Julia Wolf, photographed by Ary Russell.

FRIDAY 1:07 PM APRIL 3, 2026 EAST VILLAGE

Don’t let the lyrics about throat slitting and Instagram aura farming fool you. Julia Wolf is more wholesome than you think. As we sat down surrounded by skulls, tarot cards, and cauldrons, she recounted how she spent the morning glued to her Nintendo Switch playing Pokopia, which she described as a cross between Animal Crossing and Pokémon. Wolf first achieved virality with her song “In My Room,” cultivating a solid fanbase of Twi-hards who would go on to use her track in their TikTok edits of the film. As her career continued to grow, her haunting vocals secured her position as the premier voice of the ghost of girlfriends past on EDM tracks with John Summit and rap bangers with Drake. On April 7, Wolf announced her The Deep End world tour, set to commence in the place where it all began — Forks, Washington. But before she got on the road, I had a few questions for the world’s number one Twilight enthusiast. A week after she moved to New York, I met up with Wolf at Hekate Café & Elixir Lounge for a witchy conversation about casting love spells, leaving Los Angeles, and why her grudges last a lifetime. 

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ARY RUSSELL: I was watching your Zach Sang interview and you said you left LA because you wanted to be somewhere quieter, so naturally you moved to New York City. [Laughs] What was the reasoning behind that?

JULIA WOLF: We went to Portland [Oregon] in between my two tours thinking that’s where we were going to move because I love the Twilight of it all. But when we got there, it felt like I would be retiring too early. So I moved to Queens, which feels like the quietest neighborhood I could have chosen. 

RUSSELL: What have been some differences you’ve already found between LA and New York?

WOLF: Here, I can leave the house no makeup, sweatpants, and not feel any pressure about running into someone or having to look good. Whereas in LA, I was constantly comparing myself to every beautiful woman who was walking around. It was mentally exhausting. 

RUSSELL: As you get bigger, it’ll be easier to stay more anonymous in New York. I was watching your apartment vlog and it’s so cute because, with pop stars, you see them doing YouTube for some sort of promotion, not an intimate moving vlog. How are you balancing having that closeness with fans while also maintaining that mystique as a pop star and prioritizing your mental health?

WOLF: It’s unfortunate, but I can’t engage in the comments anymore. I’m too sensitive. So even if something’s a little negative, it’ll stick with me for days. That’s why I want to do YouTube and do funny TikToks, to just show personality and that this is a normal chick. But I do need a little bit of my mystique. Aura farming right now.

RUSSELL: I loved your album Pressure.

WOLF: Thank you.

RUSSELL: I also really connected with the lyrical themes about love and devotion. Do you get obsessed with love?

WOLF: A part of it is that I wasn’t finding any relationships whatsoever. I was ghosted, rejected for six, seven years. Nothing was landing. So not only does that absolutely deteriorate my self-esteem but, when I do start these budding things with people, I latch on so hard because I just desperately–

RUSSELL: Don’t know when you’re going to get it again?

WOLF: It feels so fleeting. I have always been that way. I mean, even with the one that worked out now, it’s very consuming and sometimes brings out the worst in me.

RUSSELL: How long does it take you to get over someone?

WOLF: My gosh, it depends. What I would do is just start talking to someone else. I’m like, “I can’t get over this until I realize that other people exist.” 

RUSSELL: Are there things that you do to get the ball rolling on closure?

WOLF: I would probably say my sister took the brunt of it, and just yapping.

RUSSELL: What are sisters for?

WOLF: I have to talk it out. Because the more that I hold it in, it does drive me insane. Just hearing someone else’s perspective on it snaps me out of it a little bit. We’re dissecting it together.

RUSSELL: You’ve collaborated across many genres with John Summit, Drake, and more. How do you know that a beat is going to work with your lyricism and your voice? 

WOLF: With all of those collabs with people, they’ve really allowed me to take the reins on it and build around whatever I create, which has been super cool that they trust me in that way. They don’t want me to fit into their world, but rather have the two come together. 

RUSSELL: Does it give you a level of confidence as an artist that someone like Drake is like, “I trust you?”

WOLF: Completely. It could not be more validating. We were freaking out about that. This road is extremely discouraging, so when things like that happen it feels good.

RUSSELL: Who’s on your Mount Rushmore of sad girl musicians?

WOLF: Phoebe Bridgers, there is no one better to me. Phoebe and Ethel Cain are my top. I love Soccer Mommy, as well. I only listen to the same records over and over. It’s really bad.

RUSSELL: On your album, you have a big connection to Twilight and Jennifer’s Body. Which is interesting because, when those movies came out, they were critically panned but now have become cult classics. Are you someone that likes the idea of second chances? 

WOLF: Unfortunately, because of how sensitive I am, I can also be very reactive. So if I even get a tinge of someone not feeling it, I am quick to burn the bridge. I would hope that people treat me the way I’ve treated them, so I don’t really love handing out second chances if I’ve been wronged. Why wouldn’t it happen again? 

RUSSELL: So your grudges last a lifetime.

WOLF: Forever. It’s hard to rebuild the bridge once it’s been destroyed. 

RUSSELL: “In My Room” is the song that defined the TikTok edits of 2025. Do you have any favorite TikToks that have used the song? 

WOLF: I really love when people replace my lyrics with their own lyrics. It’ll be like, “I stalk myself on Pornhub just to see what you’ll find.” Those are funny. 

RUSSELL: The ones that I really like are when it’s the acoustic version. That difference between how it sounds sonically perfectly captures what it means to change, for better or worse.

WOLF: Do you know Summer House?

RUSSELL: I don’t watch the show, but within the past three days I’ve gotten all the tea from everyone around me. Have you been seeing Summer House edits?

WOLF: Yes. I’m a diehard Summer House girl. They did an edit with that whole situation and that one honestly made me very sad for Ciara [Miller].

RUSSELL: With Twilight, who’s the character that resonates with you the most?

WOLF: It’s Bella. That’s why I fell in love with Twilight in the first place. Not for Edward, but more so for this girl who’s in high school, super shy. Twilight came out when I was in eighth grade and experiencing those same things where I could not even make eye contact. I saw what happened to her and I really wanted that to happen to me one day. 

RUSSELL: I definitely relate to Bella because I always resonate with this idea of devotion to the point of detriment. 

WOLF: Me too.

RUSSELL: In “In My Room”, my favorite lyric is “I stalk myself on the internet just to see what you’ll find.” When you look at your own Instagram, what do you see?

WOLF: Oh my gosh, that’s a good question. I see someone who is not trying too hard to impress anyone, just being herself in an honest, sometimes silly way.

RUSSELL: In “Girls,” the lyric that I also really loved was, “I’m on the wrong side of 30” because it really touches on this fear of aging and that you’re running out of time. Do you wish that success had happened earlier for you? Do you think that you would have been able to handle this if this happened when you were younger?

WOLF: I don’t think so. I think I would be cringed out. And who’s to say I won’t be 10 years from now? But I don’t believe that I knew myself well enough and was exposed to enough artists to feel inspired by. 

RUSSELL: By the time this will be out, you will have announced your tour. What city are you most excited for?

WOLF: It has to be New York. I grew up coming to shows here. So, to go from audience member to stage here will always impact me more.

RUSSELL: Do you have any pre-show rituals to get your head in the game?

WOLF: Obviously, I do my vocal warmups and I have my tea with honey. They say that if you stir your coffee with intentions in the morning clockwise, water can hold your intentions. I was doing that religiously every day last tour. 

RUSSELL: Are you someone that’s a spiritual person in that regard?

WOLF: I definitely dabble in the witchcraft of it all and I be casting spells in my room because I wholeheartedly believe that it did impact my life once I started getting into that stuff. 

RUSSELL: Have you ever cast a love spell?

WOLF: Of course.

RUSSELL: Has it worked?

WOLF: Yes. That was the catalyst to making me a believer. I loved this one girl on YouTube and I noticed she had a subsection of witchcraft, so I tried one of them. Nothing beats your first spell because I had no doubt in my heart. I was just full of belief. I was under the moon, and then two months later I met the love of my life.

RUSSELL: You mentioned that you drink tea on tour. What’s on your rider when you’re on the road?

WOLF: We have tequila, beer, and Throat Coat tea. The guys want beef jerky so the whole room freaking smells like beef jerky. 

RUSSELL: You have to put an embargo. When you’re going to different cities on tour, what’s been the most interesting thing that you found? 

WOLF: We were lucky to do Europe this past time, but I did not expect to fall in love with Poland the way that I did. The Polish churches are so gothic inside — skulls, burgundy, just gorgeous color palettes. 

RUSSELL: You have to go to the catacombs when you’re in Paris.

WOLF: I know.

RUSSELL: Tour can be both physically and emotionally demanding. What type of things do you do to recover night after night when you’re pouring your heart out?

WOLF: I have my cozy shows that I watch on the bus. This last tour was Schitt’s Creek. It is so funny, I didn’t realize. My mother is Moira from that show.

RUSSELL: You have Bee Blackwell opening up for you after you opened up for Machine Gun Kelly. What things did you learn from that experience you could potentially pass on to her?

WOLF: MGK was so adamant that I gain his fans. And it’s just about showing that she and I have a good relationship too. As long as I’m putting the light on her as well, that will be really helpful. I would tell her to have a good time and not get too in your head about it if people aren’t looking right at you.

RUSSELL: I’ve discovered some of my favorite artists as openers. You’re planning to debut some new music while you’re on tour. How do you feel about seeing the raw live reactions of the audience as you’re singing something that they’ve never heard before?

WOLF: I love it. We’ve cultivated a very welcoming and supportive fan base, so anytime I’m playing something new,  you could hear a pin drop. Everyone is just there to embrace the new stuff, which I’m so grateful for. 

RUSSELL: How do you hope that Julia Wolf fans are going to dress for the concert?

WOLF: I love anything from the Elena Gilbert vibe, to my emo baddies. We have a song that could fit any vibe.

RUSSELL: Even with the John Summit collab, let’s get the rave girls in here.

WOLF: Bring it on. 

RUSSELL: What are you manifesting for this tour?

WOLF: Hopefully that people come. [Laughs] And we just make some core memories. Last tour, we had some proposals happening.

RUSSELL: Do you have favorite signs that fans bring?

WOLF: Anything Twilight. I already have so much Twilight merch, but the amount of gifts is so cute. Sometimes they’ll just put the book in the air. 

RUSSELL: How many times have you read the series and seen the movies?

WOLF: You don’t want to know. I have lost track. 15 times? This is also over the course of 20 years we’re talking about. I can’t tell you. It’s infinite.

RUSSELL: But never enough?

WOLF: Never enough.

The post How Julia Wolf Cast a Love Spell on Drake and John Summit appeared first on Interview Magazine.

Coat and Belt Burberry

PinkPantheress used to hide. The 25-year-old British musician blew up on TikTok in 2021, making lo-fi drum‘n bass tracks on GarageBand while studying film in London. Face unseen, name a mystery. That era is over. She’s a pop star now, complete with elaborate music videos, a BRIT Award for Producer of the Year, and the kind of attention that follows you whether you want it or not. But PinkPantheress is still just a character. The person underneath rides the Tube, hangs out with her day ones, and has no interest in Nobu. As she tells her friend Clairo, the separation is the point.

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WEDNESDAY 7 PM FEB. 25, 2026 LONDON

PINKPANTHERESS: How are you, gorgeous?

CLAIRO: I’m good. It’s good to see you. Why are you in the dark?

PINKPANTHERESS: I’m in my bedroom and I was just having an argument with my boyfriend, so I was like, “I need it to not be bright right now.” But I’ll make sure to ask the good, good.

CLAIRO: I thought I was interviewing you?

PINKPANTHERESS: Wait, what? I thought I was asking you!

CLAIRO: I have all my notes here.

PINKPANTHERESS: Bitch, I’m gagged! I was like, hold on.

CLAIRO: Girl, this is for you.

PINKPANTHERESS: [Laughs] Oh, thank god.

CLAIRO: Did you not know that?

PINKPANTHERESS: Claire, I don’t even know what day of the week it is.

CLAIRO: I have your whole life story written down anyway, so it’s perfect.

PINKPANTHERESS: Oh, fabulous. Thank you so much.

CLAIRO: Yay. Okay, so I made a timeline and I called it the Pink Pipeline. It’s everything I know. Your whole story, it’s so mystifying to me. You started as this anonymous underground producer hero, and then you had this face reveal and everyone was like, “Wow, she’s so stunning and hot.” And now you’re Grammy-nominated and you won Producer of the Year. You’re the first woman to win that at the BRITs. It’s so inspiring.

PINKPANTHERESS: Thank you.

Coat and Belt Burberry

CLAIRO: When I hear your story I think about some of my heroes, like Kate Bush, because she produced her own music. She was charting and a huge pop star, but then she stepped away from the spotlight and she’s remained this legend. So my question is, how do you feel about mystery? How do you feel about—

PINKPANTHERESS: Mystique.

CLAIRO: Yeah.

PINKPANTHERESS: That’s actually a question I had for you. [Laughs] I’ve always been shy and I think that’s something you can relate to. I wouldn’t call you introverted in real life, you’re very bubbly, and I’m bubbly too. But online we’re more understated. It’s a, “Let the music do the talking” kind of thing. Or at least that’s how I initially started, before all these silly internet mo- ments with me doing stupid shit.

CLAIRO: [Laughs]

PINKPANTHERESS: I never wanted to show my face because I didn’t want it to affect how my music was received. Not even because of pretty privilege. It was more like, “What if they don’t like how I look? What if they think it doesn’t match up with what they’re listening to?” I think the way I look has actually affected people’s willingness to listen to me. It’s helped me a lot, but it’s maybe made people not want to listen to me as well. I’m way more outside now, I’m more open with my opinions, but there’s part of me that wishes I didn’t do a lot of these things. Maybe it would’ve stunted my career, but sometimes I value mystique over everything else. It’s really beautiful to be someone who hides and then appears when a musical moment happens. Like Kate Bush. She’s one of my inspos as well.

CLAIRO: I do think it’s cool when you pop out and do everything when you’re promoting something. And then you can decide if you want to disappear again.

Mid-length Kensington Heritage Trench Coat in Coal Blue Burberry

PINKPANTHERESS: Yeah, for sure.

CLAIRO: The thing that sets you apart for me is that your music videos are always so intricate and huge, and I feel like they’ve become your trademark in a way. Do you think a lot about music videos when you’re making songs?

PINKPANTHERESS: The videos have been such a pivotal part of this era because I was like, “I’m going to try and do the pop thing.” So yes, I think of the videos before anything’s even materialized. I like to give people my ideas and then get the treatments. I studied film, so that’s part of it. I have the kind of brain that says, “This shot should be like this.”

CLAIRO: It’s so cool to watch someone go for everything. You have this confidence and you’re unafraid of going after the wilder ideas. It’s a nice reminder for me that you can actually do everything you want to.

PINKPANTHERESS: Yeah. One thing I’ve been talking to a lot of artists about is how labels these days are so stingy with budgets. I’m not trying to put my label on blast at all, but one of the issues with these videos is that some- times labels don’t trust artists enough with their money.

CLAIRO: That’s true.

PINKPANTHERESS: It’s very frustrating, because as much as the label provides a service, we provide a service. There is no money without the artist’s fan base, without the artists doing these live shows. It’s a very weird transactional relationship with your label where it’s like, “We’ll give you this money if this song does this well.” It removes a lot of the creativity. I have to do a lot of persuading. That’s the thing that upsets me the most about the process of music videos: someone has to approve the budget. I understand that music is a business, but it completely destroys my creative desire.

Mid-length Kensington Heritage Trench Coat in Coal Blue Burberry

CLAIRO: I understand, but also to anyone at home, I bet they wouldn’t even realize this would be a struggle for you because of how much success you’ve had.

PINKPANTHERESS: Of course.

CLAIRO: But now you can kind of stand 10 toes down on your ideas, watch them come to life, and prove them wrong when they doubt you.

PINKPANTHERESS: That’s 100 percent what it’s been. For example, my team didn’t want “Illegal” to be a single. Somebody from my label must’ve been like, “It’s crazy that you called that. None of us really saw it coming.” I’ve always made music based on my instincts. I produced “Pain.” I made “Break it off.” I knew these songs had a level of quality that people would admire. Now you can’t release an album before your label hears it, and if their opinions don’t match yours, sometimes you’ll knock heads. But it’s hard to trust them because it’s like, “My writing is the reason you signed me in the first place. Why would I need to change or alter anything about the song, if I’m the reason that I’m signed?”

CLAIRO: Having to defend your reasoning is so difficult, especially if it’s coming from an intuitive place. You have to really explain yourself.

PINKPANTHERESS: For sure.

Coat and Scarf Burberry

CLAIRO: So how’s the tour? You’re probably basically burnt out at this point—or are you on a roll?

PINKPANTHERESS: Funnily enough, I just did Laneway, which I know you did last year.

CLAIRO: Yeah.

PINKPANTHERESS: It was so much fun. But all those flights absolutely wrecked me. It really did feel like a little summer camp. But with each flight I was getting sicker and sicker. I even had a little chest infection, and the flights themselves are causing the illness. I have this chronic pain in my throat just from the dry cabin. Mentally I’m fine, but it’s taking a toll on my body. That means I look tired for shoots now, or in interviews I might have a scratchy throat, or I can’t record vocals.

CLAIRO: Right.

PINKPANTHERESS: I’m also getting a weird fatigue from seeing myself online. When I have too many clips going viral at once, I get really in my head. Even if it’s great things, all the eyes on me can be really terrifying. I’m always on such high alert like, “Oh my god, what can I expect today?” That’s been quite overwhelming. Have you been okay mentally?

CLAIRO: I haven’t been doing anything, so I’m fine. [Laughs] But I get burnt out really easily. I get sick every two weeks on tour.

PINKPANTHERESS: It’s horrible.

CLAIRO: Yeah, it takes a certain amount of stamina and confidence and trust in the entire rollout. I like that you take your time with your projects, but then fully immerse yourself.

Coat and Scarf Burberry

PINKPANTHERESS: I appreciate that. When I said there are parallels between me and you, I think it’s that at the core of who we are, the music is what leads. Obviously there are people who do an album a year and it’s great, but I need time to research how to produce a certain way, or what to tap into. I try to study the music I’m about to make, so I really immerse myself in a specific sound for a few months or a year. And it goes without saying I want to be able to live a normal life for a little bit. [Laughs]

CLAIRO: That’s where privacy and mystery comes in. Because ultimately it’s very hard to do it when you are so outside.

PINKPANTHERESS: I completely agree with you. When I tell people that, for example, I go on the Tube, they’re always like, “What? When the Hannah Montana wig is off, I’m just an ex-student of UAL [University of the Arts London]. I go out with my graphic designer friends. I’m not at Nobu. I have some eccentricities, but at my core I’m a very simple person, and “simple” and “pop star” are terms people don’t associate together.

CLAIRO: I feel that. I’ve seen you talk about branding and how important it is. That’s something I sort of learned around my last record. If you’re a private person but you have this look or brand, you can hide behind it and find protection and be confident. I can take it off and just be normal, not feel so pressured to keep it up 24/7.

PINKPANTHERESS: That’s one of the reasons I’m so happy my stage name is not my real name. There needs to be some separation—that’s why I can go so hard with these music videos. Because in my head I’m like, well, this isn’t me on the regular, this is me playing into a character. I have to be Pink when I’m onstage dancing, otherwise I go crazy. I lose my sense of self.

CLAIRO: How do you deal with mis- conceptions? Are you like, “Well, they’re criticizing the character, it’s not me?” Or are you like, “Wait, we are the same person, and this does hurt my feelings?” When people criticize my music, I’m okay with it. When people criticize who I am, or my character, I do get a little upset. I take everything personally.

PINKPANTHERESS: I agree with you. I was struggling with my sense of self before this whole branding thing. I didn’t know how I should look. I didn’t really care about styling myself. People used to say I dressed really badly because I didn’t care what I put on. But then it’s like, you’re a pop star, so now you do need to fill in these roles. When I’m in the makeup chair I’m like, “I hate all these products on me but I know I need this makeup because I have to be camera ready.” I have to remove myself.

CLAIRO: It’s out of body.

