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GRIMES: DON’T CALL CLAIRE BOUCHER A POP STAR. SHE’S WAY OVER IT.
Done with trying to please people, Claire Boucher took her time with Art Angels, and the result is her weirdest and most accessible album yet
BY SAMANTHA EDWARDS NOVEMBER 11, 2015 6:43 PM

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GRIMES and NICOLE DOLLANGANGER at the Danforth Music Hall (147 Danforth), November 22, doors 7 pm, all ages. $32.75-$40.50. ticketmaster.ca.

“No, no, no,” says the musician better known as Grimes over the phone from Los Angeles, exasperation in her voice. “Every single headline that comes out is ‘Grimes Is A Pop Star.’ I’m just like, ‘Fuck you.’

“I have no problem with pop music, but I’m just emphatically not [a pop star]. I’m an independent musician. That’s really important to me. I sit at home and make beats.”

She has, however, toured with Skrillex and, this past summer, Lana Del Rey. Jay Z’s Roc Nation now manages her career. And her just-released Art Angels was so closely guarded by her label, 4AD, that I was only allowed to hear five of the 14 tracks before its release November 6.

Then there’s her music, which blurs the line between modern-day pop and traditional indie. It’s from this grey area that experimental artists like FKA twigs and Purity Ring are currently finding a place on the Billboard charts, as Grimes will also surely do if Art Angels’ early glowing reviews are any indication. First single Flesh Without Blood is addictively catchy à la Taylor or Katy, and another single-worthy romp, California, has upbeat country twang (she’s learned how to play guitar since Visions) and a definitive, sugary chorus backed by cheery handclaps.

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Formerly Boucher’s musical trademark, her synth soundscapes are now more subdued, layered beneath guitar loops and glossy vocals. The album runs the genre gamut, as if Boucher had a must-have checklist. She excitedly runs through the track list: Crazy banger? Venus Fly, featuring Janelle Monáe. (“I just wanted to make my own banger to prove that I could,” she says.) Deranged pop? Kill V. Maim. Rap-worthy beat? Scream (featuring Taiwanese rapper Aristophanes).

Her defensiveness about the pop tag is understandable. For the last three years, the Vancouver-raised Boucher’s every move has been reported in the media and super-analyzed by fans. Even her Tumblr post complaining that music journalists turn each of her posts into a news story garnered a footnote added to a Pitchfork article.

It’s just that when it comes to Grimes, there’s been a lot to talk about. Her unexpected stardom following her 2012 breakthrough album, Visions, catapulted her out of Montreal’s DIY loft scene and into Roc Nation’s office. There’s the falling out she had with Arbutus, the indie label that released her first two records. She’s become a fashion darling of Christian Dior and wore Louis Vuitton to the Met Ball.

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Media, fans and critics have been hard at work trying to figure out the 27-year-old musician/producer with the childlike voice and candy-coated hooks, who swings between arty and mainstream extremes. Some music journalists have triumphantly dubbed her the new face of pop, and more than a few fans have called her a sellout.

While the internet spent the last three years pontificating about her, Boucher was trying to figure herself out, too – all while writing, recording and producing one of the most anticipated albums of the year. She scrapped one version of it in the process – because it “sucked” and was “depressing,” she said at the time – and was adamant about releasing Art Angels on her own terms.

“At any given point until this album was done, I would’ve rather suffered the consequences of waiting than put out [something I wasn’t happy with],” Boucher says. “The pressure I felt to make an album that was better than Visions outweighed the pressure to appease people in a short-term way.”

Last year she learned the hard way that pleasing people is often impossible, even when you try. After releasing Go, a drop-heavy single co-produced by close friend Blood Diamonds and originally written for Rihanna, criticism from some fans was swift.

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“Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails and Smashing Pumpkins [are allowed to] have upfront vocals and hooks, but they’re alternative,” Boucher says. “But if I have upfront vocals and hooks, I’m pop or I’ve sold out.”

The stigma of going mainstream has trailed Boucher since her early days. Flesh Without Blood was inspired, in fact, by her falling out with some long-time friends and artistic peers in Montreal after her newfound success and departure from super-indie Arbutus to 4AD.

