When the world is too much to handle, Grimes is probably making a song about it.
A relentlessly ambitious one-woman project by the 32-year-old Canadian singer and songwriter Claire Boucher — an all-purpose musician, audio engineer, producer, artist and director — Grimes has a knack for making tragedy and the decline of humankind sound catchy. Her new album, “Miss Anthropocene,” tackles climate change, consumerism, drug addiction and more, blending dance music, Bollywood sounds, Taiwanese rap, nu-metal and electronic pop with science fiction and comic book imagery.
“Delete Forever,” a standout track from the album, sounds simple at first. But, as Grimes describes in the latest episode of Diary of a Song, the track is one of the most vulnerable in her catalog. She started writing it in the fall of 2017, following the death of the emo rapper Lil Peep from an opioid overdose; when Boucher was a teenager, her close friend died in similar circumstances.
“How do we emotionally deal with this stuff?” the singer asked, describing the inspiration she took from Jack Kirby’s New Gods comics, an extensive mythology of superhumans beyond the Greek or Roman traditions. “It seems easier to digest certain things when they’re fictionalized.”
The ancient process of personifying “painful, beautiful, abstract concepts as gods,” she continued, led her to write “Delete Forever” about the goddess, or demon, of addiction. “Maybe that helps people cope better; maybe that helps society come together better.”
Recorded alone in a closet, “Delete Forever” leaves Boucher’s vocals — typically shrouded in noise and effects — all but bare, even though she said the exposure left her embarrassed. While breaking down the song’s creation, Grimes explains the battle with herself over the track; how she decided on a perfectly violent, punk-inspired acoustic guitar sound; and why she insisted on playing the banjo and violin parts herself, despite a lack of familiarity with those instruments. See how the whole song came together in the video above.
“Diary of a Song” provides an up-close, behind-the-scenes look at how pop music is made today, using archival material — voice memos, demo versions, text messages, emails, interviews and more — to tell the story behind the track. Subscribe to our YouTube channel.
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March 20, 2020 at 12:07PM
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How Grimes, the Ultimate D.I.Y. Pop Star, Made ‘Delete Forever’ - The New York Times
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