PINKPANTHERESS: It’s easy to feel bogged down, but my job has only made me so much stronger and better as a person. With fame, people can actually go down really dark roads, and it can lead to self-destruction. But I’ve been lucky enough to say that it’s done nothing but build me into a much better version of myself.

CLAIRO: That’s beautiful. Real diligence got you to this place. And for you to be celebrated for that is such an amazing feeling. You being the first woman to win Producer of the Year [at the 2026 BRIT Awards], on top of this year you’ve already had, is the coolest thing to me.

PINKPANTHERESS: Yeah. Even though there are a lot of front-facing female producers, I feel like a lot of people don’t even know what production is. Genuinely, people were commenting, “What does this mean?” I’ve always been very open about the fact that my skill lies solely in production. If you listen to me expecting good vocals—that’s not what people listen to me for. So when I read people saying, “She can’t sing. Why are we even paying attention?” I’m like, honey, that’s not why people are paying attention. With this award I’m just like, “Thank god I’m being recognized for the thing I actually do best.”

CLAIRO: It’s probably the most full-circle type of recognition you could get.

Long Kensington Heritage Trench Coat in Honey, Shirt, and Shoes Burberry

PINKPANTHERESS: Wait, actually, I was going to ask you, do you produce your own tracks?

CLAIRO: Yeah. That’s why I’ve been so invested in your story. I’m very opinionated in the studio. Nothing flies without my knowledge. Every single thing that’s being added on is through my filter and the filter of people I trust. We’re building up the songs from nothing. That’s why it’s so inspiring to see you win this award. This is what so many girls have been doing in their rooms for so long, and it feels so great to see someone win.

PINKPANTHERESS: Well, I love all your output. And I love watching people review your project because I’m such a nerd. I watched a sample breakdown of your whole thing, and it was fantastic. But I will have to say, yes women producers. I’m shocked that I’m the first winner of this award.

CLAIRO: It matters so much.

PINKPANTHERESS: It does matter. I know it’s the BRITs, but I’m like, “Why hasn’t Claire been nominated? Why hasn’t Rosalía or Imogen Heap won this award yet?” I keep thinking of all the women before me and I’m like, “Why am I the first one?” But I’m grateful for it, and thank you so much, Claire. You know I love you.

CLAIRO: No, I love you. And I’m so obsessed with your work and all your opinions, and all the things you give other young artists and peers. What you offer is so valuable and so cool. It was great talking to you. Go get some sleep.

PINKPANTHERESS: Oh, girl. I need it. Thank you so much, Claire.

———

Hair: Anoushka Danielle using Color Wow.

Makeup: Joy Adenuga at Forward Artists.

Nails: Michelle Class using Joonbyrd.

Tailor: Ellen Poppy.

Photography Assistants: Will Bruce and Martin Eito.

Fashion Assistant: Virginia Pensiero.

Production Direction: Alexandra Weiss.

Photography Production: Georgia Ford.

On-set Production: Indy Davy.

Post-production: Grain Post Production.

Location: 63 Sun Studio.

Special Thanks: Blondie’s Bar.

The post PinkPantheress Tells Clairo Why It’s All an Act appeared first on Interview Magazine.

photography shot by Kate Owen @thekateowen

It’s difficult to catch Yosef Munro. The Nines, NoHo’s red-hued, maximally plush, celeb-packed lounge and piano bar, where Munro, 41, has been a piano man since its opening in 2022, is “selective,” if we’re being polite about it. Should one make it through the thick velvet curtains, they’ll encounter Munro’s nimble, nuanced takes on Chaka Khan, or Luther Vandross, making the place come alive. It’s less tricky, and far more likely, to hear recorded expressions of the classically trained jazz pianist and composer: he’s written jingles for Shake Shack and scored ads for Adidas; brands like Cartier hire him to play their parties; he designs sound for apps like Chess.com. The man is a sonic Willy Wonka, with beats, effects, and chord progressions as his sugars. This month, Munro added another confection, releasing an album, Just Trust, as Gooskii (he’s made several piano records under his own name). It’s a fervent, thoughtful octet of tracks, wherein simple drum loops ascend to formidable, crescending dance beats that touch on electro, industrial, and noise as they make a poppy landing in Munro’s commanding vocals. It’s electro pop, but not; jazzy house that would find a happy home on a road trip, or in a crowded club. It’s a chance to catch Yosef Munro, even if it’s not in a chic Manhattan nightspot, and even if it’s not quite Yosef Munro. It’s Gooskii.

———

JOHN ORTVED: What’s a Gooskii?

YOSEF MUNRO: Names, they’re always a struggle. It’s hard to come up with something that feels cool, that other people like, that hasn’t been done, that’s not on the nose, that’s not stupid, that’s not too weird. There’s a bar in Pittsburgh called Gooski that I used to go to when I was “21.” I added an “i,” which I think is cheeky, makes it my own, and codes it as an electronic artist. And it sounds like the name I was called growing up, “Yossi.” It feels funny and insane, because I love this work, but I’m trying not to take it too seriously.

ORTVED: Why not?

MUNRO: If I spend too much time on it, then I never put it out; I put it aside, and it dies on an old hard drive. I’m great at starting projects. I’m terrible at finishing them.

ORTVED: You wouldn’t be the first artist to experience that. Except Taylor Swift. She’s perfect.

MUNRO: She’s definitely prolific.

ORTVED: Is there any Pittsburgh sound in this record? 

MUNRO: There’s some of the Rust Belt in the whole tapestry of esthetics that I come out of as a person and an artist.

ORTVED: I can’t tell if you’re more like Art Blakey or Trent Reznor, part two, the Oscar-winning composer.

MUNRO: I would never compare myself to either one, because those are two greats. My background is jazz. Coming to New York in 2008, I started to leave the jazz world, and slowly get more of a foot into noise, metal, rock, dance music, electronic, underground stuff. 

ORTVED: You say this is “Death Jazz.”

MUNRO: On Spotify, that’s Gooskii’s bio. I like the contradiction of those two phrases, but I really am a big fan of death metal. And my background is jazz. Death Jazz was not totally inappropriate, at least in the persona of Gooskii.

ORTVED: Persona?

MUNRO: This is the first time I’m doing anything that’s not under my name, and it feels like a different person. I’m running this stuff in my home studio, but I can definitely imagine singing this on stage. 

ORTVED: Why now for an album?

MUNRO: It’s a combination of AI generated stuff saturating things, and feeling sad about that, and feeling like I have to make up for lost time. I think there will always be a market for music that’s made by people. 

ORTVED: There’s a tension there, because you’re anticipating a need for man-made music. Yet, in every Gooskii track, every beat, there’s machines. 

MUNRO: Back in the ‘60s and ‘70s, when synthesizers started to be used heavily in popular music, critics said “This is not man-made.” The difference, versus AI generative stuff, is that I had to learn what a signature is, what chords work well. There’s a combination of education and taste. The impetus, the soul of it, is coming from my brain. I also execute. 

ORTVED: I hear some classic electronic references here, going back to Kraftwerk and Wendy Carlos.

MUNRO: That’s intentional. There are classic drum machine sounds: Linn drum, 606s, 707s. 

photography shot by Kate Owen @thekateowen

ORTVED: Where did the album’s name Just Trust come from?

MUNRO: That’s something that’s come into my personal and spiritual lexicon over the past few years as I’ve dealt with things that scare me, like scuba diving, martial arts, taking my motorcycle out on to the highway. “Just trust” became a bit of a mantra. It sounds simpler than it is; it took practice.

ORTVED: Scuba diving?

MUNRO: In 2021 my wife, Hannah, and I were in Tobago for the holidays. Everything was closed due to COVID, including the beaches, so there was nothing to do besides walk around the jungle or dive with the local shop. I’d spent my whole life convinced I had a phobia of deep water. After that trip, I was like, “Wait, I fucking love diving.” I got an advanced certification in 2023. 

ORTVED: Do you see yourself performing this album? 

MUNRO: If it happens, it will be behind two decks at a smaller venue: Maybe with a drummer, and I’d have a keyboard. My aim for this project is to kind of put out music, not necessarily perform it. Someone would have to ask me to do it, and then I’d figure it out.

ORTVED: I’d like to hear it at The Nines, where you’ve played for some very discerning ears.

MUNRO: I love that piano, I love that room, I love the other piano players, and I really love the team there. 

ORTVED: Does your work at the Nines translate into making this album, or are they worlds apart?

MUNRO: A lot of times when I finish a song, I linger on the last note, but don’t cut the pedal. I’ll improvise something. I’ll land on a jazz standard, or Dolly Parton, but in those improvisational moments, it’s very stream of consciousness. That process is similar to when I sit at home and I’m starting a new Gooskii track. I’ll turn on my Prophet, which is a synthesizer, and I’ll just kind of play around: vibe on a chord progression, or play with a rhythm as a baseline and see if it works.

ORTVED: There’s that same risk in improvisation–you just have to just trust and then let it go.

MUNRO: Yes. And honestly, I feel really great about what came out. And that’s not because I think it’s perfect. It’s because I think it’s not.

The post Who Is Gooskii? appeared first on Interview Magazine.

Photo courtesy of Lauren Auder

Welcome to SOUND ADVICE, Interview’s weekly destination for playlists curated by our friends, enemies, and lovers. In recent weeks, we’ve featured playlists from Zack Fox, Danny L Harle, and Mckayla Twiggs. This week’s installment comes from British-French songwriter and producer Lauren Auder, who dropped her sophomore record, “Whole World as Vigil,” last Friday. With collaborators Dviance and Alex Parish, the album grapples with the deep complexities of human connection, the difficulty and the beauty. To mark the occasion, we asked Auden to make us a playlist and tell us all her secrets.

———

Where do you dance? In the bedroom.

London or France? Unfair advantage for France, being a whole country. 

What song on this playlist is your guilty pleasure? I have no guilty pleasures!

What’s your favorite sound effect? Roblox “OOH” or Bathory’s horse neigh on their album Blood Fire Death.

Dream collab, dead or alive? Lou Reed, obviously.

Who do you trust most with the aux? My roommate, Cajm.

What do you pray about? More time, more rest.

Best arrondissement in Paris? 20th probably?

What song is currently on replay? “Close to the Edge” by Yes. 

What album was your coming-of-age soundtrack? Mysterious Phonk: Chronicles of SpaceGhostPurrp.

Tell us a secret. I cheated my way through Latin class in secondary school. 

Night or day? Day!

What is your studio session pet peeve? Weed smell :/

Which Skins character did you relate to the most? None, I’m 27!

What are you listening to as you complete this questionnaire? Space heater next to my bed, Italian lesson next door.

What does your notes app look like? Incriminating. 

You just arrived at the function. What are you drinking? What are you smoking? Cheap lager or expensive red wine, a Syrah if it’s winter. 

The world is ending. What are you wearing True religion jeans and a white button down, as per.

The post Lauren Auder is Praying for More Time appeared first on Interview Magazine.

———

HANNAH CROSBIE: How’s the jetlag doing?

TROYE SIVAN: Genuinely fine. I woke up at six today, and yesterday just before five, so it’s getting better.

CROSBIE: What’s your go-to jet lag cure? 

SIVAN: I try not to nap for the first day.

CROSBIE: That’s hardcore.

SIVAN: It’s a hard rule. Even if it’s just melatonin, I’ll take something for the first three nights. Even if I feel exhausted, if I wake up at four, I can’t get back to sleep.

CROSBIE: Honestly, American melatonin was such a game changer for me when I first went over and discovered CVS. I found those insanely good red gummies.

SIVAN: Oh my god, they’re so delicious.

CROSBIE: They shouldn’t be that delicious. What are your fashion week plans?

SIVAN: Nothing really, I’m just in town to throw this party for Penfolds tonight.

CROSBIE: That’s why I’m here. I write about youth culture and drinking a lot and how they fit together. Or how wines and spirits are trying to fit into the constantly shifting tastes of our generation. Booze is my job now but I have such a different relationship to it than when I was growing up.

SIVAN: When I think about what wine means to me now, it’s all about community and connection. You know what I mean?

CROSBIE: I do.

SIVAN: My point of inspiration for so many things is a beautiful, sunny afternoon in Melbourne, sitting with friends in a park, and opening a bottle of wine. Wine bar culture in Melbourne is so incredible, those days when people are pouring out into the streets and everyone is so connected, having a gorgeous time together and making really special moments. I love a three-hour dinner. 

CROSBIE: I often talk about connectivity through drinking. This idea of not going out and using alcohol as a tool to get drunk or party, but using it as a tool to connect with people.

SIVAN: Totally.

CROSBIE: Wine is totally unique in this way. If you open a beer, you’re having one beer to yourself. If you order a cocktail, you’re having a cocktail that’s just yours. Wine is something that you inherently share. But there’s also this different way you can find connection through wine. In the UK, where I live, I always say we’re a nation of drinkers rather than producers.

SIVAN: Right.

CROSBIE: But someone like you who’s born in South Africa and brought up in Australia, you have that connection to wine that I almost wouldn’t even be able to begin to understand. I talk to my French friends about how when you’re from a winemaking country, how much a part of your life that industry is.

SIVAN: I’m just so proud of anything Australian. Let me give you an example. The other day it happened with this actress in The Pitt.  

CROSBIE: Oh my god, I wanted to talk to you about this. 

SIVAN: I found out she was from Adelaide, and I freaked out.

CROSBIE: You said on Instagram you couldn’t leave the house because you truly believed you worked in an ER.

SIVAN: Truly. I feel like I’m in that TV show now because of her. I just get so proud of good Australian things, especially when it’s on a global scale. It’s true for wine as well. For me, growing up and even seeing ‘Margaret River’ on a bottle, which is a town I grew up four hours away from, makes me really, really proud. I feel like it’s something we do very well. It’s very chic.

CROSBIE: This is the thing we need to find. Because everything I read at the moment is telling me that young people aren’t drinking anymore. I’m always trying to make the case that they are, but instead of cheaper and worse, it’s something a bit more elevated, with a story behind it. We’re still drinking, but we’re choosing our moments. 

SIVAN: One thing that’s been fun about getting older is having those moments where we enjoy a really good meal with delicious wine. Nothing makes me feel so good. I walk away from those nights feeling genuinely fulfilled. Especially with how much time we all spend on our own these days. It’s the antidote to all that.

CROSBIE: I’ve been thinking a lot about being truly present when it’s so easy to fall back into your phone. Especially since COVID where we all had to become immediately self-sufficient, and then we went back out to discover these experiences hospitality can give us, it became even more special.

SIVAN: Totally. It’s always such a yawn when somebody takes out their phone at dinner. Then other people take out their phones around them, it just becomes a moment for everyone to go on their phone.

CROSBIE: Yeah. I’d obviously love to know where you love to eat, but I also don’t want to doxx your favourite restaurants. [Laughs] I guess what I really want to know is what you look for in a perfect wine bar.

SIVAN: To be honest, I couldn’t tell you a single name of a restaurant in Paris, because I get guided by my fashion friends who just take me to these chic places where the wine is good and the ambience is amazing. One thing that I really care about is a personable sommelier.

CROSBIE: I have thoughts on this.

SIVAN: It’s really important to have someone explain the wine to you where it doesn’t really matter your level of previous knowledge. I really admire people who can dispel some of the intimidation people can feel from wine. That’s what I want to do when I’m talking about wine.

CROSBIE: There’s still this snooty sommelier myth.

SIVAN: Exactly.

CROSBIE: Like, they’ve lovingly put the list together, they would love nothing more than to talk about it with you and match you with the perfect bottle of wine.

SIVAN: No, I always ask. It’s part of the experience, part of the fun, part of the show.

CROSBIE: I completely agree.

SIVAN: And then the music has to be good.

CROSBIE: What kind of music?

SIVAN: It depends. One of my favorite things to do in L.A. is go to Korean barbecue. There’s this place, I don’t remember the name, but they play very loud, very intense K-pop and Korean dance music, and it puts me in the best mood. The dinner feels completely unhinged by the end. [Laughs] You’re dancing, drinking, and then cooking your own food? It’s very fun.

CROSBIE: I just wrote a column on this. It started off as a completely different piece. I wanted to write about playlist curation in restaurants and so many people told me you can almost predict exactly how customers will order when you play different music. La Camionera, this iconic lesbian bar in London, told me that reggaeton makes people buy palomas, red wine if they play jazz. Music becomes this thing that guides the evening along. 

SIVAN: That’s super, super interesting. 

CROSBIE: What are you doing this evening?

SIVAN: Oh, I’m doing this really chic dinner, all my beautiful fashion friends are here because it is Paris Fashion Week. Nice wine, nice people, and I’m gonna be showing Aussie wines I’m really proud of: it’s what I love to do. 

CROSBIE: I’ll be there. [Laughs] 

SIVAN: Yeah, me too.

CROSBIE: Thanks for your time, darling. I’ll see you later.

The post A Boozy Chat With Troye Sivan appeared first on Interview Magazine.

All photos courtesy of Lauren Halsey.

Lauren Halsey’s new sculpture park, tucked between 76th Street and Western Avenue in South L.A., is more than a monument. Two decades in the making, sister dreamer, lauren halsey’s architectural ode to the surge n splurge of south central is closer to a living venue: a temple, a dance floor, a classroom, a garden, and a much-needed gathering place in the neighborhood where the artist was born and raised. It’s a tribute to the generative Black space Halsey sees as sacred, and increasingly scarce. “While I have the keys, I want to do the most,” she told jazz composer Kamasi Washington over Zoom last week. The two have been close friends for over a decade, bound by a shared frequency, both fluent in what Halsey calls the Black fantastical. Just before the park opened, they got to talking about temples, collabs, and cosmic spirits. 

———

LAUREN HALSEY: Hi, Washington.

KAMASI WASHINGTON: How are you doing?

HALSEY: This is the first time I’ve ever been burnt out. I’m exhausted, but it’s for our neighborhood and nobody else, so it’s a blessing. I’ve been praying for the endurance from god to just get over the hump, because what’s on the other side feels liberating. 

WASHINGTON: Yeah.  

HALSEY: You told me you’ve been driving by my sculpture park, and I can’t wait for you to come in. I had an event for the studio the other night and it was very natural, free-spirited. Then we turned on the music, and the lights came on and it felt so fantastical. I use that word a lot, but it’s more how I contextualize funkadelic. Then I came up with a list of all the people who have to perform, and of course you’re on it. I think it will speak to you so deeply.

WASHINGTON: I’m so excited to see it. When I take my mom home, we drive around it. She’s like, “So your friend made that, Kamasi?” I’m like, “Yeah, my friend made that.”

HALSEY: I remember the night I first met you at Thomas Houseago’s studio. I was living at my grandma’s house on the East Side sleeping on the floor, and I got this text from Thomas like, “Come over.” I took buses, trains, and automobiles to get there. Then I met you and we just hit it off. When was that? Like 10 years ago.

WASHINGTON: Wow.

HALSEY: And here we are now.

WASHINGTON: Yeah. Your work really transforms the world you’re in. I’ve only seen pictures, but I can imagine being in this space. If we made some music there it would be crazy.

HALSEY: That’s what your dad was saying the other day when he came by. What are you working on right now? 

WASHINGTON: I got a few things on the docket. Terrace Martin and I are working on a record together. And I have this ballet I’ve been working on for forever. 

HALSEY: You’ve always talked about that. Tell me more.

WASHINGTON: It’s like you said, very Black-fantastical. It’s a very real, deep fantasy story. I started writing this piece of music and I had one little piece of an image. It actually premiered at Disney Hall, but it was only two movements of the piece. When I heard it, like really heard it with real people playing it, the rest of the story started to germinate. So I started to write the whole thing. Now it’s like 27 movements.

HALSEY: Wow.

WASHINGTON: My cousin Tamika, who’s Lula Washington’s daughter, helped me with the choreography. I’m just trying to find the right person to help me figure out how to tell this story visually, and then we can figure out how to bring it to life.

HALSEY: How do you usually approach collaboration, especially when it’s multidisciplinary? Do you just riff and hang out? 

WASHINGTON: I try not to have too set of a thing. If it’s something that I’m doing, I find someone that I think would see the vision. I try to find a way that works for the project itself and for that person. So I leave it open-ended.

HALSEY: Totally.

WASHINGTON: With your compound, how is that working now? It’s almost like you got your own little city.