“There was a real difference of opinion between us on that,” Boucher says. “I’m not going to do a Budweiser commercial, but I don’t really feel like being impoverished.”

Plus, there are upsides to having an ever-widening spotlight: in addition to bigger tours and bigger budgets, her opinions on matters close to her heart – like lifting the veil on misogyny in the music industry – also get noticed.

Take her 2013 Tumblr post entitled I Don’t Want To Have To Compromise My Morals In Order To Make A Living, in which she wrote, “I’m tired of men who aren’t professional or even accomplished musicians continually offering to ‘help me out’ (without being asked), as if I did this by accident and I’m gonna flounder without them. Or as if the fact that I’m a woman makes me incapable of using technology.”

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That post has been liked and re-blogged over 21,000 times.

Boucher’s also using her star power to maintain a tight grip on her career. In August, she launched Eerie Organization, a small artist-cooperative-cum-indie-label that released Art Angels in Canada and will put out other music hand-picked by Boucher.

“There are some artists I really, really love who weren’t getting signed or getting good deal offers,” she explains in her chatty, friendly way. “It just made me really upset that they’d be self-releasing on Bandcamp and nobody would see it.”

Eerie’s first signee is Stouffville, Ontario-raised singer/songwriter Nicole Dollanganger, who Boucher has also brought on her current tour.

“I’m playing some shows with her and I’m actually scared,” Boucher gushes. “She’s opening for me, but she’s definitely just much better than me live.”

Boucher comes alive when talking about artists she loves, fangirling over Lana Del Rey in particular. (She’d been advised against doing that tour since she was supposed to be finishing her album, but she’s such a fan that she said, “Fuck it, I’m doing it anyway.”) She also peppers her speech with “I don’t knows,” ends long statements with throwaways like “This makes no sense” and often lets her sentences slip away mid-thought.

These glimpses of uncertainty or lack of clarity seem less like evidence of self-doubt than like a way to prevent her from saying something that might become a sensational headline the next day.

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“I kind of see myself as a way less popular Billy Corgan,” she says, not even joking. “I listen to Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness and it’s kind of all over the place....” She trails off. “I feel like [Corgan and I] share similarities in that we’re both really bad at talking to journalists and maybe a bit too emotional for our own good.”

These days Boucher lives in Los Angeles and can’t hide her reservations about it. She sighs heavily before saying that the food is good (“but people don’t use enough salt here”) and so is the weather, even though she misses winter. Now that she’s done the record, she and a group of close friends are planning to move some place where “I can forget I’m a musician and go to a restaurant and chill,” like Nashville, Portland or maybe even Toronto.

So all in all, what’s her take-away from the past few years?

“I think I’ve learned that performing isn’t super-scary – it’s pretty scary – but I think I can be good at if it put my mind to it. And I’m more of a dick than I thought.”

Oh?

“I can either protect myself and make people hate me,” Boucher explains, “or I can be a total pushover and just have a really bad time all the time. I used to be a pushover and had a terrible time.

“I yelled at some people for the first time….” she begins to say before a voice in the background cuts her off. A handler trying to prevent her from saying too much?

“Ah, okay, whatever,” she says to the unknown voice.

She returns to the line.

“I’m not willing to put up with bullshit any more.”

