The New York Times/2014/Interview

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===Interviewhttps://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/magazine/why-everyone-should-be-waiting-for-grimess-next-album.html===
Why Everyone Should Be Waiting for Grimes’s Next Album
By CARRIE BATTAN
SEPT. 12, 2014
Earlier this year, Claire Boucher, the 26-year-old Canadian musician known as Grimes, briefly dabbled in the world of Billboard-chart pop. She wrote a song for Rihanna. After that, she went to a group songwriting boot camp, as she entertained the idea of receding from the intensifying spotlight she’d earned as an electro-pop phenom. “I thought, Oh, I don’t want to be a front person,” she says. “I want to write.”
In many ways, the experiment was a failure — Rihanna did not put the song on her album, and when Boucher recorded her own version, it was met with frustration. “It upsets a lot of my fans, and I get why it upsets them,” says Boucher of the big, booming track. “Everybody was like, ‘Oh, Grimes is pandering to the radio.’ ” But the failure, ultimately, was a productive one. By that point, she had already begun to hate the album she was working on: the would-be follow-up to the widely acclaimed “Visions,” from 2012. That album was lauded for seamlessly blending sugary pop melodies with a D.I.Y. aesthetic. The new one? “It sucked,” Boucher says, “so I threw it out and started again.”
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“I’d been [recording] in Vancouver, very reclusive, not seeing anyone . . . kind of stewing by myself,” she says. “That’s always worked for me in the past.” Now, with heightened technical and professional aims, Boucher has decamped for Los Angeles, where she’s “hanging out with people and bouncing ideas off my friends. I’m just making way more music.”
“I took my advance and I used it to have my own studio,” Boucher says. It’s completely portable. “Recording in professional studios is the worst idea — I don’t know why anybody even does it . . . they’re so expensive.”
She’s also relearning to navigate her relationship with the public as part of her newfound professionalism. Like many young people who frequently change hair color, Boucher maintains an active Tumblr, where she riffs on everything from veganism to cultural appropriation. But with fame comes a sizable — and reactive — audience. “I tried to do the A.L.S. ice-bucket challenge in a way that I thought was good” — that is, she refused, because of the drought in California and her opposition to animal testing funded by the A.L.S. Association — “and all these people with A.L.S. were like, ‘You’re the worst person ever.’ I was crying for days,” she says. She recently underwent media training to learn “how to stop saying stupid things so I stop having all these constant dramas,” Boucher says. “But I didn’t really learn anything.”
Category:Interview
Category:2014