HALSEY: I will say, it’s a blessing to be able to come to a studio with the most talented artists and minds. From the registrar, to the admin, to the art-handlers who put forward ideas and now we have their knowledge systems. There are moments and phases of production where it literally feels like I’m walking onto a set of HGTV in the hood, because it’s so Extra’d out. 

WASHINGTON: [Laughs] Yeah. 

HALSEY: But I’m trying to embody having a multidisciplinary practice. We’ve talked off the record about my desires to enter into music, and I feel so close. But it’s because the studio is so strong that I’m able to now figure out how to extract some of that language into another context that’s not fine art. I also want to have time in my studio where I can play, and experience myself differently through art so it doesn’t feel like a job. I used to have that in school, and I’m trying to take some of that freedom back.

WASHINGTON: Me and Terrace are talking about that. It felt like when I was younger, I had so much time to share. Similar to what you’re saying, I feel like every time I play music with other people, it’s at a gig or a show. But it wasn’t always like that. It used to be, “Let’s just get together and play.”

HALSEY: Yeah.

WASHINGTON: It gets harder and harder as you get older. 

HALSEY: Because there are all these conditions around it where it has to be produced. And that context makes so much sense because it supports everything I want to do, but I also need a context wherein none of it matters and that there are no stakes.

WASHINGTON: Man, I feel you so much. Everything’s such a big deal.

HALSEY: I saw you play the World Stage on New Year’s Eve, right?

WASHINGTON: Yeah.

HALSEY: I really love that you can be as macro as the Bowl with 17,500 seats, and you can be as micro and as accessible as in the middle of Degnan. And you’re still as ambitious in your performance and accessible to everyone. It’s very poetic. Did you always think that you would want to balance your career in that way?

WASHINGTON: Well, it was my reality. When I was still in college I started touring with Snoop.

HALSEY: Whoa. Tell that story. 

WASHINGTON: We used to come off playing these huge stadiums and then get off the plane and immediately go play at 5th Street Dick’s in Leimert. So, we’d be playing for 50,000 people and then go play for 20 people and have the same energy. 

HALSEY: Love that. 

WASHINGTON: I always said I always had that parallel universe thing with my music. And when I was younger, I was trying to figure out a way to do what we’re doing over here on a smaller scale. But I felt like it fit on the bigger scale too.

HALSEY: Same.

WASHINGTON: Then once we got it to the bigger scale, I had the revelation like, “Oh, I’m going to miss over here.” They were both happening. 

HALSEY: You were just doing it. It was a muscle. 

WASHINGTON: Yeah, and that was just our reality. We had one foot in both worlds. I think that’s just my musical composition, and it’s always going to be that. I don’t necessarily think that the size of something dictates the importance of something. You know what I mean?

HALSEY: Yeah.

WASHINGTON: It’s not like I only want to play little small places or I only want to play really big places. They exist for different reasons.

HALSEY: Totally. I want to see you and [DJ] Battlecat again. That was one of the best nights of my life, musically.

WASHINGTON: Oh yeah?

HALSEY: I just was like, “What?” It was another level of him unlocked that I didn’t even know existed. A genius, for sure. Such a pillar. 

WASHINGTON: And the crazy part is, we know nothing about Cat since the early 2000s because he came and got us. The first thing I ever did with Battlecat was a Roger Troutman tribute.

HALSEY: Wow. Where was it?

WASHINGTON: It was at the Hollywood Athletic Club. It was magic. I knew his music. I grew up a super fan. But sometimes you work with people and you gotta come down to them a little bit. 

HALSEY: What does that mean in the music world? 

WASHINGTON: It means you got to dilute it. I understand it, because it’s like cooking. You know what I mean? Everybody don’t want the hot, hot, hot, hot, hot.

HALSEY: Yeah, totally.

WASHINGTON: But then Cat, his house was hotter than us. He wanted water that we had.

HALSEY: I love that. Wow. When’s the next show?

WASHINGTON: We’re doing the Santa Monica Jazz Festival.

HALSEY: I will be there. I want to invite you to play at my park. Can you do it with Battlecat? What’s so cool for me is that the whole thing pays homage to us and our hyper-local heroes, people who are the pantheon of Black genius across all these eras of South Central. It’s been really special as people see the work, they’re like, “Oh my god, that’s so-and-so from around the corner.” Or, “That’s uh-uh-uh from up the street.” But I also want it to be animated and I want it to be used. I don’t want people to just look at it. I want it to shapeshift, where it’s a classroom for kids, because we’re going to have educational initiatives and stuff like that, and we’ll have art and workshops and wellness. Then it’s also the dance floor. 

WASHINGTON: Yeah.

HALSEY: I’ve been secretly throwing parties there, and they’ve been incredible. We have two layers of concrete walls, so it’s a great soundproof situation. Then I want it to be theater, stage, living room. The sculpture park also functions as this Black and brown venue for the neighborhood, to come and experience ourselves in another context without so much pressure. I’m already trying to plan a Juneteenth thing, secretly.

WASHINGTON: That sounds amazing.

HALSEY: So I’ll figure it out, because someone’s going to be like, “What do you want to do?” And I have four things. And so this is number two. Al Green’s number one. He’ll be at the Bowl August 15th.

WASHINGTON: Oh, snap. Okay.

HALSEY: Yeah, I missed my high reunion to see him. He was at the YouTube Theater. 

WASHINGTON: Oh wow.

HALSEY: So good. His voice is still syrupy and dreamy and silky, and he still croons. When he did “Simply Beautiful,” everyone almost passed out.

WASHINGTON: Oh yeah.

HALSEY: He’s throwing roses out in the crowd. And I’m a lesbian. You know what I’m saying?

WASHINGTON: [Laughs] 

HALSEY: Is there a venue you haven’t played yet that you really want to?

WASHINGTON: I’ve had ideas. It sounds crazy, but I visited Karnak Temple in Egypt and it was like, “I can feel the energy in here.”

HALSEY: That’s not crazy. Didn’t Travis Scott do something like that?

WASHINGTON: I think people have played in front of the pyramids.

HALSEY: But you mean inside? 

WASHINGTON: I don’t know if anyone’s ever played inside Karnak Temple, but hey, let’s put that out there.

HALSEY: It’s happening. It was already written. Boom. All right, come to 76th and Western [the location of Halsey’s sculpture park] first and then we’ll go to the temple.

WASHINGTON: That’s the new temple. I’ve only seen what you can see above it.

HALSEY: Oh, the Hathoric columns?

WASHINGTON: Yeah. I’m like, “Oh man, I can’t wait to get in there and make some music. “

HALSEY: Come towards the evening because we have such beautiful sunsets here. The sky turns this royal orange. It’s so dramatic. Then there’s the DJ across the street at the ARCO station who’s just there all day slinging CDs. Or he was doing CDs, now he’s doing flash drives where it’ll be the Best of Gospel or R&B. By the time the sun starts to set, he gets into the Anita Baker world or S.O.S. Band.

WASHINGTON: I think that there’s an Egyptian temple or something like that up the street. I always wondered what that was.

HALSEY: The KRST. I grew up going there. I did the Rites of Passage program. My grandmother’s name actually is painted in one of the cartouches on the mural on the side that says “Know Thyself.”

WASHINGTON: Wow. I’m so glad that you’re thinking of things in this way too, of making something interactive.

HALSEY: Yeah, I’m literally treating it as a venue, because everyone knows that I love wearing multiple hats. I’ve just been out here taking meetings with people, being like, “Hey, you want to have dinner here? And you cook from the garden.” Chef Alisa was there yesterday and we’re like, “Let’s do a dinner. We’ll get the musician.” Then I went to the Slauson and talked to my friend who makes incense, and I was like, “We’ll do the scent.” But it’s cool because I’m the key holder, and it’s a Black space, which we don’t have a lot of anymore. So while I have the keys, I want to do the most.

WASHINGTON: That’s how it starts. I was just saying that I grew up under Reggie Andrews and his philosophy was, why aspire to get to some other place? Why not aspire to make people want to get to your space? 

HALSEY: Yeah.

WASHINGTON: That’s what you’re doing to me. Hearing how you view the world and move through it is always very inspirational for me. I’m thankful for it.

HALSEY: I appreciate that. Ditto. 

WASHINGTON: What you do is big and permanent, and it exists in the physical world in a very tangible way. Music sometimes is the reverse. It just appears. It only exists in the physical world for a split second, and then it’s only existing within the people that saw it. I’ve been to spaces where beautiful music has been made, and it lingers. When other musicians come to play, they’ll be like, “Ooh, I feel something when I come here.”

HALSEY: I love that.

WASHINGTON: My Aunt Lula Washington’s a dancer, so she was the first person to give me the opportunity to work with one of my biggest heroes, McCoy Tyner. I was really freaking out over that. I had a weird experience. He caught me in a moment of disbelief.

HALSEY: It happens to me all the time.

WASHINGTON: But that was one of the first times I got to really play music that had dancing to it. Especially intense, heavily improvisational jazz. That separation’s never happened, people moving to this music. To me, artists creating spaces that musicians make music in is something that should happen more often.

HALSEY: I’m trying to bring it back, and you are too.

WASHINGTON: You already did it. 

HALSEY: Now I got to bring the musicians in. 

The post Inside Lauren Halsey’s Black-Fantastical Sculpture Park appeared first on Interview Magazine.

All photos courtesy of Mckayla Twiggs.

Welcome to SOUND ADVICE, Interview’s weekly destination for playlists curated by our friends, enemies, and lovers. In recent weeks, we’ve featured playlists from María Isabel, Zack Fox, and Danny L Harle. This week’s installment comes from L.A.-based singer-songwriter Mckayla Twiggs, a former Broadway actress—she played Young Cosette in the 2014 production of Les Misérables—who has since traded in her character shoes for a recording career. Glitter and diamonds paired with an impressive set of pipes, Twiggs released her debut single “What a Girl Wants” on March 20, a declaration of lust for all things illegal and expensive. In line with the release, she made us a playlist spanning pop royalty and fellow up-and-comers, then tackled our questionnaire, divulging secrets, style icons, and what it would actually take to turn her into a gold-digger.

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Where do you dance?
Everywhere.

LA or NYC?
NYC, spiritually. I was born and raised there, I just moved to LA six months ago. Every time I get in a car it feels like a hazard for everyone involved. I usually do better when my transportation method is walking in a straight line.

Who do you trust most with the aux cord?
Probably my girlfriend. She has the best music taste. 

What are you saying to God at the gates of Heaven?
“Soooo are we laughing or am I in trouble?”

Dream collab, dead or alive?
An Ariana [Grande], Britney [Spears], [Lady] Gaga, and Radiohead song featuring me.

What song off your album has been on replay?
I feel like a lot of artists don’t listen to their own music but I am a proud Mckayla Twiggs stan. “What a Girl Wants” is probably my magnum opus. I listen to it every day.

Are theatre kids really that bad?
Only if you’re threatened by range.

What song on this playlist makes you cry?
“7 Rings” by Ariana makes me really emotional.

What celeb was your gay awakening?
My girlfriend.

Fuck Marry Kill: Gucci, Prada, Chanel
Kill Gucci. Fuck Prada (she’s hot). And marry Chanel (she’s very reliable).

What’s a good piece of advice that you never follow?
Whenever my girlfriend tells me to shower.

How much money would a person need to have to turn you into a gold-digger?
Bold of you to assume I’m not the rich one.

What song on this playlist is your guilty pleasure?
“What A Girl Wants.”

The world is ending, what are you wearing?
Britney Spears’ outfit at the 2001 VMAs, riding around on a pink horse, a naturally pink one, obviously.

What is your queer canon event?
The Megan Fox Transformers scene. You know the one.

Who are your style icons?
Hannah Montana and Paris Hilton.

What is your musical taste red flag?
People who hate pop music. Because real music is back and it’s called pop.

Who is the Queen of Pop?
Madonna started it, Gaga perfected it, and I’m just here trying to pay rent.

What’s a song on this playlist you wish you wrote?
“Everything in Its Right Place” by Radiohead.

Tell us a secret.
Whenever I go to London, I fake a British accent in public to see if anyone will clock it. If you hear it, don’t say anything.

What number one rule do you live by?
Never apologize for belting in public. The world needs it more than you think.

The key to my heart is…
Gay

The post Mckayla Twiggs Is the Rich One in the Relationship appeared first on Interview Magazine.

With her sky-high bouffant and jazzy mezzo-soprano voice, Sienna Spiro could be confused for a new age Nancy Sinatra. In reality, she’s just a British girl with an old soul and a penchant for vintage clothes. With only an EP to her name, the 20-year-old “Die on This Hill” singer has already received cosigns from legends like Elton John and soulful contemporaries like Sam Smith. Spiro spent the last few weeks performing for weeping fans at intimate venues across America, but before she could close out the US leg of her tour, I visited her dressing room to talk British pessimism, sixties style inspo, and why she stays in her sad girl music bag.

TUESDAY 6:13 PM MARCH 17, 2026 LOWER EAST SIDE

———

ARY RUSSELL: Welcome to New York. This is not your first time here, right?

SIENNA SPIRO: No. I mean, other than London, New York is my favorite city in the world.

RUSSELL: Really?

SPIRO: Yeah, it’s the last real city with magic where you can be spontaneous and inspired. Also the jazz music here is incredible. Whenever I have a free moment, I’m always at a jazz club.

RUSSELL: I want to start back at the beginning. Even though you’re so young, you have such a rich musical history. What is the first memory that made you realize that you wanted to pursue this as a career?

SPIRO: I’ve been singing since I could talk, like doing nursery rhymes. When I was super young, Frank Sinatra, Nina [Simone], Etta James, Dinah Washington, Barbara Streisand, Al Green—all the greats were played in my house. That was my pop music, and I used to try and emulate the way they would sing. 

RUSSELL: Power houses.

SPIRO: Then I wrote my first song when I was ten. I was a very emotional child. I’m very overwhelmed by things. I remember being 16 and we had GCSEs in school and I knew I didn’t want to stop.

RUSSELL: You’re like, “That’s my life.”

SPIRO: I went behind everyone’s back. I found a music college, applied to it, kind of didn’t get in. My parents were like, “What have you done?” I was writing them every day, and then I got in. I kind of gave you my whole story. [Laughs]

RUSSELL: I love it.

SPIRO: I ended up finding my management from posting one video. I went to music college, dropped out at 16 for honestly a bad reason. So I’m glad it worked out.

RUSSELL: I read you dropped out at 16 and I was like, “How were her parents reacting?”

SPIRO: They didn’t have a choice.

RUSSELL: Did that instill a level of confidence in you or was it just the pressure to succeed because you’d made this crazy decision?

SPIRO: A bit of both. I’m very stubborn and headstrong. When I want to do something, I would just try everything in my power to do it. I was dropping out for quite a foolish reason that, looking back, probably wasn’t the right thing to do.

RUSSELL: Why’d you drop out?

SPIRO: Don’t even, girl. [Laughs] It was like false promises, older producer man.

RUSSELL: It’s almost like a rite of passage for a young, rising star.

SPIRO: We’re good now. Everything’s okay. Thank god.

RUSSELL: You’re here.

SPIRO: It was a blessing in disguise. As insecure as I’ve been my whole life, I must have had this confidence in myself because I never even considered doing anything else. This is all I ever want to do. I’ve only recently been reflective and understood how lucky I am that it’s actually happened this way because this is not normal. 

RUSSELL: I’m very curious about the trajectories and the mindsets of artists that are from the UK, because in comparison to America, the culture we will instill in kids is “You can be anything. You can be the President of the United States.” I’ve heard from British people—

SPIRO: We don’t have that. It’s like, “Get to work.”

RUSSELL: But then there’s people like you who go against the grain and lean more into the American mindset of , “I’ve got to take a risk. I want to be a star.” 

SPIRO: Right.

RUSSELL: I wanted to talk about your looks. I see the sixties vibe. Who or what’s been on the mood board for you as an artist and specifically for this tour? 

SPIRO: I love the personality and character of the sixties, and how individual it is. It took me a really long time to find my style because I grew up, honestly, hating my body. It took me a while to be comfortable being looked at on stage. But I love the silhouettes from back then and I’ve grown into myself and feel a lot more confident than I used to. Nancy Sinatra, Barbara Streisand, and Francoise Hardy are amazing women who I just admire a lot. And those paper dresses or the little box dresses. I just love that.

RUSSELL: I love the look of a romper with go-go boots back then.

SPIRO: So cute.

RUSSELL: How are you balancing making sure that you’re paying homage to these artists that have inspired you while also putting your own stamp on your identity as an  artist?

SPIRO: Well, just listening to music, you’re naturally influenced subconsciously. The way I sing is the main way I pay homage to  those artists because that’s how I learned to sing. There’s this famous quote from Frank Sinatra, he said, “A singer, to me, is somebody who tells a story.” I keep that in mind whenever I’m singing and I always try and bring myself back to what I wrote the stories about.

RUSSELL: Yeah.

SPIRO: But my music is, for the most part, pretty stripped back. I love the humanness of music from back then. You couldn’t auto-tune, you couldn’t punch in. I record everything in one take and there’s barely any chop-ins. All the instruments are recorded by people. You hear the little mistakes.

RUSSELL: The cries.

SPIRO: You hear the breaks, you hear rubbing from my dress. That is so personal. The guy I work the most with is Omer [Fedi] and he’s taught the most about singing because I used to do every riff, and every run.

RUSSELL: You’re Christina [Aguilera].

SPIRO: I was trying to prove myself because I actually didn’t think I was a good singer growing up. So every chance I would get to over sing, I would do it. He’s the one who taught me less is more and you can only do what the song wants. 

RUSSELL: That way when you really want to do more, it feels like—

SPIRO: A moment.

RUSSELL: Your music is very evocative of sad girl vibes. When I ask this question, I don’t want you to take this in the wrong way.

SPIRO: Don’t worry.

RUSSELL: Do you see yourself writing happy songs in the future?

SPIRO: I have to write wherever I’m living. I’m not sad all the time. I just find it easy to pull from that emotion. It’s a sad set, I’ll be honest with you. I would love to make some upbeat songs. 

RUSSELL: When you’re looking out into the crowd and you’re singing, literally pouring your heart out, what is the reaction that you’re typically seeing from the crowd?

SPIRO: It’s all different. I was doing a show in Philadelphia the other day and I saw this girl in the front row crying, and it just looked like she’d been through so much pain. I’ve lived through all these songs, so I know what it feels like. I really love the people in the audience. It’s a very special group of people. There is such a mutual understanding in that crowd, which is so rare.

RUSSELL: You’ve referenced that since you’ve lived what you’re singing, it hits you emotionally. When you’re singing that song night after night, are you reliving that? Or at a certain point, does it become a separate version of yourself?

SPIRO: I used to, and I was like, “This is actually driving me insane.”

RUSSELL: Not healthy.

SPIRO: Because I’d try to take myself back there to get back into the emotion, but I can’t do that.

RUSSELL: You’re going to burn out.

SPIRO: That’s what “You Stole the Show” is about. It’s about living it every night and just imagining what would happen if that person was there. 

RUSSELL: I was really excited to talk to you about “The Visitor” because it was something that you dropped because of the high demand of your fans. What is it like to be able to have instant feedback from your fans on TikTok who are like, “We want more of this clip that you released. When’s the full version coming out?”

SPIRO: As cool as that is, it will never dictate what I do. I put that song online because I knew I was putting it out eventually and genuinely it was my favorite song I’ve ever made. Sometimes I just hate the whole waiting thing. I’m quite an authentic person, especially online. I do my own social media, I post what I want, and I just felt like it was the right thing to post at the time. 

RUSSELL: The fan response is just a bonus.

SPIRO: Yeah, it’s amazing. Social media is a blessing and a curse at the same time. It has incredible opportunities. But it would be a huge disservice for artists to just focus on that.

RUSSELL: If you start focusing on commercialization, you lose that personal aspect. There are artists who will specifically write songs with the intention of like, “This is going to go viral on TikTok.” And fans will be like, “I can tell that this was written to be a sound.”

SPIRO: To each their own. I personally wouldn’t do it. I think art should just come from humans, and be personal in whatever way that means. 

RUSSELL: Even though you’re in your 20s, your lyricism is so poignant and sharp. Were you always a natural talent in that way?