>>1788808
Grimes In Reality
Cover story: Grimes started as a fantasy project, then became too real. Now Claire Boucher is taking back control and showing the world that pop stars can be producers too.
By EMILIE FRIEDLANDER Photographer BEN GRIEME
Grimes In Reality
Claire Boucher is behind the wheel of her white Ford hybrid, talking faster than we’re moving through space. There’s a faint ring of blue around her hairline—lingering make-up from an eight-hour photo shoot in Hollywood this morning—and her acrylic fingernails are clicking lightly against the car’s touchscreen, fussing with the levels of bass, treble, and mids. The plan had been for her to play me her still-untitled, three-years-in-the-making fourth LP in the car, but now, driving down Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles, she seems reluctant to let any of it play for more than 10 seconds at a time. “It just sounds so tinny in here!” she exclaims, repeatedly raising and then completely lowering the volume on a guitar-studded power-punk anthem called “Flesh Without Blood.” “They told me I’m not supposed to play all the songs. I hired these people to help me not fuck up with the press. Fuck! I just really want to play you these songs.”
Boucher, 27, is referring to Roc Nation, the Jay Z-helmed management company she signed on with in December 2013. She announced the affiliation with a Tumblr photo of her tattooed hands throwing up the Roc: “I’ve joined the x men,” the caption explained. There seemed to be a little bit of truth to that. Just a few years after its scrappy beginnings in the Montreal DIY scene, her conceptual pop project Grimes had landed Boucher on the brink of stardom, with a Billboard-charting, multiple-year-end-list-topping album in her 2012 breakout, Visions, plus fashion cosigns from Karl Lagerfeld and Alexander McQueen, among a dozen other big names, and the sort of fanatical cult following best measured by the scores of lovingly hand-drawn fan portraits she uploads to her Tumblr. There was certainly something superhero-like in her ability to pen charmingly off-kilter, globetrotting pop songs using rudimentary tools (she recorded Visions using Garageband)—and, as the budgets grew bigger and video treatments more involved, in the aesthetics of the Grimes character herself, which seemed to draw on an eclectic mix of heroes and antiheroes, from the 11th century polymath Hildegard Von Bingen to Marilyn Manson and Sailor Moon.
Today, though, riding on just three hours of sleep, she seems a little nervous, a little distracted. She spent the past week making a foray into professional acting that she can’t tell me very much about, and she only has a few weeks left to finish the new record, which is slated to drop this October on 4AD. In a T-shirt and shorts, her home-dyed hair piled into a scraggly white, green, and purple bun, she’s hardly recognizable as the formidable heroine triumphantly raising a sword to the sky in the video for Visions single “Genesis.” For one thing, she doesn’t really know her way around Los Angeles yet. Following six months of self-imposed exile in the mountains of Squamish, a coastal region of British Columbia, and some time in Vancouver, she and boyfriend James Brooks, whose own musical projects include Elite Gymnastics and Default Genders, relocated to L.A. just this past September. “I got to a place where I didn’t need to run away from the entertainment industry anymore,” she says of the move. “I just had to do that to make sure I could get to a place psychologically where I wouldn’t go insane.”
Grimes In RealityGrimes In Reality
Boucher has lived in town long enough to have a favorite take-out spot, but not long enough to name a sit-down restaurant where she might hold a quiet conversation with a journalist. So we head to an Italian restaurant her publicist recommended. It turns out she’s also relatively new to driving—too new, I soon learn, to fiddle with the car stereo without accidentally driving a couple miles in the wrong direction, only narrowly avoiding a minor fender-bender while abruptly pulling into a turning lane. As we wait for the light to change to green, I comment to Boucher that driving in Los Angeles seems terrifying. “It’s not that bad,” she replies, swinging us into a side street so we can drive back the other way. “It feels good getting control of it.”
Like many studio rats, Boucher says navigating daily life can sometimes be a challenge. “It’s important to be cognizant of making sure that you eat every day, and eat enough food, and sleep at night,” she will tell me later, speaking of the athletic recording schedule she’s been keeping for the new album, which sees her pulling 12 to 16-hour studio shifts at a time. “[Remembering to take care of myself] sounds really basic, but for me, it’s not basic.” This morning, Boucher emerged from the studio wearing a brace over her right ankle—a sprain from jumping off a riser during her recent cross-country tour with Lana Del Rey, another seasoned architect of seductive, fictional worlds. Her ankle isn’t the only thing that has made the last few weeks of recording a test of endurance. Occasionally, during our time together, Boucher frowns and clutches her abdomen, plagued by a chronic stomach ailment she says has forced her to subsist almost exclusively on a diet of vegan burritos and spaghetti.
