Elle/2016/Apr/Interview

* **Interview**
* Photoshoot

# **Grimes Wanted to Be the First "DIY Pop Star." Mission Accomplished**

By doing it all herself—writing, recording, producing, video-directing, and more—Grimes has pioneered a new breed of stardom. Lizzy Goodman drops in on her European tour.

It's eight hours till showtime at Docks, a music venue in Hamburg, Germany's red-light district. Three burly twentysomething guys dressed all in black are huddled beneath the dingy marquee, trying to light a cigarette in the rain. Within an hour they'll be overwhelmed by a swarm of Grimes superfans, some of whom have followed the Canadian electronic musician and producer on tour from Asia to Europe. Grimes, aka 28-year-old Claire Boucher, has just arrived through the back entrance and is settling into her latest home-for-a-day, a series of dank, batcave-like rooms under the stage. She played Berlin last night, and before that, Singapore, and before that, Seoul. She's been on the road, off and on, for the better part of a year now, and will be on a bus slogging through northern Europe for another four weeks, in the middle of winter—which is fine by her. "I've done so much really trashy touring, like in a minivan, holding your gear on your lap," she says. "This is not that bad." Except for one thing: She forgot a coat. "Stella McCartney sent us something…" begins Boucher's manager, Lauren Valencia, glancing at the singer and starting to laugh. "It looked normal on the model, but on me it was down to the floor!" Boucher recalls, smiling. Petite and wiry, like the former ballerina she is, Boucher tucks her fists into the sleeves of her black hoodie, shivers a little, and shrugs. "We're only here for, like, another month. It's not really a problem."

This is the glamorous life of one of music's most-watched young stars. In January 2012, Grimes released *Visions*, a madcap 48 minutes of beguiling, deeply weird, electro-pop brilliance she recorded by herself during a writing binge in her Montreal apartment. The record astounded critics and fans alike with its blending of opposing influences—from hip-hop to chamber music—and the undeniable authority of its young maker. Who *was* this girl? And where had she come from? The answer: Montreal's underground music scene, which is independent to the point of being nearly anarchistic. *Visions* may have been so eccentric it verged on noncommercial, but by her native subculture's standards, Grimes had sold out as soon as she signed, in 2012, with the prestigious, if still firmly independent, label 4AD. Then her songs became popular. On a list of the best tracks of the decade thus far, *Pitchfork* named Boucher's breakout single "Oblivion"—in which she sings in an anodyne lilt about a sexual assault she experienced years ago—number one, calling it "the sound of one woman turning personal devastation into not just a career-making single, but a lasting anthem of transformation." *Visions* went on to become the number one indie album of the year on iTunes. Meanwhile, she signed a management deal with Jay Z's Roc Nation and toured with the likes of Lana Del Rey and the EDM godheads Diplo and Skrillex. The latter describes her appeal thus: "She has an unfiltered emotion that comes through all the different vehicles she uses for her art. No matter what she picks up—whether it's a piano, or a triangle, or a computer, or drum machine, or her voice—it comes across as her." In short order, Grimes went from recording on GarageBand in her bedroom to being hailed as the next Lady Gaga, a virtuosic weirdo auteur destined for megafame.

Boucher grew up in Vancouver, a Catholic schoolgirl raised with four brothers by strict, hyperbrainy parents: Her father works in biosciences; her mother is a journalist. The family was into sports, among other things. "My mom's sister and brother were Olympian figure skaters, and my mom was almost an Olympian figure skater," she says. "My dad used to coach basketball, and one of my brothers is, like, a prodigy at basketball." Claire, on the other hand, was into Marilyn Manson and Nine Inch Nails, both of whom she was forbidden to see in concert. She says her parents weren't closed-minded, just discerning. "My dad was open to some things, like System of a Down," she says, referring to the progressive metal band, "because they were political and intellectual."

Like any artist who goes from working in relative obscurity to being anointed the Next Big Something, she has struggled with the attention and the scrutiny. "It was really traumatic," she says of the period following *Visions*. "I didn't have any experience with the media. I was really stressed by it. And at the same time, a lot of my best friends were like, 'You're such a sellout.'" In 2013, she hid out for awhile in sleepy Squamish, British Columbia, where she began work on what eventually became last November's *Art Angels*. It is both her most commercial and her most inventive album to date, full of intricate tracks that borrow from the Laurel Canyon singer-songwriter sound ("California"), grunge ("Flesh Without Blood"), and K-pop ("Kill V. Maim") without pledging allegiance to any one genre.