SPIRO: I have to say, my first song, I actually loved. It then went downhill from there for a long time and it stayed down and then I think it got better. [Laughs] It’s been a process. I’ve written hundreds and thousands of songs and most of them are bad. 

RUSSELL: The songs that are bad, do you want to go back and see if you can rework them with a new lens?

SPIRO: Depends. I mean, “The Visitor” I wrote nine times and I genuinely have nine finished versions of that song. I believed in it so much and everyone was sick of me. I was like, “Why don’t we try it again?”

RUSSELL: One more go. [Laughs]

SPIRO: Sometimes it works and sometimes you just have to let things go.

RUSSELL: When you’re on tour, there are going to be your diehard fans, and there are also going to be people who aren’t too familiar with your work. What do you want them to leave with after your performances?

SPIRO: I hope they like me. I love when people are like, “I’ve never heard of you before.”

RUSSELL: You hand everyone a survey on their way out. [Laughs]

SPIRO: I’m like, “Have you been here before? No? Well, would you come back?” That’s what I’d like them to leave with, a ticket for another show.

The post Introducing Sienna Spiro, the Sad Girl Singer Bringing the Sixties Back appeared first on Interview Magazine.

Photos courtesy of Grace Ives.

In 2022, Grace Ives made a splash with her critically acclaimed second studio album Janky Star. Then—just when we were savoring her husky voice and electropop beats—she disappeared. Following a much-needed three-year hiatus, the 30-year-old singer returns with a newfound confidence and a new album, Girlfriend. As she tells her internet friend, Hunter Schafer, she’s stripping down her identity and letting the music shine through, one track at a time.

———

GRACE IVES: We’re alone. 

HUNTER SCHAFER: We’re doing it.

IVES: Wait, where are you? 

SCHAFER: I’m in Budapest right now and have been going back and forth between here and Italy for the past month because I’m doing two movies at once right now, which is really crazy.

IVES: Yay!

SCHAFER: Almost to the finish line, which is cool. Where are you?

IVES: I’m in L.A. doing rehearsals for a release show for the album on Saturday.

SCHAFER: Oh my god. Are you excited?

IVES: I’m excited. Yesterday, Ariel [Rechtshaid] sent a text that was like, “Reached out to Charli and she wants to come.” And I’m like, “Oh!”

SCHAFER: Wait, Charli XCX?

IVES: Yeah.

SCHAFER: That makes a lot of sense though. The sonic relationship is there.

IVES: We’re both just people. 

SCHAFER: Wait, do you live in L.A.?

IVES: No, I live in New York. Where are you from? 

SCHAFER: I grew up in a few different places, but I just say North Carolina because that’s where I spent the longest time in my childhood. You grew up in New York, right?

IVES: Yeah. In Lower Manhattan, like 12th between 6th and 7th for a while. And then Brooklyn. Are you in L.A. mostly?

SCHAFER: I technically live there, but I’m never there. It’s just because of this little lifestyle I’ve got going on. I’m living out of suitcases right now. Maybe that’ll change someday. 

IVES: I can relate. The suitcase life is so fucking hard. 

SCHAFER: Are there any parts of it that you like?

IVES: Yeah. I realized recently, “Oh, this is the fun part of this, a fucking tour.” It’s physically crazy and emotional. But then I’m like, wait, It’s so special.

SCHAFER: So you took a three-year hiatus?

IVES: Yes. I went on tour and then came back to Brooklyn and then started just collecting songs. But my last tour was like, “I don’t remember that.” 

SCHAFER: Does this one feel different?

IVES: I think so. Before, I was like, “I’m disconnected from the people who interact with it.” It’s weird to have fans, especially when for so long been like, “I don’t know if anybody likes me.” This time around, I’m like, “We need to come together.”

SCHAFER: And you feel ready to face that.

IVES: Exactly, and just be excited to get to show the music to people. Because it’s not just for me, it’s for people to hopefully be moved by.

SCHAFER: Yeah.

IVES: I mean, it’s weird. I’m sure you have a relationship with fans, but they’re seeing you and identifying with your ability to become someone and use parts of yourself to do that. And then people are like, “I love that. I love you.” I wonder what that is.

SCHAFER: It’s similar in a lot of ways, but where I imagine it’s different is with fans or people who watch the work, they end up having a relationship with the characters that I do. And then I’ve also had to create a character of myself, because I feel like it’s much nicer for my brain to separate it. Do you feel like there’s a little gap?

IVES: There probably should be, but I’m not there yet. I’m just being myself. If I looked at my Instagram, I would be like, “I don’t really know who this person is.”

SCHAFER: Yeah.

IVES: There might be a gap because some people are like, “Oh my god, this song changed my life.” And I’m like, “I hate that song of mine. That’s my worst one.” With musicians also, I love when I see people’s personality. That’s what has helped me make better music also, just literally being myself.

SCHAFER: Was that your approach with making this new album? Did you have one more holistic idea of what it would be, or was it more about just getting in the studio and you being you and letting that be it?

IVES: It’s the latter where it’s like I have all these songs, and then in order to make them with another person, I can’t hide at all. You can’t be shy about it or else you’re not going to get what you want.

SCHAFER: Yeah. 

IVES: In the past I’ve been afraid of speaking up because I don’t want anybody to be mad at me.

SCHAFER: I feel that so much with acting, too. I have to remind myself that I’m going into work to play this other person, but when it comes down to it, what really makes something sing are the moments of looseness and freeness when you might’ve gone too far.

IVES: Where you just let yourself react to the other person?

SCHAFER: Yeah, you get a little lost in it, a little lost in the songs.

IVES: Yes. When you’re crying, I assume that you’re tapping into a true part of yourself that would be sad about something.

SCHAFER: It depends. Crying is always particular and funny because it’s always like all I have to think about is what’s actually happening in the scene or whatever. And then other times it’s like, “No, I think I need to go visit somewhere that’s hiding in my head and sit down there for a second and get cozy in the grossness or whatever it is.”

IVES: Totally. I’m fed so many acting class videos on TikTok or Instagram and I relate to it. 

SCHAFER: Wait, okay. I want to ask you specific album questions.

IVES: Okay.

SCHAFER: So it’s your first album after a three-year hiatus. Do you feel like you have grown or changed as an artist? When did you know that you were ready to start making a new project again?

IVES: I was living this life as somebody who makes music in the way that a college kid would, where it’s pretty unserious and a little bit self-involved. I’ve moved away from being so scared of judgment or any kind of reaction that would make me feel bad about myself. I got there in the process of making this current album by actually physically working with someone else. I’ve definitely changed. I mean, three years is crazy.

SCHAFER: It sounds like making music was more kind of a by yourself activity, right?

IVES: Yeah.

SCHAFER: Was there a process of figuring out who you want to let in and of breaking the walls down?

IVES: Totally. At first, I was very like, “I’m going to do it all myself because if I work with another person, everyone’s going to think that they did it and not me.” There’s this fear of just not being a guy in the room, fear of people taking credit, of being overlooked.

SCHAFER: Yeah, totally. 

IVES: And then I got lucky in the people that I worked with like  John DeBold and Ariel. I trust them. I’m not “other” from them. I struggle with feeling like I don’t belong, or like there’s something wrong with me. But trusting these two people, John and Ariel, is like, “Oh yeah, we’re all the same. At least in this room.”

SCHAFER: Did your relationships change with them over the time you made it?

IVES: Definitely. When I started, it was just John and I, and I was kind of still in party mode, just being not nice to myself and everybody. So I was not really forming a real connection with him because I was just thinking about myself and what I did last night. John is close in age to me and he works out of his back garage and he’s young in his career and I feel similar. So I kind of just felt like working with like we’re kids.

SCHAFER: Yeah, or your neighbor or something.

IVES: And then Ariel is like my favorite.

SCHAFER: Aww. Wait, one thing I’m always curious about is how you choose the order of songs, especially if you’ve made them not with a particular sequence in mind. How do you figure out what the story and the evolution is?

IVES: I grew up being very playlist-minded, so when I’m putting stuff together it’s very like, “How does it feel to listen to this all the way?” This time it’s like, “What feels good? If you were just sitting and closing your eyes and listening to this, would you want to fidget? Does it feel okay?”

SCHAFER: My stylist, who works for Interview actually, is always talking about letting the eyes rest at something. Because we always go through this process of adding a bunch of stuff to an outfit and then realizing, “Oh, wait. We need to respect what’s asking to be looked at, and then take away elements.” 

IVES: I have goosebumps for no reason, but that was amazing.

SCHAFER: The words of Dara.

IVES: I love it. I’ve done that where I’ve had a really amazing song and then I’ve just kind of destroyed it by adding and adding and trying to make it beautiful when it already was.

SCHAFER: What made you land on the name for this album?

IVES: I was thinking way too hard about it for so long.

SCHAFER: That just made me think of how daunting thinking of an album name would be.

IVES: I literally made a word cloud of all the lyrics and was like, “Okay, most used word. What’s the through line?”It’s like me kind of stripping myself down to one identity. I’m somebody’s girlfriend and I have a responsibility to them and I belong to them happily. Each song is from the perspective of me in somebody’s life.

SCHAFER: As their girlfriend.

IVES: Yeah, it’s just also so cute as a word. [Laughs]

SCHAFER: It’s really cute. I agree. 

IVES: It’s a cool word also because it’s kind of temporary, which is just interesting, especially as a name given to something because it will be over, and this album represents who I am right now. There’s something kind of sweet about the label of girlfriend, new and young.

SCHAFER: You allegedly worked some odd jobs before making it to musician. Did you learn anything that helped you on the other side as a musician diva?

IVES: Oh my god, I worked as a coat check at a venue, which was so hard for me. 

SCHAFER: It’s so hard.

IVES: I was a dog walker.

SCHAFER: Whoa.

IVES: And I said that I had a bike, but I didn’t. So I did it by scooter.

SCHAFER: You walked dogs while moving on a vehicle?

IVES: No, like to get from place to place. It was like East Williamsburg and then true Bushwick, and then it was straight out. The woman who was facilitating it, hired just by phone. I never met her, and she was like, “Why is it taking you so long?” I’m like, “Traffic. And it’s raining.” 

SCHAFER: Wait, Razor scooter or Bird scooter?

IVES: Razor scooter.

SCHAFER: Razor scooter, let’s go!

IVES: I worked in a restaurant for a while. By the end, I didn’t need a notepad or anything like that. And I think then I got frustrated with people because I wanted them to be uncomplicated, but then you realize that people are complicated.

SCHAFER: But that’s such a mature take for a service worker.

IVES: Well, I was exhausted and pissed. But it’s good to do good hard work. Sitting at home and making music is pretty romantic and makes it a little bit sweeter.

SCHAFER: Did you know early on that “Dance with Me” was going to be a centerpiece in the album? 

IVES: No. That’s one I was sitting on for a while, just had the guitar version of it. The chorus in my mumbling used to be like, “Why don’t you come home and finger me?” Which is, “Delete!”

SCHAFER: Kind of amazing. [Laughs]

IVES: I wasn’t ready. Now I’m like, “Okay, I could go there next time.” I didn’t really know what it would be while I was making it, and then it just turned into something electric and fun. I mean, it’s a song that says “dance” in it, so you want to do something in that world that–

SCHAFER: Feels alive.

IVES: Yeah, I’m happy where it ended up. It’s nice to talk to someone about sharing art and to think about the similarities is really exciting. I liked these past 30 minutes.

SCHAFER: Me too. I find the musician archetype really yummy.

IVES: I just want to hang out and talk to you, but I think we did it.

The post Grace Ives Tells Hunter Schafer Why She Loves Being Called Girlfriend appeared first on Interview Magazine.

All photos courtesy of Naomi Scott.

Despite having a mega career as a child star, Naomi Scott feels like she still needs to earn her stripes. At just 17 years old, the British actor and singer first won Gen Z over for her role as Mo in Disney Channel sleeper hit Lemonade Mouth. The film was regarded as High School Musical for outcasts and has lived on in cultural resonance since its premiere. Now, after a steady stream of Disney blockbusters like Aladdin and horror hits like Smile 2, Scott is ready to return to her first love, music. Her debut record F.I.G. is sexy, soulful, and sophisticated, but most importantly, it was created on her own timeline. While in Marrakesh on a top-secret project, Scott hopped on a Zoom call with her friend and fellow pop diva, Jessie Ware, who knows a thing or two about marching to the beat of her own drum. Below, the pair dish on budget music videos, The Bell Jar, and Scott’s reintroduction to the world.

———

JESSIE WARE: So, you’re in Marrakesh, but we’re not allowed to say why because you like to keep it exciting.

NAOMI SCOTT: You know me. I don’t like anyone knowing anything about me.

WARE: That’s what I love about you, Naomi. Can we talk about how the first time we met was at a Vogue BAFTA party?

SCOTT: Very bougie. These things are varying degrees of fun. Sometimes they’re amazing, sometimes they’re not.

WARE: And for me, who’s a person that likes to be in bed by 10 with my ashwagandha and magnesium—I’m there and everyone is rolling in and this beautiful girl just starts singing in my face. This is right after I’d accidentally spilled a bit of drink on Lily-Rose Depp, and she’d looked at me being like—

SCOTT: I need to clarify that I went up to Jessie like, “Oh, my gosh, it’s Jessie Ware.” It was a very inspirational moment for me. You can be in a room with lots of famous people, but when you have a personal connection to someone’s art, that’s a different thing. 

WARE: So, this beautiful, young, exciting thing is coming up to me. I was like, “This girl is unlike many other people that are usually at a fashion party and I like her.” And then we proceeded to get each other’s numbers and be in touch. From that moment where you were talking about wanting to make music, you’d be like, “Would you listen to something?” 

SCOTT: One hundred percent.

WARE: It was really beautiful to see. You were having this moment in the spotlight with Aladdin, but you decided to go, “Cool, I can act and I can do the beautiful cover girl things, but actually I really want to do music and I’m going to do it my own way.”

SCOTT: We can finish this interview, guys. I’m so good. [Laughs]

WARE: No, but I do need to ask you some questions. When did you get up and sing for the first time?

SCOTT: Oh, my gosh. This is like seven years old at church vibes. I grew up on gospel music. The albums that my mom would get me were from Mary Mary, Kirk Franklin, Kim Burrell, and all these amazing vocalists.

WARE: Is that how you learned to riff?

SCOTT: Yes, 100 percent. I’m sure you had this too where you just mimic. So that, in turn, starts to exercise your muscles. I had my first ever public performance at our church during summer. There was a vocal coach and I sang Aretha Franklin’s “Say a Little Prayer.” I was 11.

WARE: Did it go well?

SCOTT: Yes. I remember being like, “Oh, yeah, I can sing.” I always knew music was my first love and I always knew I wanted to pursue it. There was also a community event at the local Baptist church. And we had Kéllé Bryan coming who was in the band Eternal.

WARE: Oh my god.

SCOTT: And so I sang “If I Ain’t Got You” by Alicia Keys. Afterwards, Kéllé was like, “Do you know what? I have a little theater agency. I know you can act.” 

WARE: So Kéllé Bryan of Eternal got you into acting?

SCOTT: Correct. She was my first agent. She is the person who “discovered” me.

WARE: I love that. It makes so much sense. Your parents must have felt quite safe because she had faith and she was—

SCOTT: Exactly.

WARE: Can I ask you, are we calling it F.I.G, not F-I-G?

SCOTT: Correct. Yes, F.I.G.

WARE: But it’s got dots in it, hasn’t it?

SCOTT: Yeah, because the acronym is Fall Into Grace. Grace is my second name, so there’s a few meanings. Number one is the good old classic The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, which is basically the only novel that she wrote. 

WARE: Yeah.

SCOTT: So, it’s just before the pandemic, and I’m going through a 27-year-old life crisis. I got married young.

WARE: How old were you?

SCOTT: I was 21.

WARE: Oh, wow.

SCOTT: Yeah, I know. When I meet 21-year-olds now I’m mind-blown that I got married at that age.

WARE: No, but let’s talk about your gorgeous, charming, brilliant husband, who is fantastic.

SCOTT: He’s pretty sick.

WARE: We share that. We were both with our childhood sweethearts.

SCOTT: Exactly.

WARE: Does that make us weird people or does that make us true romantics?

SCOTT: There’s just no one way. This is what the album is about. What I came to realize was I hadn’t properly mourned the other versions of my life. And so although that doesn’t sound like the most romantic thing, it’s quite beautiful because it’s real. In the novel, the character has a dream and she’s sitting at the foot of this fig tree and all the figs represent different versions of her life. 

WARE: Wow.

SCOTT: And she was so fearful of making the wrong choice that all these figs plop to the ground and die as she starves to death. I just felt it so profoundly in this day and age. 

WARE: It’s interesting what you were saying about how everyone is mourning the loss of what they don’t have.

SCOTT: We’re all mourning that we can only be one human being.

WARE: Well, I’ll tell you what you do. When you feel like you’re mourning, maybe you get your husband to give you attention, you get James Norton to be a cowboy in your music video [Laughs].

SCOTT: Let’s go, “Ride”.

WARE: Have a day on a farm with him and then it’s quite fab. I want to ask you about F.I.G because it’s beautiful and so accomplished. You sent it to me about a year ago and I remember walking through New York listening to it.

SCOTT: It means I trust you, because obviously you know what it’s like when you’re sending music and you’re like, “Please don’t judge.”

WARE: You’ve done exactly what you set out to do, and that’s why you are such an interesting pop star. You don’t laude attention and press and you have this incredibly stable, beautiful family. You take risks in your sonics and your melodies and your words and you sound brilliant. Also, let’s talk about the fact that in every music video—you’re doing this independently, aren’t you?

SCOTT: Yes, which was very key.  We can get into that. This next music video, when I send it to you, I’m going to tell you how much it cost and you’ll literally be like, “What?”

WARE: Am I going to be jealous that you made it for so cheap?

SCOTT: Oh, yeah.

WARE: You’re very savvy. You have a production company with your husband, and maybe that’s why you and I understand each other. We try different things, we take risks.

SCOTT: 100 percent. Did you come up with that idea with James Norton being in “Ride”?

WARE: I basically wanted to objectify a really beautiful man. 

SCOTT: That was such a good choice as well. 

WARE: Thank you. It was all shot on film with Kodak. Because it’s quite like a filthy song, and so I wanted to elevate it in a cinematic way. Also, it’s The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, so I was like, “This needs to feel like a film.” But I didn’t actually think I was going to be in it as much as I was. I was like, “Yeah, you’re going to ride the horse and you’re going to look really hot.” But then there’s me with my finger in his gob. 

SCOTT: You know when you see your friend and you just sense them owning their sexiness? I just love it. A person becomes sexier when they’re feeling sexy.

WARE: I do feel sexy.

SCOTT: The way you came into this call with your boobs out. You were like, “I’m sorry. I’m in a fitting.”

WARE: I’m sorry. But my aspirin is on an ironing board, Babe. They’re not exactly bosoms. [Laughs]

SCOTT: Both of us, Babes.

WARE: But let’s talk about the album a bit more. You’ve funded this, you’ve done it your own way. It couldn’t be further from Princess Jasmine.

SCOTT:  I can’t see how it would’ve worked the other way. I directed “Cherry” is because I couldn’t afford a director. The “Gracie” music video, we shot on 35mm.

WARE: Is the one you shot on Ilford High Street?

SCOTT: Yes.

WARE: I was getting TikToks about being spotted. And you’re walking down doing your dance. 

SCOTT: Yeah, I’m getting weird. It’s weird dancing.

WARE: You are nailing it and everyone’s watching you, but you’re on a pedestrianized shopping street in Essex.

SCOTT: We didn’t have the budget to lock off the street. We got to lay a track down in Ilford because no one shoots in Ilford. I met my choreographer for the first time the day before, and just had to roll with it. But, sometimes limitations breed a creativity that brings freshness. Sometimes it’s harder when you have all the resources in the world. For example, with the “Cherry” video, my intention was nostalgia, summer, British—

WARE: Bend It Like Beckham.

SCOTT: Yes, it’s like pop star energy, but in a more organic context. That was my aim. 

WARE: Who were some of your inspirations, artist-wise?

