Interview paired Lana Del Rey and Grimes together for a new feature, and during their chat, Grimes pulled back the curtain on her songwriting process.
For example, Grimes said that even today, she works better when “surrounded by garbage in a closet” than she does in a professional studio environment: “Earlier this year, for the first time, I had a nice studio. It was this spacious room with windows and soundproofing and it had a view of everything. I was like, ‘This is going to be great.’ And it was terrible. I made nothing. I eventually moved back into the closet, literally. I need to be surrounded by garbage in a closet or I can’t make anything. I need a terrible environment and a bad chair that hurts my back.”
She also said that she “so need[s] to be in love to make good art,” and that her good songs mostly come from her worst days: “I so need to be in love to make good art. The best is being heartbroken, or in a volatile relationship. My worst creative periods have been when I’ve just been in a stable relationship. In my current relationship, we’re both super alpha, crazy people. It’s just level ten all the time, which is great, even though it’s very crazy. […] Almost all my good songs are from some nightmare day where I’m just bawling my eyes out, and then I have to sit down and put it into a thing. I make so much music if I’m in a fight with my boyfriend or a friend, and I just want to impress them.”
Grimes went on to reveal that while she previously wasn’t worried about pleasing anybody with her music, with Miss Anthropocene, she has a new mindset: “I love trying to win somebody back by writing them a song. On my last record, I was like, ‘I don’t care. I’m not trying to impress anybody.’ And on my new record, I’m trying to impress everyone.”
In the same piece, Grimes also talked with Brit Marling, and she spoke about her fears regarding artificial intelligence, and shared a theory she has about Jeffrey Epstein: “What scares me is an artificial intelligence getting online, seeing everybody’s search history, and then blackmailing all of us into doing whatever it wants. It just feels inevitable. We’ve all sent weird e-mails or texts. Even if there are laws to prevent that, there will eventually be a sentient technology that is smart enough and strong enough and has access to take everyone’s sh*t, and then can make anyone do whatever it wants, Jeffrey Epstein–style. My theory on Epstein is that he had tapes of people with underage girls, and that’s how he was getting all this stuff from all these people. Someone gave him a house and a plane. It’s like, ‘What the f*ck?’ It reeks of deep blackmail to me. If you have everybody’s stuff, you can control the world. It seems a lot easier than a violent takeover. If I’m an AI, do I hold everyone hostage with nuclear bombs, or do I just blackmail everyone? Killing a lot of people seems hard.”
Read the full feature here.
Miss Anthropocene is out 2/21/2020 via 4AD. Pre-order it here.