This March, Boucher released “REALiti,” a gauzy power ballad that seemed to grapple explicitly with the trials of daily existence, even as the neon-colored video, shot during a recent tour in Asia, showed Boucher leaping, twirling, and air-boxing her way through life: Oh, baby, every morning there are mountains to climb/ Taking all my time/ Oh, when I get up, this is what I see/ Welcome to reality. With its playful handclaps and crunchy synths, the song seemed like something of a return to form after 2014’s “Go,” a pounding, EDM-inspired club tune that she’d penned with Kansas City-born producer and longtime best friend Mike Tucker, aka Blood Diamonds, as part of mysterious songwriting project for Rihanna. The pop star didn’t end up using “Go,” so they released it as a surprise. But according to a New York Times interview from September 2014, the song “upset” a lot of Grimes fans: “Everybody was like, ‘Oh, Grimes is pandering to the radio,’” she explained. But the article’s subsequent revelation that Boucher had scrapped the long-awaited new solo album she’d been working on, while true, got misreported in the slapdash music blog headlines that followed, leading many to believe that she had tossed the LP because of negative responses to “Go,” even though the song had never been intended for the new record to begin with.
“It wasn’t so much a scrapped album,” Boucher tells me. “It was just [songs] that didn’t make it onto this album. Basically, I was doing a bunch of stuff, and maybe a bit before ‘Go,’ I was like, ‘You know, my life is getting a lot better. I’m going to put all this stuff on a hard drive and start again. There were just hundreds of songs—on this album that I’m making now, there’s at least a hundred songs that won’t make it onto this. I think all musicians have songs that don’t make it onto records.”
Grimes In Reality
While Visions wasn’t Grimes’ first album, it was the first to find widespread acclaim, giving the delay between that 2012 success and her announcement this past March that a follow-up was on the way the appearance of a sophomore slump. Still, Boucher says that starting over was worth it. “Everything I made after that was 10 times better,” she says, explaining that the extra time gave her room to expand upon the electronic palette that Grimes had become known for and mine the ’90s rock and punk and nu-metal that soundtracked her adolescence. “I want people to feel, if they’re buying something, like I put my heart and soul into it and I improved myself as a person and a writer.” Boucher recorded and self-engineered every instrument on the new album herself, including guitar, drums, keys, ukulele, and violin—but she had to learn how to play them first, in addition to mastering a whole new battery of production programs and learning how to mic her own vocals. (On one track, she used the very same tube condenser mic that Taylor Swift did to record Red, a fact that Boucher, a longtime fan of the country-star-turned-pop-idol, cites with pride).
The “Go” misunderstanding still bothers Boucher, though, as do the many misunderstandings that came before, especially the ones that cast doubt upon her total and categorical authorship of her own work. Boucher’s Tumblr, beyond functioning as a kind of perpetually in-progress moodboard for the Grimes project—a hodgepodge of anime, cute animal pics, female pop divas, and mist-covered East Asian mountain ranges—logs the successive disappointments and controversies she’s experienced as a public figure, mostly at the hands of the same volatile internet that powered her rise. An entry dated April 23, 2013, when she was living in Squamish, lists several of them: “i dont want my words to be taken out of context. i dont want to be infantilized because i refuse to be sexualized […] im tired of the weird insistence that i need a band or i need to work with outside producers […] im tired of being considered vapid for liking pop music or caring about fashion as if these things inherently lack substance.”
That’s the other thing that makes the Grimes character something of a superhero figure: Boucher can’t seem to stop speaking out against the things that upset her, even as her earnestness frequently backfires against her. Whether she’s talking about the environmental perils of plastic bottles or explaining her reasons for declining the ALS ice bucket challenge (partly because she didn’t want to waste water in the midst of a California drought), even her non-music posts become fodder for music blogs. In February 2013, after Pitchfork recycled yet another of her Tumblr updates as a news story, she posted a follow-up to her original post: “my tumblr is not a news source [...] i dont like it when what i say on here is taken out of context and posted elsewhere. its not a story and its not an official statement.” Then she deleted most of the posts on her Tumblr, and Pitchfork ran a news update about that.