SCOTT: Honestly, Dev [Hynes], big time. You can see that. I remember the “You’re Not Good Enough” music video and his choreography. You’re watching and it’s a little bit odd. It’s in the pocket, but the dancers aren’t perfect. And then you’ve got more fantasy-leaning stuff like Caroline Polachek, where it feels more luscious.

WARE: You gave me some Robyn on stage. You know how Robyn has that strut? I remember watching her at Pitchfork Festival in Paris a very long time ago, and she had everyone eating out the palm of her hand. It’s so infectious. When you were supporting Dev your set had that. You were unstoppable with your energy. Lots of people can go from acting to music and struggle with the stage presence and identity. But you knew who you were as an artist already because you’ve taken your time. 

SCOTT: You’re right. I’ve taken my fucking sweet time.

WARE: And then we think about your first gig when you did Lollapalooza in Chicago. You had a huge crowd. People are so ready for an artist like you, Naomi. And it’s just so exciting to see where you’re going to go.

SCOTT: Oh, wowza, this is so crazy for me. Jessie Ware saying all this.

WARE: Oh, shut up.

SCOTT: It’s like a dream come true. And a lot of these things you’re saying—right back at you. Do you ever feel pressure when you’re creating music to lean into something more commercial?

WARE: I used to. Before I had another avenue with the podcast, I had pressure. It was like, “I’m about to become a mother for the first time and I need to earn money. What’s the way to earn money? You need to have a commercial hit.” It actually doesn’t work like that because I never had the budget, and it compromised my work. 

SCOTT: Absolutely.

WARE: I love pop music and I love making things for everyone. But I don’t do “compromise” anymore. That’s been the most delicious, freeing thing. 

SCOTT: I agree. And the trust that you have between people who love you and love your music, you cannot fabricate.

WARE: Do you understand your audience yet? 

SCOTT: I’m definitely still discovering. One thing I noticed at Lolla was young people who watched this Disney Channel movie I did growing up called Lemonade Mouth. 

WARE: I’ve got to watch it later. The F.I.G version of High School Musical.

SCOTT: No, literally it was like the Disney Channel version of The Breakfast Club.

WARE: Oh, my god, this sounds amazing.

SCOTT: Honestly, it was sick. It didn’t go off and become High School Musical, but it has this cultural resonance for people who’ve watched it. There’s a song that my character sings in it called “She’s So Gone.” It’s a banger. Now people are  like, “You’re Mo from Lemonade Mouth.” They might’ve been an 11-year-old kid who loves that movie, and now they’re 20, 21, and they have a wide range of taste in music. They love pop and they’re fucking with what I’m doing. So, that was quite encouraging to me.

WARE: You sing that song in your set?

SCOTT: I sang it at Lollapalooza. It’s still super popular. 

WARE: That’s so brilliant. You’ve got to honor that, you with your nearly four million listens on Spotify. It’s beautiful.

SCOTT: And with the Lollapalooza,  there was this curiosity and I thought, “Please put me on a small stage.” I don’t mind. I genuinely feel so confident in who I think I am as an artist.

WARE: You want to earn your stripes. I know.

SCOTT: I don’t want to skip steps because there will be nothing underneath it to sustain it. What you’ve built is an actual sustainable project where it’s not just dependent on a song hitting.

WARE: Thanks, Babe. 

SCOTT: When you are performing, do you have this checklist of the things that are important to you in terms of, “This is my intention and what I want to achieve”?

WARE: Yeah, it’s changed. It was survival at the beginning. Now I’ve learned how to appreciate every moment and be generous and entertain the crowd and make them have the best night. But Naomi, you’re already creating that. I’m, what, a few albums ahead of you?

SCOTT: Just a few.

WARE: There’s a few lessons ahead, but you’re so ready to embrace your own beautiful fan base. I can’t wait to see the world that you create with your fans, because it is the best feeling in the world. And on that note, I bid you adieu. Have the best time in Marrakech.

SCOTT: You’re the absolute best. I love you so much.

The post Naomi Scott Tells Jessie Ware Why She’s Ready to Take the Stage appeared first on Interview Magazine.

If you’ve never stumbled down the rabbit hole of reaction channels, prepare yourself. Buried deep in YouTube’s endless scroll is a genre built on a starkly simple premise: watching someone else watch things. These creators are reacting to the latest album drops, new episodes, the movie everyone’s talking about. Sometimes they’re skipping to the good parts, or sitting with you through every minute of it. Surprisingly, the audiences tuning in aren’t a niche pocket of the internet. They’re massive, with individual channels racking up anywhere from 100 to 700 million views. Somewhere along the way, reaction content stopped being a curiosity and became a phenomenon, one thats caught the attention of the very artists being reacted to. Sabrina Carpenter, Rachel Zegler, The Weeknd and even Drake have all taken notice. To satisfy our curiosity about this booming corner of the internet, we sent a questionnaire to some of the biggest reaction channels right now.

———

ASHLEY IPPOLITO

YouTube: @urinternetmomash

Subscriber count: 838K

Photo courtesy of Ashley Ippolito.

Why do you think people watch reaction videos? 

We are the most connected we have ever been, yet also lonelier and more disengaged than ever. It’s so easy to get stuck doomscrolling or seeing countless opinions on topics that don’t even need to be addressed, and in those situations, we find comfort in the media that makes us happy. Whether it’s because you don’t know anyone close who likes the same thing as you or you want to know what a TV show is about without the commitment of watching all 10 episodes, the reaction space provides all of that.  

Is content creation your main source of income?

Right now, YouTube is my main source of income. My mom supported me financially and emotionally when my regular retail job was going out of business. I was trying to build up my YouTube career with only $200 a month paychecks. I’m so happy I took the risk and went for something I wanted.  Fun fact, reaction content does not make as much money as the average YouTuber does. I could have the same subscribers or engagement as someone who does lifestyle content, but they are more lucrative to brands and the algorithm. 

Which video did you get the most backlash from?

When I reacted to the show Yellowjackets. I said that the soccer coach was hot–which he was! Suddenly, I was accused of diminishing the sapphic relationships in the show and undermining everything that it stood for. The backlash was enough that I never finished the show, but maybe one day.

What is the toughest part of your job?

Staying current. My audience jokes that I am three months late to everything, but it’s not always entirely my fault. An audience member can sit down and watch an entire show in 6-10 hours, but that amount of time for me could only be used to edit maybe one or two episodes out of the series. In addition to the runtime of what I’m reacting to, making sure I follow copyright fair use laws adds to the final production time of a video. With the way media is consumed now, by the time I can get to something, I feel like everybody has already moved on to the next thing. 

What’s your favorite internet rabbit hole?

Anything to do with feuds or accidents that happened on movie sets and, of course, cat videos. 

How do you celebrate hitting follower milestones? 

I did have a drink and a night of relaxation when I hit 800k on tour, but I have started celebrating other milestones in my life more so than the numbers, like getting my new place, my cat’s first birthday, and my sister’s graduation. 

What’s one thing you refuse to react to?

Usually, I’d say no if I couldn’t put it on YouTube without getting in trouble. But honestly, I still try to find a way around that. Euphoria? Anora? Heated Rivalry? They’re all up on the channel with heavy edits and blurring. I do have to be strategic about what I post. There is a lot more planning and involvement than people think, especially once you have sponsors that want to have a say on what type of video their ad is placed on. That’s a whole other ballpark.

Has a celebrity noticed your videos before? 

When I attended Sabrina Carpenter’s Q&A session during her Emails I Can’t Send tour, the girl I was standing next to—who I became friends with that day—had the chance to ask Sabrina a question. When Sabrina saw me standing next to her, she said, “Oh my God, I watch your videos all the time. I had no idea you would be here.” Naturally, I blacked out in the moment.

A message to your haters?

I would be mad too if I saw someone thriving by doing something you do every Friday night on your couch for free. If anyone can do this and it’s so easy, pick up the camera! The internet is so vast and there is so much out there, don’t bother yourself with what I’m doing. 

———

ANTHONY FANTANO

YouTube: @theneedledrop

Subscriber count: 3.08M

Photo courtesy of Anthony Fantano.

Why do you think people watch reaction videos? 

I think there’s a lot of isolation and atomization going on in modern society currently, and as a result, experiences that you might be having together with a larger community are just no longer part of people’s routines. Watching another person who you sort of trust like a close friend, is kind of the closest we get back to that. I also think reactions and streaming in general are much quicker than turning in more formal content that’s methodically edited and combed over.

Is streaming your main source of income? 

No, it’s just kind of one of many irons in the fire that I have going on. Between Twitch, YouTube, Patreon, TikTok and ads, it all kind of comes together.

Which video did you get the most backlash from?

Probably my My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy review. Though, I’m still quite proud of having the position on that record and I have doubled or even tripled down on it multiple times.

What is the toughest part of your job?

Keeping my finger on the pulse of what’s happening. There’s so much music out there right now, and there’s so much happening all over the music world all at once that it’s kind of difficult to keep up with all of it.

What’s your favorite internet rabbit hole?

Any music-based rabbit hole. But my most recent favorite was Marcus the Worm from VRChat. 

How do you celebrate hitting follower milestones?

These days, I celebrate the length at which I’ve been able to continue to do this rather than the size of it. I never thought I’d get out of my basement doing this. I thought I would top out at a hundred thousand viewers and that’s it, but I’ve somehow garnered more than that. There are people who have had channels much larger than mine, but their career has only lasted half as mine.

What’s one thing you refuse to react to?

Pressure.

Has a celebrity noticed your videos before?

Yeah, Drake. He’s a big fan. He’s a really huge fan of what I do. He loves my reviews. He loves my stuff. He watches all my videos. He comments on all of them too.

A message to your haters?

I don’t know what I could say to the haters or what the haters could say to me that I haven’t heard a million times for the past 10+ years. They’re like, “You’re the worst thing. You’re wrong. You’re terrible. You’re an idiot. You got the worst taste in music.” And I’m just like, “Okay, I’m just going to keep making videos. Bye.”

———

TRIN LOVELL

YouTube: @lovelltrin

Subscriber count: 728k

Photo courtesy of Trin Lovell.

Why do you think people watch reaction videos? 

I believe that people watch reaction videos for the same reason I started creating them: Community, and shared interests in things that people in your life may not know about. Commentary videos also serve as this shared experience of watching together, similarly to mukbangs. The act of watching a movie with someone can bring comfort to many people. 

Is content creation your main source of income? 

Yes.

Which video did you get the most backlash from? 

Recently, Heated Rivalry.

What is the toughest part of your job? 

Probably working in a vacuum. I film, edit, and come up with most video concepts alone, and sometimes I feel like an echo chamber of myself. In those times, I need to put the laptop down and speak to some real people. 

What’s your favorite internet rabbit hole? 

Censorship laws within movies, and how the rating system was created and has evolved over time. I know, it’s thrilling. 

How do you celebrate hitting follower milestones? 

Honestly, just posting and celebrating with the audience. Sometimes, my parents would send me flowers, which is always so sweet.

What’s one thing you refuse to react to? 

Fifty Shades of Grey. I made it a rule when I was under 18 due to many people requesting it. Now that I’m older, I just carry on the rule for no reason other than because I said it on camera when I was 17. 

Has a celebrity noticed your videos before? 

Yes! I’m really lucky to have a friend in Rachel Zegler. We became friends before she made her film debut in West Side Story. She said that she found my Bring It On videos and then DMed me! So surreal, I can’t believe that happened.

A message to your haters? 

If I have the right to criticize and discuss movies and TV shows, they also have the right to criticize me.

———

HAMILTON TROY HAYES

YouTube: @hthaze

Subscriber count: 1.06M

Photo courtesy of Hamilton Troy Hayes.

Why do you think people watch reaction videos? 

Ever since COVID, I think people have become really lonely. I think people crave a kind of friendship where you used to be able to sit down and listen to an album or watch a movie with someone. It might be the feeling like you’re spending time with someone who is invested in the same thing as you.

Is streaming your main source of income? 

Streaming is not my main source of income. We actually donate every dollar from streaming to a different charity every month, along with funds from the Patreon too. But overall, we are solely funded by our Patreon community, The HT Hotties! I recommend Patreon to any creator with copyright issues like the ones I run into, because 99% of my YouTube videos on the channel are demonetized, and I’m still trying to have a career with something I love doing.

Which video did you get the most backlash from? 

Any Taylor Swift video is where you are going to find the most. But I don’t see backlash as a bad thing when we do get it; it is a necessary part of commentary! As long as comments aren’t attacking my character I say it’s fine.

What is the toughest part of your job? 

I’m a pretty emotional guy, so regulating my emotions and being a blank canvas for whatever we need to listen to that day is usually my first hurdle. Also, deciding between reacting to what is viral versus what I genuinely am interested in listening to can be tough. Though, being a YouTuber is genuinely pretty easy in the big scheme of it all.

What’s your favorite internet rabbit hole? 

Fire-arm safety! I’m really passionate about that right now. And D20. I’ve been binging all the Dropout shows, I’d love to be a guest someday.

How do you celebrate hitting follower milestones? 

When the channel hit a million subscribers, we had a little party with some friends and a cake. But now, I feel like hitting milestones should have some real-life thing behind it. Sometimes, a number is just a number. Seeing how my impact can affect our community positively is the “milestone” I try to hit nowadays.

What’s one thing you refuse to react to? 

Artists who are pedophiles or abusers and A.I. music. 

Has a celebrity noticed your videos before? 

Yes! Just to name a few, we have Sabrina Carpenter, Lady Gaga, Lizzy McAlpine, PinkPantheress, 5 Seconds of Summer, Role Model, Troye Sivan, Selena Gomez, Ariana Grande, Miley Cyrus, Lorde, Zara Larsson, Conan Gray, and Noah Kahan. The Tik Tok is very popular–shoutout to Leah, my assistant, who runs it.

A message to your haters? 

Smooches.

———

JON DENTON

YouTube: @jondenton

Subscriber count: 518K

Photo courtesy of Jon Denton.

Why do you think people watch reaction videos? 

There’s something innately human about watching someone react to something and connect with it. It’s essentially how we learn and evolve as a species, and these videos capture some of that human essence. If you think about it, so much reality TV focuses on reactions. Think of the judges and audience shots in American Idol. This is just an extension of that, dialed into very specific moments that people love or hate.

Is content creation your main source of income? 

It is. I’m very grateful that I’ve been able to do this full time since 2020. Before that, I was a video game reviewer and consultant, so I’ve been creating content in some manner for over 20 years.

Which video did you get the most backlash from? 

During the Kendrick [Lamar] and Drake rap beef in 2024, I had a lot of backlash from Drake fans, which continues to this day! It’s all good though, I like the energy. 

What is the toughest part of your job? 

Keeping a level head when a video underperforms or overperforms.

What’s your favorite internet rabbit hole?

Recently, conspiracy theories. Although I’d much rather just watch TheBurntPeanut clips. 

How do you celebrate hitting follower milestones?

I should really celebrate these things more. It’s important to take a breath and feel grateful for everything.

What’s one thing you refuse to react to?

I don’t refuse, but I don’t enjoy reacting to mediocre music. 

Has a celebrity noticed your videos before?

Many, and most famously, The Weeknd himself. It’s amazing what can happen when you put yourself out there! 

A message to your haters? 

I don’t care about them. 

———

GREGORY ALBA

YouTube: @thereelrejects

Subscriber count: 1.45M

Photo courtesy of Gregory Alba.

Why do you think people watch reaction videos?

Reaction videos tend to attract people who are already fans of the property because they want to see others experience certain moments. At the end of the day, these movies and shows always boil down to the emotional experience. I believe that a reactor’s job is not only to affirm a general consensus, but also to get in touch with their emotions and let it out, even if you happen to not like it. 

What is the toughest part of your job? 

I didn’t set out to start a business. I was just making videos hoping to get into the newspaper as a movie critic. It wasn’t until a year in when I learned you can make money doing this. Naturally, it became a job, and turning it off is the hardest part. The creator studio app is a business app but it’s more addictive than any social media app because it carries everything in one–views, business, and hell, even validation. From the second I wake up until I go to sleep, I’m usually doing some type of work for the channel. 

Is content creation your main source of income? 

Absolutely.

Which video did you get the most backlash from? 

We loved the first Wicked–it was our biggest movie reaction, and I was obsessed with it. Then, we did a reaction to Wicked: For Good, and we weren’t really fans of it. But like I said earlier, we’d mainly be attracting people who already loved the movie, and oh boy, our video was disliked. At the end of the day, we can’t let that stop us from being honest about our experience because it’s subjective. This idea that movies and shows can have an objective take is ridiculous. 

What’s your favorite internet rabbit hole? 

Watching people do drama videos about comedian podcasts. Outside of that, my usuals are movie essays, movie reviews, personal development videos, a lot of Conan O’Brien, and The Weekly Planet.

How do you celebrate hitting follower milestones? 

Honestly, we don’t really celebrate hitting follower milestones, but we should. We hit a million subscribers a couple years ago, and I still haven’t received our YouTube placard. I haven’t received an email about getting it either.

What’s one thing you refuse to react to? 

The Human Centipede 2. After watching the first one, which actually performed well for us, I just can’t sit through something even worse than that.

A message to your haters?

I hope you find ways to make your time more useful. My favorite haters are the ones who leave a mean comment on my YouTube video and then find my Instagram to send a message. Like, you gotta be the biggest loser with zero productive time to do that. Just leave it in the comments section.

The post These Creators Are Getting Rich Off Reaction Content While the Rest of Us Watch appeared first on Interview Magazine.

Xaviersobased, photographed by Demetri Demetropoulos.

If future cultural archeologists wonder how hip-hop turned into a distorted Soundcloud party in the 2020s, they should start with Upper West Side’s Xaviersobased. His debut album, Xavier, came out in January, the culmination of three years of underground work that turned millennials into the old heads that they swore they would never become. For every pristine melody the 22-year old churns out, there’s another moment where he’s determined to confuse, or even repel. To hell with the old heads, though. More than his underground aesthetics, Xavier’s ambition is obvious. The blockbuster potential jumps out on grandiose tracks like “iPhone 16” and “Wrk Wrk.” He’s also the total rejection of the hyper-capitalist, overly controlled, loner personas that once defined a rap star in the 2000s. In many ways, Xavier feels like the cool New York rap star that we haven’t had since the murder of Pop Smoke and losing A$AP Rocky to A24. He’s laconic, curious, community driven, but also aware of what it means to be a star. A few weeks ago, I met Xavier at a salon and we talked about his latest record, underground hip-hop, and what makes his music different from what came before.

———

BUFORD: One of the coolest things so far about your music for me is that it feels like a new movement, but it’s without the toxicity of a lot of the stuff that has gotten older in hip-hop. Would you agree with that? 

XAVIERSOBASED: I agree with that, but I feel like every movement comes with toxicity. Obviously not as much as other movements, but I definitely agree with what you’re saying. 

BUFORD: Where does that come from?

XAVIERSOBASED: Probably me feeling like I wasn’t accepted when I was younger, and that in turn made me want to make others feel accepted. 

BUFORD: Maybe toxicity was the wrong term, but it feels like your movement is ambitious, but also grounded in community. And that’s legitimately inspired me in a lot of ways. I became a little bit disillusioned with the hip hop scene in general. I think around 2023 I discovered your music, and it’s really brought me back in a lot of ways.

XAVIERSOBASED: Appreciate you. Yeah, that’s a great way to describe it though.

BUFORD: I think hip hop is a combination of a lot of different things. It’s both a really transgressive art, but it’s also rooted in love and community and peace. It also has a lot of different identity groups though. How have you added to that lineage?

XAVIERSOBASED: Just combining all the things I fuck with in my own way. Me and you probably both like totally different things about rap music. So I take the things that I like and form it into my thing. If you do the same thing, it’ll come my way differently. You know what I mean? I just take it from the things that I like and put it into my craft.

BUFORD: Yeah, absolutely. What do you think has made you so popular with the youth? Your music really just feels like it’s for them. But also, a lot of old heads don’t give you enough credit for the fact that your music is conceptual. I think they think your music is just for kids.

XAVIERSOBASED: One thing about that is a lot of my influences are very internet. A lot of people that aren’t internet heavy, like the old heads, don’t really get it. But once COVID hit and TikTok started popping, Bladee and all the underground shit started getting super popular because everybody was on the internet to find it so quick. So now more people understand where I’m coming from with my influences. 

