Grimes, also known as, Claire Boucher, has been featured as the cover story of The Fader after a super interesting interview with Emilie Friedlander. Aside from looking totally gorgeous on their front cover, we got a great insight into who Claire Boucher is, her struggles in the world of music and what we can expect from her in the future.
The wonderful piece Grimes In Reality starts off with Grimes showing Friedlander her upcoming LP. One of her tracks Flesh Without Blood was described as a “guitar-studded power-punk anthem” and another, which features three female rappers as a “ferocious-sounding club track with twanging subs” and about being “too scary to be objectified.” The excitement is real.
In other music news, she mentioned the project that was said to be scrapped, actually wasn’t. She said she was writing a bit of music before Rihanna‘s Go (which she says was “never intended for the record” despite of what was reported). “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,” she said.
Her identity was also a topic of discussion. Boucher revealed that Grimes isn’t her only alter-ego. “Okay, there’s Grimes, but there’s other ones too now—and they’re like a girl group,” she says. “There’s Screechy Bat, who’s the metal one. There’s one that’s super vampish and sexy now—I don’t know her name yet, but she’s like the Ginger Spice.”
What does that mean? Are we in for something very different in the near future?
She touches on some of the struggles all female musicians face, such as not being taken seriously by the industry. “The thing that I hate about the music industry is all of a sudden it’s like, ‘Grimes is a female musician’ and ‘Grimes has a girly voice.’ It’s like, yeah, but I’m a producer and I spend all day looking at fucking graphs and EQs and doing really technical work,” she said.
Another was the lack of safety of female musicians. She says she, and other musicians, get rape and death threats all the time. She even shared a story. “One time I was backstage at a show, and there was this random guy in my dressing room, and he just grabbed me and started making out with me, and I was like, Ah!, and pushed him off. Then he went, ‘Ha! I kiss-raped you’ and left. Shit like that happens quasi-frequently. When I play a show I have to have, like, three bodyguards in front of the stage, and then I have to have bodyguards on the side.”
There’s so much more to read in this incredible interview, which is available via The Fader’s website.