You could describe the Grimes aesthetic as experimental, determined joy; both she and her music are bright in a willful way that also conveys a deep understanding of darkness. But what really sets her apart in the music world is sheer originality. "Trying to describe Grimes is like trying to describe Tom Waits or Springsteen or Neil Young—like, I don't know, just go listen to Neil Young. Claire is just Claire," says Jack Antonoff, the songwriter and performer behind the bands fun. and Bleachers, as well as an established producer who won an Album of the Year Grammy for his work with Taylor Swift on *1989*. There is simply no one else in pop music like Boucher, with her ambitious, mold-breaking aesthetic *and* the ability to execute it all on her own. "Claire is extremely technically skilled on a production level, which gets missed a lot because it plays into some gender issues," Antonoff explains. "Usually the way records are made is with a lot of people involved—this person did that snare sound, and this other person did that beat. To have one person doing everything would be the equivalent of having one person designing the house, building it, doing all the plumbing, all the electric, decorating it, and then living in it for 100 years and creating a great vibe. What Claire does is just crazy."

So on *Art Angels*, Boucher not only continues to lay herself bare to her fans, confessing, for instance, her ambivalence about lofty expectations for her own success (in "California," she sings, "The things they see in me, I cannot see myself / When you get bored of me, I'll be back on the shelf"), but also weaves wild, transporting fantasies via epic videos that she directs and performs herself, like the one for "Kill V. Maim," the third in a series of dystopian, anime-influenced mini films. Like music iconoclasts before her—think Cobain, Bowie, Madonna—she's engaged in a high-wire act, walking cautiously through the mainstream doors that are now open to her while staying vigilantly true to her core ideals. "I feel like there's this weird sense of 'Oh, she must be going for this, she must be going for that,' but I don't court the trappings of success," Boucher says. "I'm not going to turn down a great thing, nor would I change my music or the way I look."

Over the course of a few days together, Boucher will explain how frustrating it's been to get flak from the underground for compromising her DIY values, even as she continues to do it all herself, more vigorously than ever. She'll tell me how pissed she was when, having released under her own name a song she'd originally written for Rihanna (2014's magnificent EDM ballad "Go"), the underground assumed she was being manipulated into pop songwriting by her high-powered management, while the mainstream (falsely) dismissed the track as a flop. These are legitimate frustrations. But I can't help thinking they're the result of Boucher getting exactly what she wanted. When we first met four years ago, just after *Visions* came out but before it broke through, she told me she wanted to be the world's first DIY pop star—the first to blend what she called Fugazi-esque ethics with broad-spectrum pop appeal. And now she makes exactly the art she wants to make, says exactly what she wants to say, and people—many people—listen. *Art Angels* has sold nearly 100,000 copies thus far; her tour has sold out nearly every venue she's played; and she's rounding the corner into summer festival season with spots at Coachella and Moogfest, in between dates as the opening act for Florence + the Machine's U.S. arena tour. Meanwhile, fashion has embraced her as its resident fringe princess: Boucher wears Rodarte and Proenza, is a favorite of Louis Vuitton, and was recently named the face of Stella McCartney's aptly named new eau, POP. She is not a sellout, but make no mistake—she sells.

Backstage at the venue, it's nearly time for sound check. Boucher, who in person has a slight lisp and a hyperactive, childlike eagerness, flits around the maze of rooms, chatting with a member of the crew, disappearing upstairs to catering, popping back down to her dressing room. In addition to Valencia, the singer's traveling squad includes her opening act and good friend, the electronic musician HANA, as well as two dancers, Linda Davis and Alyson Van. When Boucher held open auditions for dancers in L.A., where she now lives, 250 of them showed up. Davis and Van "were just the weirdest ones," she says. Van did "a weird, like, wooden-doll dance," Boucher recalls. "At first I was like, Is that even dancing?" Now the two are curled up on an overstuffed sofa, about to watch, for the hundredth time, the *SNL* skit "The Day Beyoncé Turned Black." Boucher, too, is a big Beyoncé fan. "After I watched 'Formation,' I was like, This show is shit! Our dancing is shit!" she says, almost cheerily. "I'm mostly driven by intense fear of humiliation and failure. Every time I see some good art, I feel really ashamed and then get back to work."

Boucher only recently began allowing her brother, the basketball prodigy–turned–filmmaker, to codirect her videos with her, and still, she'd prefer to do it herself. "There's just a limit to how much I can take on," she says, clearly pained to admit it. The singer's obsession with autonomy goes way back. She doesn't like to talk about it much these days—she has a lot of young fans—but as a teenager, Boucher was a wild child. She messed around with drugs and, in her late teens, went to a kind of reform school. Now she barely drinks, but one could imagine Boucher's ongoing commitment to independence as some sort of residual allegiance to her past self, a girl who was kicked out of her ballet company at 14 for shaving her head.