BUFORD: Yeah, I think your music is definitely rooted in the internet scenes, but also I think your stuff always has a vignette style songwriting to it, and it’s really honest. I think about “Pediatrician”, which kind of reminded me of being at a dentist office on the Upper East Side when I was a kid.

XAVIERSOBASED: That’s so fire that you just said that though, because that’s literally the type of vibe we’re trying to invoke. I used to go to the pediatrician on the Upper West Side, on 96th and it was definitely a similar experience.

BUFORD: Mine was actually around the corner. I remember when I listened to “Pediatrician,” it brought me back to those days, like reading Sports Illustrated for kids, being bored and wishing I could get out of here. Some things don’t change, but also everything changes, right?

XAVIERSOBASED: Exactly. A lot of it is rooted in memories too, or rooted in personal experience and definitely a bunch of things that I used to listen to. Because obviously I’m from the streets, but a nigga wasn’t in the streets like that. So obviously a lot of songwriting is more about things I listen to, things I’ve seen, things I’ve been around. 

BUFORD: The record Xavier is really interesting because it really showcases your rap nerd intellect. And on “Wrk Wrk,” there’s kind of a little bit of Shawty Redd in there.

XAVIERSOBASED: Yeah, I can see what you’re saying. I definitely listened to a lot of Gucci [Mane] growing up and older artists like that, and I feel like a lot of it just seeps out when I rap. It’s not like an inherent like, “I’m going to be on this,” but I’ll damn near sing a bar from a song that I used to listen to years ago and not even realize, you know what I mean? 

BUFORD: Your opening line on the record is one of my favorite bars from you: “Yeah, this rap shit stress me out, but nigga, I don’t hate it.” It reminded me of something that an early Drake or early Lil B would say like, “I’m becoming a star, but I’m also emotionally intelligent enough to understand that with this comes a lot of stress and a lot of pressure.” What pressures come with that for you?

XAVIERSOBASED: It’s down to the little shit, like watching how I got to act around certain people because I know people trying to read me, trying to figure out what I got going on or like what I’m thinking in the exact moment. I try not to, but you tend to watch the things you post. You tend to over analyze your whole life. Because other people are over analyzing, so it’s like you try to compensate for that. That’s one of the biggest stresses.

BUFORD: I know what you mean. Because it’s like, “Okay, all eyes are on me now and that puts a kind of pressure on what you’re saying to the public.”

XAVIERSOBASED: Not even just to the public, but it goes all the way down to even day-to-day with family or with homies. I don’t know, like I might not get back to somebody and now niggas is like, “Man, what happened?” It’s like, “My bad. I was busy.” And I tend to overthink things like that too, because I don’t want people to think I’m on some fool shit.

BUFORD: Something that I can’t stand about detractors of New Gen SoundCloud, is that people talk about it as if it’s so different from some of the stuff that they grew up on, right? 

XAVIERSOBASED: I do feel like it’s different though, because the music reflects the state of the world, and the state of the world is different. It is the same concept of we just rapping about what we go through, though. But what we go through is way different than what they went through. You know what I mean? It’s the same idea of just different lived experiences.

BUFORD: You have a line on “iPhone 16,” where you say, “Being smart is hard, and ignorance is bliss.” What does that line mean to you? 

XAVIERSOBASED: I mean, I still got homies that’s on block type shit. Niggas that’s not into what I’m into. A lot of people are good at masking shit too though. It’s kind of like, when you’re not worried about it, you don’t know about it, then what is it you think about? 

BUFORD: I think when people have eclectic taste, when people have tastes that go just beyond whatever’s on the radio, I think also it can tend to become something that … I’m trying to say this in a way that’s diplomatic, but sometimes it becomes easier for these fucking white kids from the suburbs to enjoy it.

XAVIERSOBASED: These are facts. I mean, I keep all types of different people around me. So people see that and that I embrace all types of different people. Being with Ren, he’s Peruvian and Italian, and then you got fucking all the homies. We’ve got Ecuadorian, Dominican, Black, right? None of that ever mattered though. That’s what keeps all kinds of different people fucking with us though.

BUFORD: It reminds me of a time in New York that felt different than what it is now. My high school had a lot of Black and Brown kids and a few Italian and Irish sprinkled here and there. It was like a genuine, diverse coalition in a way. So what is it about New York for you that has helped you become Xaviersobased?

XAVIERSOBASED: The diversity. Like you said, my school was the exact same way and it’s like everyone was into all types of different things. I feel like I was kind of growing up in the start of the scam era, and the early drill era for New York, like 2017, 2018. So it’s a lot of different shit going on, you feel me? Having a Spanish family and then just being on the internet.

BUFORD: Yeah. I feel like it’s cliche at this point to bring up your mom and your brother, but I know they were very influential with you in terms of music. Being in a musical home like that, what’s the greatest memory of them helping you?

XAVIERSOBASED: Definitely just me and my brother, scrolling on the internet, scrolling on YouTube, watching shit. And my mom playing music in the house. These are my favorite memories for sure, as far as that goes.

BUFORD: What was some of the hip hop she was playing in the house, if anything?

XAVIERSOBASED: Just like regular shit, you feel me? Like 50 Cent, niggas like that. Who else though? Like fucking Kris Kross. There’s more people though.

BUFORD: Yeah. Kris Kross has a youthful energy that I think you have a little bit of.

XAVIERSOBASED: I fucked with them when they came out. Whenever my mom was playing it, they were snapping for sure.

BUFORD: When it comes to fashion, what have you been on lately? What is the best Xaviersobased fit?

XAVIERSOBASED: I mean shit, they see it. I’ve just been on a bunch of extreme sports vibes. I’ve been on the designer, but don’t get me wrong, I haven’t been too focused on the designer. But I’ve just been more against shit that I used to look at as a kid. I used to watch Danny & The Dingo and shit like that, like fuel TV shit and just things like that when I was growing up. That’s more of the type of vibe I’ve been on with fashion.

BUFORD: Facts. Growing up, was there a rapper whose fashion you were inspired by?

XAVIERSOBASED: The earliest ones were probably like A$AP [Rocky], Mac [Miller], Tyler [the Creator]. The Supreme came out. I mean when they was rocking the HBA, niggas was rocking. Just like that blog era type of swag. That was my first introduction to fashion. 

Xaviersobased, photographed by Jayson Buford.

BUFORD: I love the way [Chief] Keef looked because to me, he looked cool, but it was away from high end fashion stuff at the time. He was just in True Religion jeans.

XAVIERSOBASED: Somebody that was on that in their own way was Bladee. The way Bladee used to be swagging and dripping, and just the whole Drain Gang. And then it came more to Slay World and them. They were the first ones that I seen really doing the archive drip. Carti and them, and Ian [Connor] and all that was on them before that. But when I started looking at Weiland and Summrs, they was really rocking. Number Nine Mickey and Undercover Pants and shit like that. 

BUFORD: Hell yeah. I have crazy ADD, and I’m wondering how much of your music is based on the new generation and attention span?

XAVIERSOBASED: I’ve never been diagnosed, but I could say I’ve just always struggled with paying attention. Always just doing what I wanted to do. I couldn’t even fathom doing something I wouldn’t want to do, whether it’s going to school or just doing an assignment. It used to be a problem like, bro. I used to be crying when my parents would be helping me do the homework and shit. Everything was always an issue, but that definitely plays a big role in my music too, because you could hear it, bro. I got songs that really scratch that brain itch of just, shit is overly sped up and overly bass heavy for no reason. 

BUFORD: I think about “You See Me” It’s great to me because it’s kind of like a snippet as a song in a way. 

XAVIERSOBASED: That’s definitely why I make more faster songs too. But that’s also why this time around, I was challenging myself to make longer songs.

BUFORD: Why do you think it threw people off?

XAVIERSOBASED: Because, like you said, this generation. Everybody’s on the phone. Everybody’s giving themselves ADHD at this point. So it’s just like, you got to get with the times.

BUFORD: Do you ever feel any pressure to be the king of this new generation? 

XAVIERSOBASED: Hell no.

BUFORD: I think that’s cool, man. You don’t think selfishly, which I really noticed in your music. It’s so community based. I think that’s what makes you really a special artist too.

XAVIERSOBASED: I appreciate that.

The post New York Belongs to Xaviersobased appeared first on Interview Magazine.

All photos courtesy of Pamela Des Barres.

An evergreen teen dream, Miss Pamela Des Barres remains a cultural icon of the ’60s and ’70s for her torrid love affairs with rock legends like Mick Jagger, Jimmy Page, and Keith Moon. Naysayers dubbed her a groupie like it was a dirty word, yet she welcomed the title with open arms. “I’ve got the G word in my blood and it’s never going away,” Des Barres professed proudly over Zoom. Of course, we would be remiss if we didn’t highlight the fact that she was also a member of her own girl group, known as The GTOs, a traveling dance troupe often cited as being responsible for the iconic style of your favorite rock stars. For years, she’s been performing live readings of her memoir and groupie Bible I’m with the Band all over the country. Now the queen of the Sunset Strip is bringing her one-woman show to the Big Apple at The Cutting Room. Before she touched down in NYC, we hopped on a Zoom call with Des Barres to chat about romancing with Mick Jagger, the GTO girl code, and what it takes to be a groupie today. 

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ARY RUSSELL: The last time that we spoke, you said that you were going to be in Albuquerque. How was everything?

PAMELA DES BARRES: It was wonderful. I travel a lot. I’ve been doing workshops all over the country.

RUSSELL: What’s your favorite part about doing these shows?

DES BARRES: Sharing my former reality. It seems like a myth to a lot of younger people who weren’t able to be in the thick of the musical, sexual, and spiritual renaissance of the ’60s and early ’70s. This book personifies that era in a way that I didn’t think of when I wrote it. 

RUSSELL: Do you ever have girls coming up to you with similar stories?

DES BARRES: Yes. Groupies always love me, and they want to entrust me with their experiences. I get tons of messages from people I don’t know regarding their wild antics with musicians. 

RUSSELL: I re-read your book for the third time. I first asked for it for Christmas when I was 16. I’ve always considered myself a fangirl, but felt like a weirdo because my parents could not understand why I’d get so obsessed. So, when I read your book for the first time, I was able to say, “I’m not a freak. There’s someone who understands.”

DES BARRES: I’ve had a lot of that response. Because groupie is a state of mind, people think it’s all about sex, which of course—

RUSSELL: It can be.

DES BARRES: If you’re lucky. Groupies are usually a certain age and all our hormones were popping. I was only 14 when The Beatles happened, and no one understood what was going on there. Elvis [Presley] too. All my walls were covered with their photos, and I’d never stopped. I had many rituals I had to do, or I’d never meet Paul [McCartney]. 

RUSSELL: You were very bold for your age, sneaking onto The Beatles’ property or following Mick Jagger to his hotel. Was there ever a moment where you thought, “Okay, I’m taking it a little too far”?

DES BARRES: No. I wanted to take it further. And of course, when I came across Jim Morrison, I did. But it was very different in the mid to late-’60s. We were coming out of the ’50s and men didn’t expect you to drop your drawers for them immediately. I never went all the way until I was 19 and a half with Nick St. Nicholas, another bass player. My first three lovers were bass players. 

RUSSELL: It’s one of those things where you never want to live with regret. 

DES BARRES: “I wish I’d done that.” I was early on in the scene. It was just good timing and I was close enough to the Sunset Strip to get there by hook or by crook. People think that because I was a groupie all I wanted to do is fuck rock stars. I had tons of goals and it was because my mom gave me such a great foundation and believed in me that I remained safe in that scene when a lot of people went too far with drugs and alcohol and sex.

RUSSELL: You knew your limit.

DES BARRES: I had a love foundation, the love-ins, the closeness that people had with each other. The GTOs [Girls Together Outrageously], my girl band, were crazy about each other. I didn’t have sex with any of them, but a couple of them did with each other. 

RUSSELL: I loved reading about the camaraderie that you had with The GTOs. When you’re mixing the hormones with these goo-goo-gaga rock stars, how did you stay strong in that camaraderie? Were there moments where multiple girls were interested in the same rock star?

DES BARRES: Not The GTOs. We were real careful about who we got crushes on. We were more important to each other than the musicians were, especially when Frank [Zappa] turned us into a group and we thought we were going to be world famous, like our rock star friends. That didn’t happen, of course, but it was a real magical time. For people to judge me and anyone from that era who had a blast, I feel sorry for them that they didn’t get to do all that stuff.

RUSSELL: They missed out. 

DES BARRES: It was so much fun. Of course, my heart got broken horribly by Jimmy Page, but a lot of it was just romping and fun like with Mick Jagger. I knew I was not going to land him. 

RUSSELL: Oh, Mick Jagger…

DES BARRES: He was my first sexual crush. I was the right age to go, “Oh, my god. What’s going on down there?” when listening to his music. Actually, I had to fight him off for a while because I was in love with Jimmy Page. I thought he was being true to me on the road, which was ridiculous. But I was an innocent 20-year-old, and I learned a lot with Jimmy. He was crazy about me. 

RUSSELL: Were there any situations that now that you’ve gotten older, you’ve begun to look at differently?

DES BARRES: I didn’t know when I first decided to do these one-woman shows that people would laugh as much as they do. So, I dig a little deeper into it, and a lot of it is very funny. There were some deadly, tragic times, too. I do read a lot about Gram [Parsons], because he was my favorite all-time singer. So, there’s a lot of sweetness to it too, even though we lost him at 26. 

RUSSELL: It’s one thing when your idol that you’ve never met dies.

DES BARRES: Yes. 

RUSSELL: It’s another thing if you knew them. What was it like to get the news, “Jim Morrison died. I spent the night with this amazing person”?

DES BARRES: It was horrible. That’s the downside, the drug side, which I was not addicted to. But I fell for the addictive people, because my dad had that quality. It was addiction that brought a lot of these people down and we didn’t know how deadly it could be at that point. Gram didn’t mean to die at all, and neither did Jim Morrison or Jimi Hendrix or Janis Joplin. Brian Jones got murdered, but I don’t think he would’ve lived much longer anyway. [Laughs]

RUSSELL: A lot of people see groupies as one thing. They’re there to fulfill the sexual appetite of these rock stars. But you are doing a lot of emotional labor for these guys. And then also, culturally, you’re influencing their fashion.

DES BARRES: Oh, totally. We gave as much as we got. Sometimes the other way around. We put so much into these people and spent a lot of time with them, especially the Brits. They would come over here and be bored to death. In those days, you could tell your wife you were going to Utah but they would always come right back to L.A. after the show. The Stones, when I was hanging out with Mick, recorded their album here for six weeks.

RUSSELL: Yes.

DES BARRES: They loved being here, and it was an equal exchange. And a lot of times, I wasn’t a groupie, like for Gram. I babysat his daughter. I just loved the music. So, it goes beyond the word “groupie” a lot of times when you’re spending time with musicians. That was family to me.

RUSSELL: Even the title I’m with the Band indicates, “I’m in a place I’m supposed to be. I belong here.”

DES BARRES: That’s true.

RUSSELL: You were also making these shirts that were being worn by these rock stars who were seen as style icons. 

DES BARRES: Oh, yeah. Jimmy Page put one of the shirts I made him in his photo book, my pink and white velvet 3-foot fringe shirt. But did he give me credit? No.

RUSSELL: A slight oversight. [Laughs]

DES BARRES: Yeah, right. [Laughs] We were very influential and close with these people. They would come to town and we took them shopping. There was only one vintage store in LA at the time and Nudie’s with Rodeo Tailor.

RUSSELL: Were there any rock stars that were completely different from the persona that they shared with the world?

DES BARRES: I mean, Mick was very funny and incredibly self-deprecating. So was Robert Plant. They were amused by the whole thing. Jimmy Page took it a lot more seriously.

RUSSELL: Do you think that your desire to be around famous people truly stemmed from your desire to be famous yourself? 

DES BARRES: Well, a lot of the bands I loved were not necessarily famous. I never, ever liked them because they were famous. It was the music that I loved. When I was seeing Jim Morrison, the first album wasn’t even out yet. I just wanted to be around these creative people.

RUSSELL: To be inspired. 

DES BARRES: I wanted to be an actor for quite a while and then when The GTOs started, I thought, “Oh, boy. Now, I’m in a band myself.” We opened for Alice Cooper at the Whiskey [a Go Go] and Miss Christine, one of The GTOs and his girlfriend, did his makeup.

RUSSELL: I remember reading that.

DES BARRES: Even in his fabulous documentary, Super Duper Alice Cooper, he gives us credit for their look. We put them in skirts.

RUSSELL: Which is crazy, because it’s almost like we’ve gone backwards. If you put a guy in a skirt today, it’s a whole hoopla. 

DES BARRES: The androgyny started really with the Brits. Mick was androgynous, and The Beatles started it with their long hair. We, as females, felt more comfortable with these androgynous guys.

RUSSELL: Because it was a level of being less threatening?

DES BARRES: I guess so. I mean, I always felt heightened when I was spending time with my favorite musicians, my boyfriends. But there were other times, like with Keith Moon, where I had to take care of him. He would be bipolar now, and there’d be medication for it. There wasn’t then. 

RUSSELL: You were playing doctor?

DES BARRES: I was literally a nurse with him. He’d wake up screaming and I’d have to give him another Placidyl. I felt bad for Monika Dannemann, the girl who gave Jimi Hendrix the dose that killed him, because I was doing that too.

RUSSELL: And you had no idea.

DES BARRES: She didn’t know she was giving him too much medication. I got to spend a lot of time with her before she gassed herself. She never got over killing Jimi Hendrix.

RUSSELL: I mean, that’s part of the emotional investment when these people are no longer just an idol, but they’re part of your life. 

DES BARRES: The further we get away from it, it’s going to be even more mythologized because it’s an incredibly unique time, never to come again. I’m with the Band, it’ll be 40 years since it came out next year. I think it will continue to sell long after I’m gone. My spiritual teacher told me my real fame would come after I’m gone. Then she went, “Oops. I probably shouldn’t have said that.” [Laughs]

RUSSELL: Going back to the solidarity that you had with The GTOs and the other women, I also found it a little cheeky when Lori Lightning [Mattix] and Sable Starr make a little cameo in the book.

DES BARRES: They were so mean. Lori was never mean, but Sable was really mean. Lori was just this innocent goofball because she was a kid. They were 14 years old. I didn’t see it that way then, though. I mean, Loretta Lynn got married and had her baby by 14. 

RUSSELL: You settled down earlier.

DES BARRES: Now, it’s viewed in a whole different light and should be. People glom onto that part of the book and say, “Oh, Jimmy’s left you for Lori.” That’s not what happened. He left me when he met Charlotte [Martin] on his birthday. Then he came back to town, and we had a tryst. I expected to see him the following night, too and that’s when he took Lori home. He had so many affairs after that. But Lori wasn’t aware of any of that. So, I wasn’t angry at her, but Sable was always mean to me.

RUSSELL: How did it feel seeing as you were the pioneer? 

DES BARRES: They didn’t see me that way. I was 23. I was too old.

RUSSELL: If you could’ve gone back, would you have said anything to Sable?

DES BARRES: I’m a lover, not a fighter. 

RUSSELL: There was a moment in your book where you were questioning, “Why can’t I settle down with an engineer or a CPA?” To come from being with these creatives to then go with an engineer, would you have even been satisfied?

DES BARRES: I couldn’t have done it. And the people I’ve dated since Michael [Des Barres] have only been creatives. My last boyfriend, Mike Stinson, is a brilliant singer-songwriter. We were together for five years. My last two true loves were both 20 years younger than me. I have a very youthful spirit.

RUSSELL: You’re someone who’s so evergreen. You’ll never go out of style. 

DES BARRES: Oh, thank you. Please write that. [Laughs]

RUSSELL: Is there a star now that you think has the same level of fandom and impact?

DES BARRES: Harry Styles. And maybe the Jonas Brothers for a while there, and One Direction. Now, thank god, it’s a lot of women in the Top 10. I just wish they were saying something more important. It’s all about love and heartbreak for the most part. [Bob] Dylan and Leonard Cohen came along and changed that. That’s why I always call myself a lyric whore.

RUSSELL: Is there someone you wish you’d had the chance to have a love affair with?