>>1788814
"I think the real world was always just this thing I had to deal with, and then Grimes could be a thing which was how I wished it was."
A couple days in Boucher’s orbit, though, makes it easy to see why even the most well-intentioned journalist might have trouble getting her story straight. When you ask her about her childhood in Vancouver, or the time she spent touring the world following Visions, the gaps resonate just as loudly as her words—doubtless the product of her not wanting to “get into a situation,” to quote a phrase she frequently uses when she’s venturing into territory she perceives as dangerous. Formative career moments—like the first time she heard Mariah Carey and realized she wanted to make pop music—shuffle a few years forward or backward in her timeline, depending on the conversation. Long stretches of her biography fall prey to the sort of forgetting that comes with processing life’s hard knocks: “I think I, like, blacked out just a lot of that time in my life,” she says of the last few years she spent in Montreal. “It was really fucking awful.” Boucher peppers words like “insane” and “nervous breakdown” so liberally throughout her accounts that it’s hard to tell if she’s speaking literally or just talking the way she talks.
Partly because of the way she narrates it, it’s the larger-than-life aspects of Boucher’s story that stand out most: the French-Canadian grandfather who taught her how to shoot a rifle when she was in elementary school; the strict, hyper-athletic family that counts Olympian ice-dancers in its ranks; the Catholic schooling, and the years of pre-professional ballet training, and the locker hall bullies. A Wiccan phase in seventh grade petered out after she “got cursed”: “I was casting a spell, but the rosary crumbled in my hands, and it was really scary,” Boucher remembers. Ballet training ground to a halt when she showed up to class one day with a shaved head: “I think at some point in grade eight, I started smoking pot. I was just listening to System of a Down. I would show up to ballet, and all the kids would make fun of me, and no matter where I went everyone thought I was insane, so I was just, like, ‘I cannot be here. I have to do something so I cannot be forced to do this anymore.’” By the end of high school, these same contradictory impulses—the rigorous self-discipline of an art-form like ballet, combined with a longing for escape—would surface again in her projected career path. Boucher matriculated to McGill University in Montreal in 2006, thinking she was going to be an astrophysicist.
That didn’t end up happening, though the course load she tasked herself with was probably no less ambitious: a double major in philosophy and “the science side of psychology,” with minors in Russian language and a field called electro-acoustics, a realm of neuroscience concerned with the way the brain processes noise. “We did, like, psycho-physics and shit,” says Boucher. “I never took calculus, and you [were supposed] to take calculus to get in, so I constantly had to be teaching myself calculus behind the class. I mostly just tried to prove that I could.”
In retrospect, her attraction to mathematical problem-solving seems to foreshadow her present-day preoccupation with the technical aspects of music production. Still, science’s allure wasn’t strong enough to keep her on track for a career in brain research, especially after the summer of her junior year, when she left Montreal with a friend to live on a houseboat on the Mississippi River. The story, she says, was wildly blown out of proportion by the handful of local newspapers that picked it up at the time, though some of the finer details were true: “We did actually have chickens, but we gave them away because it’s not nice to bring chickens on a boat,” she says. “And then we had some ducks, but they escaped. Ach! I shouldn’t say this. We didn’t have a typewriter, and we weren’t trying to do Huck Finn. The main thing that’s true is the potatoes. We had lots of sacks of potatoes, but that’s not that weird.” Eventually, the cops caught up with them, and the boat was impounded.
Looking back, Boucher says this surreal interlude in her biography was probably partly a way of coping with some of the harsher realities of her life in Montreal: “a shitty job postering in sub-zero weather”; a breakup with longtime boyfriend Devon Welsh, who’d go on to have a recording career himself, as indie singer-songwriter Majical Cloudz. Perhaps most painfully of all, she’d experienced the deaths of two friends in the span of one year. One of them was David Peet, a fellow Vancouver transplant she’d met frequenting the city’s punk and industrial circuit as a teen, who’d recently moved to Montreal and opened the DIY venue Lab Synthèse with Sebastian Cowan, another pal of Boucher’s from growing up, and some other friends. Boucher lived a block away from the Mile-End district warehouse that housed the space, and she occasionally worked the door there. Before Peet tragically committed suicide in March 2008, he and Boucher had been thinking about starting a band together.