Fierce independence also comes, of course, from her allegiance to the Montreal underground scene that birthed her. She moved to the city in 2006 to attend McGill University, where she double-majored in neuroscience and philosophy and double-minored in electro-acoustics and Russian—a dizzying assembly of seemingly counterintuitive subjects that foreshadowed her hybrid approach to music making. Boucher adored school but didn't graduate because, by 2010, Montreal's "really rad music scene" had fully taken her over. She describes the city as a mystical-sounding creative utopia with cheap rent and access to tons of illegal venues, all but cut off from the wider world. Among her set, "no one could afford the Internet—I thought Animal Collective was the biggest band, like playing stadiums," she recalls, referring to the relatively obscure Baltimore group. "I'm literally just finding out about everything now. I just found out who Springsteen is. Or the Killers—that was last year." Living in that indie bubble from 2006 to 2011, she cut her teeth playing gigs that very few people saw. "I know people who are like, 'I fucked up my chance because I blew up on MySpace and I went to play live in Brooklyn; it was my first show and it was a disaster,'" she says. "I played a million shows before I had to play on a proper stage, in front of people. It was a great way to get your feet wet."

At sound check, Boucher has thrown a tie-dyed skirt over her gray spandex leggings and added beat-up Adidas shell toes. The stage is set up as if a star DJ were about to do a set in a Goth mermaid's cove. On risers in the center is Boucher's buffet of instruments: electric guitar, drum machine, keyboard, and multiple samplers (computers used to build the bits and pieces of sound Boucher layers into each track), all set against a stagewide backdrop of steel-gray net. Van and Davis casually freestyle in the foreground, moving through choreography and goofing around, while Boucher's sound guy cues up "Oblivion." "Someone could break your neck / Coming up behind you / Always coming, and you'd never have a clue…See you on a dark night," she sings, her voice high and detached. "*Beaaauuutiful*," she says mockingly, sticking out her tongue as HANA, who's onstage tuning the guitar they share, laughs. "My voice is *fuuucked*!" the singer says. Then she starts again.

A few hours later, Boucher's creative philosophy comes to life. Her live show is what an alien musical prodigy might come up with after studying the last hundred years of earth's pop history, compressing it into two-minute sonic freak-outs, then playing it live inside a giant disco ball. "It's a party," Davis had promised me earlier, and she was right. From note one, it's a relentless hour-plus of skittering, oddball glee, complete with a cotton candy–colored light show playing over hundreds of fists raised in the air.

The next day, Boucher and I meet for lunch at a seafood restaurant in downtown Hamburg. "Sorry I'm, like, wearing my pajamas," she says, glancing down at her marled gray sweats and shoving her hands into the pockets of her silky black bomber jacket. "I hope they let me in." Last night's show went terribly, she announces brightly. "I was just very, very stressed out and couldn't sing. Sorry about that!" A good performance for Boucher means "the appearance of effortlessness, the appearance of confidence," she says, and mentions HANA—who does have a kind of bodhisattva vibe—as a model of what she means. "She's never fazed, ever. I'm fazed all the time, by everything." HANA's boyfriend, the producer Blood Diamonds (aka Mike Tucker), is Boucher's friend and collaborator from Vancouver, and he used to play HANA's role in Grimes's stage show, but now Boucher prefers to have all women. It's not that she doesn't like men—she considers Tucker her best friend—but "when Mike was touring with me, I'd go for an interview, and they'd be like, 'Where's the guy you were onstage with, the producer?' " Boucher, of course, produces all her own music. "They'd always ask for him to be there, and I'd be like—but he's just here because he wanted to come to Japan!" The comment points to another reason for Boucher's resolute independence, particularly now, when she's reached a stage in her career when big names are no doubt lining up to help. It's not just that she's allegiant to her 14-year-old punk self, or that she doesn't want to sever her roots in the underground. In fact, she's pretty tired of the hypocrisy of that world. "A bunch of angry white men shouldn't be sitting around telling women they're wrong for being ambitious," she says. Boucher is resolutely independent because unless she does absolutely every last thing herself, it's assumed that she isn't doing any of it.

At the restaurant, Boucher is having a hard time leaving her bowl of rigatoni. "When you're on tour, food is your only reprieve," she says. In a month or so, she'll go home to L.A. "My first break in almost three years," she says. "But I also have to write, produce, and do a whole video in a week." Today, though, it's still early afternoon, and the bus to Cologne doesn't leave until midnight. That leaves five whole hours for a midtour mini break. HANA is back at the hotel dyeing her hair. "I have no data," Boucher says, holding up her iPhone. "Would you mind texting her and asking her to save me some of the purple if she can?"

1. ↑ https://www.elle.com/culture/music/a35362/grimes-profile/