DES BARRES: Prince. I know it would’ve been brief. But man, I would’ve loved to get my hands on him. Oh, what a loss. And of course, Paul.

RUSSELL: I was going to ask, “Are the feelings for Paul still fresh and never-ending?”

DES BARRES: Absolutely. I still get crazy about people. It’s just in my DNA. I’ve got the G word in my blood, and it’s never going away.

RUSSELL: On top of re-reading your book, I was also reading your two stories in Interview. You talked about how there’s no more backstage and how the relationship between the musician and the public has changed. I don’t think anyone could ever do what you did. What do you think happened?

DES BARRES: They can do what I did, but with bands that haven’t been discovered yet. One of my dolls, I call my writers my dolls, her daughter is a big groupie, and they meet on Instagram and TikTok.

RUSSELL: Yeah.

DES BARRES: They slide into each other’s DMs, a term I can’t imagine I’d ever say, but that’s how they meet. [Laughs] The guy in The Strokes—

RUSSELL: Oh, Julian Casablancas. 

DES BARRES: He’s very naughty online and slides into many DMs.

RUSSELL: I’ve heard the stories. For the young girls who want to live the groupie life today, what advice would you give them for getting a rock star’s attention?

DES BARRES: Well, you have to start in whatever city you’re in. Go to local clubs, find a band you love, and start there. That’s the only way to do it now. There’s certainly no way to go backstage at a massive concert anymore. Or become a journalist, like you. After I’m with the Band came out, I was a journalist for many magazines, and that’s how I met them. So, what you’re doing is the right way.

RUSSELL: I had a feeling. [Laughs]

The post How Pamela Des Barres Became Queen of the Groupies appeared first on Interview Magazine.

Photo courtesy of María Isabel.

Welcome to SOUND ADVICE, Interview’s weekly destination for playlists curated by our friends, enemies, and lovers. In recent weeks, we’ve featured playlists from Zach Fox, Danny L. Harle, and Organ Tapes. This week’s installment comes from María Isabel—the Queens-raised, Dominican-American singer-songwriter turning soul-baring R&B into something sexy, unapologetic, and a little bit dembow. Ahead of her March 6 single, “Suiza,” produced by El Guincho, she built us a playlist that sounds like all her favorite Queens influences rolled into on e: merengue and Mobb Deep, Aaliyah and Aventura romance, “dancing at home in your underwear with the stereo on TEN.” It’s tender, devotional, and just dramatic enough to make you print out the lyrics like it’s 2004.

———

You were born in Flushing, Queens. Describe its sound. And raised in Corona. Queens sounds like Merengue and Mobb Deep. Like Alicia Keys and Aventura. But mostly the ice cream truck. 

What are you first drawn to in a song? Lyrics! I love words <3 AZ lyrics and a printer used to hate to see me coming as a kid. I like having the lyrics the first time I listen to a song. 

Favorite workout class in NYC? Hot pilates with Alex at Practice Room in Williamsburg. 

How do you start your day and end your night? I start my day with an instant hit of dopamine from my phone and a cup of lemon ginger tea. I end my night with a book and another cup of lemon ginger tea. 

What’s the best medicine? Girl time. Giggling. French fries. Sweating. Dancing at home in your underwear with the stereo on TEN. 

Do you believe in God? I’ve seen too many miracles to not. 

Dream collaboration? Aventura.

Do you keep secrets? I never kiss and tell. 

How do you avoid burnout in the studio? I think the best way to do that is to have fun and try not to take it all so seriously. 

What energy are you bringing in 2026? I’m going into 2026 like I’ve got nothing to lose and everything to give. 

Describe your new album in three words: Sexy. Unapologetic. Romantic. 

The post “I Never Kiss and Tell”: María Isabel Made Us A Spicy Playlist appeared first on Interview Magazine.

Mariah the Scientist, photographed by Jayson Alexander.

Minutes after Mariah the Scientist concluded her sold-out show at Radio City Music Hall, the 27-year-old Atlanta-born shapeshifter was still wired, having dashed back onstage at 10:57 PM to squeeze in half of “No More Entertainers” before curfew fines kicked in. In a custom SEKS toy soldier look and sky-high customized Versace heels, she pinballed through rock, R&B, pop, and blues, less interested in genre than momentum. When we met backstage, flowers from her rider lined the dressing room, her Bengal cat Mr. Tootie awaited his traveling litter box, and her entire family—sister managing, cousin assisting, parents omnipresent—hovered like a well-oiled entourage. Fresh off her Rising Star win at Billboard’s Women in Music (which she’ll officially receive in April,) we talked zodiac signs, EOS-scented meet-and-greets, and mozzarella sticks as post-show salvation. As for the industry’s sudden embrace? She shrugged. “I guess we’re going up.”

———

MARIAH THE SCIENTIST: How are you?

OLAMIDE OYENUSI: I’m good. You were so good. You gave us every genre—rock, R&B, pop, blues.

MARIAH: Thank you. I’m so glad people came to see that.

OYENUSI: And for our readers, where are we right now?

MARIAH: We’re inside Radio City Music Hall’s dressing room.

OYENUSI: Period.

MARIAH: And my dad keeps saying, “Can you believe that Beyoncé and Diana Ross probably got ready in here before?” I was like, “My gosh, I can’t believe it.”

OYENUSI: And what are you wearing tonight?

MARIAH: I am wearing a custom Toy Soldier outfit from SEKS. They’re so great. They also made the original green one.

OYENUSI: And the shoes?

MARIAH: These shoes, I believe, are Versace. They’ve been customized.

OYENUSI: They match really well. How’s the tour been going so far?

MARIAH: Pretty good. It’s cold outside—a winter tour—but it’s okay. People are just showing up, they don’t even care. It literally has been snowing outside and they still come. I just feel like this crowd is a different breed.

OYENUSI: Has there been a particular memorable show so far?

MARIAH:  Well, on this tour, this one has been maybe the best so far. And then this year, I really enjoyed South Africa. We’ve got to go back over there. It was freaking lit.

OYENUSI: Hit Nigeria next.

MARIAH: I know, right? That’s great.

OYENUSI: Is there a particular location that you’re especially excited for?

MARIAH: Atlanta, always. Always excited to go back home.

OYENUSI: Who do you bring with you on tour?

MARIAH: Well, my entire family is present, or at least that’s what it seems like. My sister, my mom, my dad, my cousin. Well, my sister is my manager, and my cousin is my assistant. [Laughs] My parents insisted on coming on tour with me and it’s lit. 

OYENUSI: What’s the first thing you did when you got to New York?

MARIAH: Slept.

OYENUSI: Fair.

MARIAH: Immediately.

OYENUSI: [Laughs] Do you have any pre-show rituals?

MARIAH: Doing some warmups and drinking tea. Otherwise, I’m never a tea drinker, but when it comes to doing shows, I have compromised and sacrificed my preferences. I have definitely had enough Throat Coat for multiple lifetimes. [Laughs]

OYENUSI: And what’s on your tour rider? 

MARIAH: I love to be greeted with flowers in every room. I also have water, fruit. I’m on mangoes these days. And a litter box and cat litter because I bring my cat everywhere. I wish he was in this room right now.

OYENUSI: What’s your cat’s name?

MARIAH: His name is Mr. Tootie. He’s a Bengal.

OYENUSI: I have a cat named Dorito.

MARIAH: Oh, cute. What does she look like? 

OYENUSI: She’s black, orange, and white—a tortico. What is your guilty post-show meal?

MARIAH: Mozzarella sticks. Anything cheesy—macaroni and cheese. I don’t like to do it before the show because I’ll be more congested.

Mariah the Scientist, photographed by Jalen Jones.

OYENUSI: What do you try to avoid before a show?

MARIAH: I try to avoid drinking any alcohol because I feel like it has a real effect on me. Or anything fried, anything dairy—I just try to not do that until later, maybe.

OYENUSI: That’s interesting, because I know a lot of people like to go on stage with a little something in their system. You like it sober?

MARIAH: I know. I gave it up for Lent, too, as well. I’ve been doing my shows sober. One of my fantasies is to do one of my shows just out of my mind, but I don’t want to compromise the integrity of the show. So it would have to be an experiment, for sure.

OYENUSI: Good thing you’re The Scientist. You just won Billboard’s Women in Music Rising Star award. Congratulations.

MARIAH: Thank you.

OYENUSI: When you hear “Rising Star,” what does that mean to you?

THE SCIENTIST: I guess we’re going up. I guess that’s what that means. I feel like they’re finally digesting my presence.

OYENUSI: Has that recognition changed how you see yourself?

MARIAH: I can’t say that it has. In terms of my fans showing up and singing my lyrics and stuff like that, that makes me feel more on an understood level. But not necessarily how I’m perceived by the masses. I wouldn’t say that I was really super into impressing them on that level. I feel like it’s more about the art.

OYENUSI: Good for you. What’s your sign?

MARIAH: I’m a Scorpio.

OYENUSI: What’s the most Scorpio thing about you?

MARIAH: Let’s ask my sister. What’s the most Scorpio thing about me? She’s really into the science. 

MORGAN BUCKLES: Mariah’s like a cat in the way that she shows affection. Scorpios are not the most willing to embrace.

MARIAH: Yes, I am. Give me a hug. [Hugs]

OYENUSI: [Hugs] No, but as a Capricorn—I get it. This is why, as a Capricorn, I really like Scorpios.

BUCKLES: If I say up, Mariah’s jumping down for sure. But no—like a cat in the sense that they’ll look at you and they want attention, but if you touch them or give them attention, it’s like, “Get away from me.”

MARIAH: I feel like as soon as you’ve stepped out of the room, though, your cat becomes a different cat. They don’t have such strict standards when you’re not in the room. They’re giving it out.

OYENUSI: [Laughs] What’s the most unglamorous part of touring?

MARIAH: The lack of sleep.

OYENUSI: How many hours do you get on average?

MARIAH: The show’s over at 11:00. Then you try to eat something in between, if you have any time. But there are lots of people who come and you want to be gracious of them and their time. So you have to see your entire family, see your friends, see all work associates, try to get some food in your system, maybe go to a hosting, try to take a shower, then try to get on the bus on time. And then drive to the next place.

Mariah the Scientist, photographed by Jayson Alexander.

OYENUSI: Where are you going next?

MARIAH: Boston, which means that when I get on the bus at maybe 3:30 or 4:00 (AM), I’m going to drive for a few hours and then they’re going to wake me back up. That’s how they do it.

OYENUSI: Do they make you pay to use the bathroom on your tour bus?

MARIAH: Well, we have a rule: no shitting on the bus. It’s a real violation.

OYENUSI: [Laughs] What’s your favorite song to perform on tour?

MARIAH: Currently, it’s “No More Entertainers.” And they cut it out of my set tonight because they said that Radio City Music Hall has a really strict curfew. So I tried not to rush, but I tried to do the last two songs and then when I got off, it was 10:57. So I ran back out there to try to do half of the song before they fined me.

OYENUSI: If you could sneak one song from your previous albums into this set without your team knowing, what would it be? 

MARIAH: It’s probably already in there. I’ve got some good ones.

OYENUSI: You really did take us through all of the genres.

MARIAH: I’m glad that you felt that way. It makes me feel seen. I pushed it up on them, right?

OYENUSI: You did. Everyone’s always like, “R&B, R&B.”Enough of this strict R&B categorization.

MARIAH: I know. Thank you.

OYENUSI: Do you have a dream cover or collab for a future New York show?

MARIAH: This is a good question. Let me dig deep in my bag. I probably wouldn’t make the attempt because I don’t want to ruin the classics, but I probably would pick something by Faith Evans to cover. She’s a New Yorker. And then if I had to pick somebody to collaborate with: Mariah Carey.

OYENUSI: Mariah squared. When I was walking here, some old man was like, “Is Mariah Carey on?” I was like, “Nah.”

MARIAH: [Laughs] That would be great. I just love Mariah Carey. Faith Evans and Mariah Carey both have blonde hair. Do I need to move into my blonde-hair era for the one time? Maybe I will.

OYENUSI: You should. What’s a hidden talent that you have that no one knows about?

MARIAH: My eyelashes are kind of sliding down, but I do my makeup every night. Check my wing out.

OYENUSI: Drop the tutorial. 

MARIAH: You should, ‘cause your skin is literally so amazing.

OYENUSI: Korean skincare, I’m telling you. It’s so good.

MARIAH: It’s really amazing. You have not a single pore.

OYENUSI: Thank you so much. If this tour had a perfume, what would it smell like?

MARIAH: I do have a favorite perfume, but sometimes it changes. The one I’ve been wearing recently—it’s the EOS perfume. It’s a spray, actually. 

OYENUSI: I remember growing up, they had those circle lip balms.

MARIAH: I know, right? In the ball.

OYENUSI: Yeah. When you look back on the Hearts Sold Separately tour, what’s one image you hope never leaves your brain?

MARIAH: This is a good question. Maybe just the idea of my entire team as a little clique. I feel like everybody’s very close, and everybody does their job very effectively. And I just love that. They’re like my friends.

OYENUSI: And family.

MARIAH: Exactly.

The post The Stars Are Aligning For Mariah the Scientist appeared first on Interview Magazine.

Photos courtesy of Zach Fox.

Welcome to SOUND ADVICE, Interview’s weekly destination for playlists curated by our friends, enemies, and lovers. In recent weeks, we’ve featured playlists from Danny L Harle, Organ Tapes, and August Ponthier. This week’s installment belongs to Zack Fox—the Atlanta-born comedian-rapper-actor-DJ-producer and certified agent of chaos whose brain runs on punchlines, prophecies, and three cans of Celsius. Ahead of his set at Skyline Festival, a three-day ode to L.A.’s underground electronic scene taking over the city from February 28th to March 1st, Fox assembled a playlist for the end times: part Sunday sermon, part basement sweat, part Abbott Elementary staff party. It’s funny, filthy, and just spiritual enough to make you text your mom.

———

Where do you dance? Literally everywhere. Might hit my two step in TSA. 

Which song on this playlist makes you cry? “Pressing On” by Vanessa Bell Armstrong. I remember my mom playing it on cassette when I was a little kid and just thought it was groovy; whole time it’s a working-class single mother struggle banger. 

Dream collab, living or dead? If I don’t get to act alongside Regina Hall, I’ve failed. 

Name an underground artist that you wish more people knew about: Whu Else. His music is so camp and fresh and funny but oddly poignant. 

Which song on this playlist would the students of Abbott Elementary enjoy the most? “Ghetto Life” by Rick James, because they’re cultured and cool beyond their years.

What are you ordering from In & Out? Nothing. We eat burgers from the Win-Dow in my household. Love their outfits though! Beautiful gowns.

Which song on this playlist do you sing the loudest in the shower? It’s not on this playlist but it’s that song that’s like, “Rest in peace my granny she got hit by a bazooka…”

The world is ending. What are you wearing? The fit Eddie Murphy had on in Raw.

Which song on this playlist do you wish you wrote? “That’s What I Want” by Shake aka Anthony Shakir. He sampled “Mesopotamia” by The B-52s and it’s so simple but effective. And hard as hell.

Best TV sitcom of all time? My Wife and Kids. No contest. 

East Coast or West Coast? I love Los Angeles but the East Coast is home forever. 

Three things you need with you in the studio: Three cans of Celsius.

Drop your all-time favorite dad joke: “I don’t know what HD is but I went to the doctor and she said I got 80 of them bitches.”

The post Part Sweat, Part Sermon: <i>Abbott Elementary’s</i> Zack Fox Made Us a Playlist appeared first on Interview Magazine.

Hilary Duff wears Corset Stylist’s Own. Top and Shorts Area.

Hilary Duff survived the noughties teen dream: the Disney machine, the arena tour grind, the US Weekly feeding frenzy. Since then, the former Lizzie McGuire star has kept busy with seven seasons as a millennial girlboss on Younger and four kids off-screen. Now she’s putting those experiences on the record with her comeback album, luck… or something, co-written with her husband Matthew Koma. As she tells her drinking buddy Dakota Fanning, it’s pop with perspective, made for the fans who’ve grown up with her, watching her normal-ish life from the sidelines.

———

TUESDAY 9:45 AM DECEMBER 16, 2025 LA

HILARY DUFF: [Laughs] Wow. This feels reckless.

DAKOTA FANNING: This is dangerous.

DUFF: It’s also 9:45 in the morning.

FANNING: [Laughs] I was going to say, the first time I heard some of these songs was when we stayed up til five in the morning. We’re not allowed to hang out anymore unsupervised.

DUFF: Right. We haven’t been left to our own devices since that night. It’ll happen again, it’s an annual occurrence.

FANNING: For sure. How are you?

DUFF: I’m okay. I had a lot of anxiety at 2:00am because making Christmas magical for kids and prepping a tour is a lot. But I’m okay.

FANNING: You haven’t had to do it with this many kids before. [Laughs]

DUFF: With any kids. I feel like a deadbeat, but I know I’m not.

FANNING: You’re not.

DUFF: I actually love kids and that’s why I had so many of them.

FANNING: Yeah.

DUFF: I’m also obsessed with leaving them and working, but the guilt is super thick.

FANNING: Are your kids listening to the album?

DUFF: They are. They know all the words. It’s really cute. I actually have to tell them my Dropbox isn’t working sometimes.

FANNING: Because you can’t listen to it anymore.

DUFF: Yeah. They’re like, “Can we listen to mommy’s songs?” I’m like, “Oh my god. That’s so sweet you’re not choosing Sabrina Carpenter.”

FANNING: [Laughs] Obviously you’re doing this for you and it’s so truly you, but it must also be so exciting to have them be a part of it and go to the shows.

DUFF: My son is 13 and I know he’s really proud of me because he actually tells me sometimes. But he might also be embarrassed because his friends might see something on the internet about me, nothing bad, but I just did this Dunkin’ Donuts thing and I’m assuming he’s probably like, “That’s my mom and that’s not very cool.” But the girls think I’m so cool.

Dress Coach. Bra Zana Bayne. Underwear Wolford. Bracelet Aslan World. Shoes René Caovilla.

FANNING: [Laughs]

DUFF: They’re like little cheerleaders. They’re so excited to watch me perform. Even though the subject matter’s not about my kids, because of who I am and how I process what I’ve gone through becoming a mother, they feel a part of this record even though I’m not singing about carpooling. [Laughs]

FANNING: Of course. I was getting ready the other night and I listened to it start to finish, and I just loved it so much. And knowing you—I think we should also tell the people how we became friends.

DUFF: Yes.

FANNING: We started taking tennis lessons together.

DUFF: Well, you were already an amazing tennis player.

FANNING: Please. I never became an amazing tennis player.

DUFF: You’re good at everything you do, Dakota. And then here comes me and Matt [Koma]—Matt and his short shorts and his long legs running around the court.

FANNING: Matt was probably the most improved out of all of us. [Laughs]

DUFF: That’s true. He had a rough start. My other favorite fact is that we would hang and play tennis with your mom.

FANNING: Yes. My mom is your and Matt’s biggest fan. Elle [Fanning] too. She was taking lessons also.

DUFF: It was a family affair.

FANNING: That leads me to Matt, because you worked on this together. I love that he’s a part of this with you because you can feel, in the first few minutes that you meet Matt, how much he loves you and thinks you’re the greatest thing that’s ever lived. So how was it, making this together?

DUFF: One, the comfort I feel, having that guy in my corner—it sounds so cheesy to say, but waking up every day and taking on the things in our world—we’re such a unit. Growing up in the industry, I felt like a lone rider for such a long time. That’s such a dorky word, but I was like, “I’m tough. I’ve got this.” It took me a really long time to accept how much he could take off of my plate.

FANNING: Totally.

DUFF: And then the fact that he’s insanely talented. I wasn’t interested in making a record with anyone else. I was like, “It has to just be me and you.” The most honest stuff came from that because he has a front row to my life and everything I’ve experienced, the really difficult times and the really easy good times that made me who I am. Everyone’s like, “How is it working with your husband? Do you guys fight a lot?” I’m like, “We literally never fight.”

FANNING: Yeah, you guys never really fight.

DUFF: Well, that’s not true. We have one drag-out fight once a year. He actually brought it up the other day. He was like, “We haven’t had a fight in such a long time.” I’m like, “Are you ready?”