Grimes In Reality
Boucher says that she cannot recall the year when she first started sketching rudimentary songs out on her laptop—only that she started taking music a lot more seriously following Peet’s death. “After that, I was like, I guess I should probably try doing this by myself,” she remembers. “I mean, it seemed wrong not to. It seemed it would be a failure to a person, I guess.” She set to work home-recording her first two albums as Grimes: Geidi Primes, an 11-track collection of dreamy, looping freak-folk inspired in name and subject matter by Frank Herbert’s 1965 science-fiction novel Dune; and Halfaxa, which provided glimpses of the stronger melodic backbone and heavily multi-tracked vocals she’d later expand upon with Visions. Both albums came out in 2010, via Montreal’s Arbutus Records, the scene-defining, bizarro-pop label that Seb Cowan started after a series of police visits led Lab Synthèse to close its doors, in November of 2009. (Until October 2012, about a year before she signed with Roc Nation, Cowan would also be her manager.) After being put on academic probation for a string of absences, she dropped out of school in early 2011.
Around the time she released the homegrown clip for “Vanessa”—a poppy, angelic-sounding single from a 2011 split release with Montreal musician d’Eon that would become her first real breakout track—the idea of a “fake pop star” would emerge: Grimes as a fictional character played by Boucher, crooning songs that the real-life Boucher had written for her to sing. “I didn’t want to be a pop star—I wanted to be like Phil Spector,” she says, pointing to her natural shyness. “I wanted to be the person behind the scenes who no one ever had to look at—who just could be crazy and be a genius and have a performer fulfill their creative wishes. But that wasn’t possible, so I just had to do it myself.”
As far as creation stories go, there couldn’t be a more colorful one than the widely mythologized tale about the making of Visions, which she recorded during an extended, nearly sleepless Adderall binge inside her Montreal apartment, racing against a last-minute deadline. “It was, like, less than a month, but basically I did lock myself in a room,” Boucher tells me, for clarification’s sake. “I did do a lot of drugs. And I did not eat very much. And I blacked out the windows. But I also did sleep at times, and [former Arbutus employee] Marilis [Cardinal] brought me food and Devon [Walsh] brought me food and [local musician Matthew] Duffy came and visited me,” she says.
Years out from the experience, she says she’s past the period in her life where she’d willfully put herself through such ascetic extremes: “It’s not good to do. I’d probably die if I tried to do that again. It’s really bad for your heart, it’s bad for your mind, and it’s bad for your soul. Great moments of clarity came when I was not high.” Still, those ecstatic, quasi-religious transports remain key to her creative process, which, she says, is “halfway really intellectual and mathematical and halfway going so deep in my head that I just black out and don’t remember what I did.” When I ask her how one might get into that zone without drugs, she smiles. “I don’t know how to make this not sound insane,” she says, but “I guess you just have to get close to God.”
Visions sounded like a revelation too—when it came out at the top of 2012, as a joint release on 4AD and Arbutus, Boucher was entering a music industry in transition. For the first time in history, quirky bedroom musicians with nonexistent support teams were becoming viral sensations overnight, thanks to low-cost production software and the ability to connect with fans online. With its curiously pitched vocals, off-kilter club beats, and ecstatic pop climaxes, Visions felt like the sound of a generation of scrappy upstarts sort of figuring out how to make pop music as they went along. As glowing reviews rolled in and Boucher’s star rose, Grimes seemed to incarnate the heretofore impossible paradox of a DIY pop star—not just because she was becoming famous with music that sounded “weird,” but also because she’d honed every aspect of the project, from the vocals and the beats to the home-grown clothes and haircuts, entirely herself.
“I think she’s the patron saint of this generation, where everything’s possible,” Tucker explains to me over coffee. The internet has been kind to him too: after getting his own start on the DIY circuit, he’s currently a producer for the likes of Katy Perry and the K-pop star CL, as well as a protégé of Skrillex.