Tank Top RE/DONE. Pants‚ Bracelets‚ and Belts Aslan World. Mask Zana Bayne.

FANNING: [Laughs] Are you ready?

DUFF: I’m not. Last time I threw his phone in a Bougainvillea bush and it felt so good. It was during the fires. We had been displaced, we had all the fucking kids, and we just needed to have it out. But we don’t usually fight, and making the record—I don’t speak this language. He makes music all day, every day since he was 15 years old. So I’m like, “That sound, what is that? Get that out of here.” [Laughs]

FANNING: He’s able to translate things.

DUFF: Yeah, he also knows my style and he’s got his pulse on the cool factor. He definitely elevates me and my taste beyond belief. Every time I’ve made a record, the A&R person would be like, “You need to work with this person, they have this hit right now. Let’s go to Sweden.” It was important we weren’t swinging for some hit. After 10, 15 years of not making a record, I wanted it to feel like a body of work for people who grew up listening to me and waited a really long time to hear from me. It feels really cohesive.

FANNING: Was it always the plan to do this when you were ready, or was there a time where you thought you would never make a record again?

DUFF: Music is not my natural state. I grew up an actor kid. I wanted to be a pop star and I did those things. But I had a child and I got divorced. I was trying to navigate all these things as a very young adult, and doing music felt too forward facing and too scary and exposed. So I was like, “Okay, I’ve got to learn how to be the best mom I can be.” I took some acting jobs, some really random poor choices, some great choices—like taking Younger, that changed my life.

FANNING: Yeah.

DUFF: But doing music on such a big scale as a young person, in arenas at a time when records sold, was just different. Ten years down the line, I was like, “Am I going to be playing in a small club? Is that okay?” I wasn’t ready. I didn’t have the safety and the confidence to execute it like I have now. I also wasn’t desperate to connect with people the way I am now. I feel this pull to share and be a part of people’s lives again.

FANNING: Totally.

DUFF: Even five years ago, I wouldn’t have felt comfortable to say some of the things I say on the record. You just get to a point of not giving a fuck. Of course, I want people to love it and I want it to be reviewed well. But at the end of the day, I’m going to come back to my four kids and my husband who I’m obsessed with, and we’re going to close the door.

FANNING: When “Mature” was released, you must have got a little taste of like, “Oh, this is going to go well.”

DUFF: Dakota, when we put the tickets on sale—

FANNING: And they sold out in, like, two seconds.

DUFF: And the waiting room queues were like, 175,000 people.

FANNING: That’s insane.

Top and Briefs Tod’s. Belts Zana Bayne.

DUFF: I was like, “What’s happening?” People from the label were like, “Are you okay?” I honestly want to cry when I think about that many people showing up for me 25 years into my career. It’s beyond what my vision was. It also makes me really nervous. I’m like, “Oh wait, I have to be really good.” [Laughs]

FANNING: You will be. We have that in common. All these people come up to me and talk about Uptown Girls, for example. They’re like, “When I was young, that was my favorite movie.” It’s had this resurgence. You’re experiencing a version of that, meeting the people who loved you as a 14-year-old girl. Now they’re your age and getting to hear about what you’ve been through, and it probably makes them think about all they’ve been through.

DUFF: I also feel like I’ve lived a normal-ish life. There’s so much on the record where they’ll be like, “Me too, me too, me too.” Whether it’s about abandonment or anxiety or feeling insecure in your relationship or being cheated on or feeling like you don’t recognize yourself anymore in motherhood—that’s just what life is at this age. Going back and digging into some of my old songs, figuring out how to perform them now and what they mean to me at this stage in my life has been so fun. Sometimes it’s silly and I’m like, “What was I singing about when I was 14?” Because I actually connect more to it now.

FANNING: [Laughs]

DUFF: But back to the conversation about how we had similar upbringings. It used to be really hard for me to constantly hear that I was nostalgic for people.

FANNING: Yeah.

DUFF: It’s so funny because I look at you and I’m like, “You’ve always been a serious actress.” Uptown Girls is just the cute era.

FANNING: It’s interesting you say that because nostalgia doesn’t have any sort of negative connotation to me. It was always age-related, constantly feeling like everyone thought I was a kid over and over and over. Hearing that all the time when you’re trying to grow up, but also not trying to grow up too fast—that’s another cliché people have always said to me. “Don’t grow up too fast.” It’s like, “What is that?”

DUFF: Like, “What? I’m getting paid like an adult. I’m working adult hours.”

FANNING: [Laughs] “I can’t change it. There’s nothing I can do.” Now, at almost 32, I can confidently say I don’t feel that anymore. When people revisit things from when I was younger, I’m free to enjoy it the same way. I never wanted that to make me angry, so I don’t think I let it, but it was definitely something where I’m like, “I am 25 years old, not eight.” I would kind of have to grin and bear it and move on.

DUFF: Oh, I forgot you were eight.

FANNING: Oh, I was six. [Laughs]

Dress Gucci.

DUFF: Six?

FANNING: I was six in I Am Sam.

DUFF: Oh my god. How do you feel now, having had a bomb ass career since you were six years old?

FANNING: I honestly feel nothing but gratitude and happiness. Obviously everyone goes through things that are challenging, and there are things you wish didn’t happen. But ultimately I’m really grateful I got to do what I was meant to do for my whole life.

DUFF: It’s very obvious when I watch you work that you’re doing exactly what you were meant to do.

FANNING: I feel that way, and the confidence and the self-esteem I’ve gotten from that, I really appreciate. Do you feel that doing something professionally from a young age gave you that, or no?

DUFF: Yes. I cannot imagine doing anything else, except for maybe interior design. [Laughs]

FANNING: Yeah. But you kind of do that a little bit, too.

DUFF: I do. I feel like I was meant to perform. I don’t always know in what capacity. Like, there’s days during rehearsal where I’m like, “What the fuck am I doing? Singing is so hard.” But that’s just having a job.

FANNING: Exactly.

DUFF: We’re not robots. It’s not like you can just be on every day. It’s like that in motherhood, too. So it’s taken getting to this age to be a little easier on myself, but I do feel like I’m doing exactly what I’m supposed to be doing.

FANNING: That’s a good feeling. I have high standards for myself, but I’ve gotten to a point where I’m like, “Today’s not my day and that’s okay.” Growing up, and I’m sure you heard this a bunch too, people were always like, “You haven’t gone off the rails yet? Are you okay?” You’re like, “What? It’s almost like you’re willing me to go off the rails by continuing to ask me this.” And so you manage that by being like, “No one will ever see me make a mistake.” But now, I don’t carry that with me.

DUFF: I totally understand what you’re saying. We also both have parents from the South.

FANNING: One hundred percent.

DUFF: No matter what people would say to me, which would sometimes be massively inappropriate, I would just grin and bear it. It’s the Southern upbringing, which I appreciate, but it’s also been nice to grow up and be like, I can keep some of that but not destroy myself in the process.

FANNING: Yeah.

DUFF: Actually, there’s a lot of that in the title of the album, which is luck… or something. It has a lot of meaning behind it, but part of it happens to be that age-old question of, “How are you okay? How did you not go to jail?” How do you answer that? There’s no specific formula for “This is how I didn’t go crazy.”

FANNING: Well, I can suggest maybe stop asking people why they’re not crazy yet, because you’re probably driving people crazy.

DUFF: There’s always time for me to lose it.

FANNING: They might sing a different tune if they saw you and me at 4:30am.

DUFF: What were we thinking? [Laughs] I’ve only had one of those nights this year. How many have you had?

FANNING: That was one of those weird time warps where all of a sudden it was late.

DUFF: That was a very healing night for me, Dakota.

FANNING: Oh, good. I loved it too.

DUFF: I needed to drink way too much. I needed to cry, laugh, roll on the floor, dance on the table, do all the things, and we did all the things.

FANNING: We did it. I haven’t had too many of those nights. I mean, I’ve had a couple more than you, because I don’t have kids.

DUFF: Yeah. My friend was arriving from Canada the next day, and when my phone started ringing and the Uber came, I just went and laid on the sidewalk outside.

FANNING: Matt texted me and said, “You killed my wife.” [Laughs]

DUFF: He was like, “What did you do?” My kids came into the room and they were like, “Can we skip school today?” And I was like, “Uh-huh.”

FANNING: [Laughs]

DUFF: Like, “What? No, absolutely not. Don’t listen to mommy right now.” [Laughs]

FANNING: It was so good. You need that sometimes.

DUFF: All I did that next day was eat La Scala. That was the only thing I could figure out how to do.

Dress Jacquemus. Shoes Converse.

FANNING: I had something to do the next day.

DUFF: I think you went to Pilates, you sick fuck.

FANNING: Oh, I did. That was so weird!

DUFF: It was 10:30 in the morning.

FANNING: I needed to prove to myself that I could still have a night like that and go to Pilates, because as you age, it gets harder and harder to have anything.

DUFF: I have to lift weights or I’m not a good person.

FANNING: I was doing that for a while.

DUFF: But at some point we will find a time to drink more wine.

FANNING: We will. And we’ll have no plans the next day. More horror dating stories for me.

DUFF: Oh, Dakota. Dating stories aren’t for Interview magazine, but they are for another time.

FANNING: I love you.

———

Hair: Ruby Howes using Oribe at Shotview Artists Management.

Makeup: Yasmin Istanbouli using Dior at The Wall Group.

Nail: Eri Ishizu using Dior Vernis at The Wall Group.

Prop Styling: James Rene at Jones Management.

Tailor: Caroline Trimble.

Photography Assistants: Byron Nickleberry and Chauncey Walker.

Fashion Assistant: Alex Rzyan.

Hair Assistant: Daria Solovyeva.

Prop Assistant: Ryan Elliott.

Production Director: Alexandra Weiss.

Photography Producer: Georgia Ford.

On-set Production: Eppy at Radish Films.

Production Assistant: Brooke Ramirez at Radish Films.

Production Interns: Ha Chu and Isaac James.

Post-production: Blythe Cross.

Social Media Assistant: Ashley Hood.

Location: Interwoven Studios.

The post Hilary Duff and Dakota Fanning on Songwriting, Nostalgia, and Not Giving a Fuck appeared first on Interview Magazine.

Grant Gee, photographed by Jan Tracz.

Over the course of his career, veteran documentary filmmaker Grant Gee has followed musicians (Radiohead, Joy Division, and more), novelists (Orhan Pamuk) and essayists (W.G. Sebald). And now, he is back with something completely new—a biopic titled Everybody Digs Bill Evans, which premiered last week at the Berlinale Film Festival. We meet the titular jazz pianist, played by Anders Danielsen Lie, during the worst moment of his life, right after the untimely death of his close friend and collaborator Scott LaFaro. The film, viewers realize, proceeds more like a thought experiment than a conventional biopic. Gee, 61, is more interested in the psychology of suffering, opening the film with a cross-cutting sequence that juxtaposes Evans’ and LaFaro’s concert with the latter’s death and its aftermath. The memory of music, emphasized by black and white colors, becomes a Proustian madeleine.

Our interview is scheduled two days after the now-infamous Berlinale press conference during which Wim Wenders argued that the cinema should “stay out of politics”—another reason why the festival has seemed to gradually decline in stature over the last couple of years. When I notice Gee from a distance in the 1,600-seat Berlinale Palast, he appears withdrawn, confirming my suspicion that Grant Gee the man might, like Grant Gee the filmmaker, prefer the shadows to the spotlight. Shortly after his film’s world premiere, he joined me to talk about his very first contact with Evans’ music and the real difference between making a documentary and a feature film.

———

JAN TRACZ: Thank you for finding time.

GRANT GEE: It’s a pleasure.

TRACZ: How is Berlin treating you so far?

GEE: I haven’t seen a great amount of it this time, but I’m back for another job for a month in a few weeks time.

TRACZ: Can you say what kind of job?

GEE: I have another strand of work, which is working with theater directors who use film and video in their stage shows, so I’m working on a show at The Schaubühne.

TRACZ: David Byrne was there two nights ago. Did you manage to talk?

GEE: No, no.

TRACZ: I ask because, first of all, I would love to see a documentary of yours about The Talking Heads. Before Bill Evans, you haven’t done a film on an American artist, right?

GEE: Is that right? Yeah, that’s true.

TRACZ: What happened? 

GEE: There was no conscious changing of mind. The conscious thought was I started directing music videos that led to a couple of music documentaries. And after the second one I thought, “Okay, if I do any more of this stuff, I’m going to be typecast as the guy that does music films forever.” I didn’t want that at that time. Before this, the last music film I did was 2007, nearly 20 years ago, and I’d been trying to get another one made. And it was really almost by accident that this odd little novel about an American jazz musician was the one.

TRACZ: Do you remember listening to Bill Evans for the first time?

GEE: Yes, I absolutely do. I saw a photograph of Bill, I didn’t know who he was, and there was something about his expression in this photograph which was fascinating and made me want to listen to whatever music this person made. So I asked a friend: “Where do I start with Bill Evans?” He said, “Well, get the Sunday at the Village Vanguard album.” I got it. And I can remember putting on the first track, “Gloria’s Step,” with no expectation of what was going to come out of the speakers.

TRACZ: What did you feel? 

GEE: I would have felt enchanted and charmed and excited by the deft delicacy of it. Something like that. I can’t put it into words, but I can remember the feeling.

TRACZ: What made Evans so special?

GEE: I don’t know enough about music to be able to say what made him different from other piano players. I only know it in terms of feel. I think there’s something maybe about he’s got a more rhapsodic quality than many pianists. There’s a chapter in a great jazz book called Meet Me at Jim and Andy’s, by Bill’s friend Gene Lees; it’s portraits of a number of great jazz musicians and titles the chapter on Bill “The Poet.” I don’t know how Bill’s technique is more or less poetic, but I think one can feel that there’s a poetic melancholy, even in the most sentimental of standards that he covers.

TRACZ: Tell me more about Evans’ grief.

GEE: All I know is, in the film, he didn’t talk a great deal about it. He didn’t say much about it in interviews either. What do we know about Evans’s grief? It’s odd because so little was actually written about him by people who knew him or about his emotional life. What has survived has been Chinese whispers based on one interview. So for instance, his close friend Gene Lees, who wrote the book that I referred to earlier, wrote that “He never really got over Scott [LaFaro’s] death.” That’s one person’s opinion, but it’s probably the only person who actually knew Bill, so anybody who’s written about him since has taken that quote and refracted and refracted. But if it’s true that he never really got over Scott’s death, then you work backwards to be like, “Oh, shit, what must that have been like at the time?”

We do know that after working on Kind of Blue, he decided that the modal music that he was making with Miles [Davis] wasn’t the direction he wanted to take. He wanted to lead his own trio. He’d had a trio before he worked with other musicians before. But the Scott LaFaro and Paul Motian Trio was the one where it all came together. So Bill is achieving his professional and creative dream by 1960. It reaches its apogee at the Village Vanguard in 1961. And 10 days later, Scott’s dead. That trajectory… What is that? What happens after that? He never really got over that. Let’s just imagine how that might be.

TRACZ: When I was driving here today, I was listening to Undercurrent, the album that was out a year after.

GEE: Oh, yes. I love, love, love that one.

TRACZ: And I have to say, it hits different after watching the film. He was trying to find peace after death. But was he able to find his peace, do you think?

GEE: Who knows whether he found peace or not. Undercurrent is interesting because it’s a duet with Jim Hall and I think they all could relax more when he was not Bill Evans leading the Bill Evans trio. Did he find peace? The next album that he made as leader of a trio was at the end of 1962 or maybe end of 1962, I think. You’d struggle to hear any grief in that. But whether he found peace? Yeah, I honestly don’t know. Everything I know is in the film.

TRACZ: Do you remember the cover of the album, Undercurrent?

GEE: Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

TRACZ: Because I was thinking of that photograph, this Weeki Wachee Springs.

GEE: I’ve been to Weeki Wachee Springs.

TRACZ: Yeah?

GEE: If you look at a video for the band Supergrass called “Low Sea,” it’s shot in Weeki Wachee Springs, and I shot some stuff on that and they still have mermaid shapes there, or they did 10 years ago.

TRACZ: Wow. This is your first feature, right?

GEE: First drama feature.

TRACZ: Drama feature. And is there a real difference between documenting artists and directing actors?

GEE: It’s really hard to say. It’s all filmmaking. So, fundamentally, it’s the same thing. It’s just different components of the film. Obviously in a drama, the actors are a component that you have very little of in documentaries. The biggest difference for me is, with documentaries, you’re doing so much yourself. I was joking, but other people carry things around for you when you’re doing drama, you don’t have to carry all the stuff yourself. It’s like the difference between being in an orchestra and being a solo musician. Directing actors to the extent that you need to do for a drama feature was a new experience for me. I expected that my skills in the room actually doing detailed technical direction were not going to be the best, so I tried to compensate by what I thought my strengths were, which is giving them all contextual and psychological information beforehand and talking a lot about roles. And to my mind, I did relatively little active directing. We blocked everything out, but I was asking a lot of questions. And if they had any questions for me, I would answer as best as I could. But it was about allowing the actors to propose what was going to happen here.

Everybody did so much more for this film than I imagined that they would. There was a real sense of letting people do what they do. And to a certain extent, that’s part of my nature. When I teach documentary students I’m always saying, “Just do what you do and don’t tell people what they should do. Let them do what they feel they should do, and then just a little bit of shaping, maybe.” But with people of this caliber, you just let them do what they do, and if they’ve got any questions, they’ll let you know, and then you answer those questions as best you can.

TRACZ: Can I ask you a final question?

GEE: You can ask as many questions as you’d like.

TRACZ: Death appears on so many levels in this.

GEE: Death? Yes.

TRACZ: LaFaro dies, the ex-girlfriend and the brother kill themselves, and Evans was also very young. 51, I think.

GEE: Yes.

TRACZ: What’s your personal relationship with death?

GEE: I’m getting old, so one’s aware of it getting closer. It’s weird, isn’t it? The film about Joy Division, Ian Curtis killed himself. But I don’t know about my relationship with death. What’s the Woody Allen line? “Death’s all right. It’s dying that’s the problem.”

TRACZ: That’s a great conclusion.

The post Grant Gee Made Films About Radiohead and Joy Division. Now He’s Turning to Jazz. appeared first on Interview Magazine.

Kevin Parker, photographed by Sam Kristofski.

When Mac DeMarco, sitting comfortably in the bathtub of his home in Canada’s Southern Gulf Islands, hopped on a Zoom with his friend Kevin Parker earlier this month, the Tame Impala frontman had, just hours earlier, won his very first Grammy Award, this one for Best Dance/Electronic Recording. But accolades don’t matter much to the Aussie, whose 2025 album Deadbeat, inspired by the vibrant raves—or “doofs”—of his homeland, marked a radical and somewhat polarizing sonic departure. “I’m going to be dead honest with you,” Parker told DeMarco, who opened for Tame Impala on the 2015 Currents tour. “I forgot that I was nominated.” The musicians, both synonymous with the indie rock explosion of the early 2010s, reunited at a moment of contemplation and nostalgia, each reflecting on the days when they used to get “fucking hammered” just to make it through a live performance. “It’s funny how things that were so chaotic back then become romantic ideas,” mused Parker, whose world tour kicks off in February. Below, he and DeMarco get deep about sobriety, imposter syndrome, and the quiet thrills of your late 30s.

———

MAC DEMARCO: There he is. I’m in the tub. 

KEVIN PARKER: Maybe show me really quickly?

DEMARCO: Okay, okay. [Turns camera on] Let’s see. 

PARKER: Man, you’ve really trumped my relaxational interview mode. Gorgeous. How are you, my friend?

DEMARCO: I’m good. Good to see you.

PARKER: Yeah, dude. You too. Where are you in the world?

DEMARCO: I’m in Western Canada. It’s an area called the Southern Gulf Islands in British Columbia.

PARKER: Okay. Is that where you bought a house?

DEMARCO: Yeah, I got a crib out here. It’s very old and I’m constantly working on it. We actually built some doors and put them in last night, which I thought was going to be easy, but it was just not easy at all. I’m covered in wood dust and I’m covered in caulking. It was a nightmare but I finished just in time and that’s why I’m in the tub. And you’re in L.A. a lot of the time now, right?

PARKER: I am, but I’m in Fremantle right now back home in Western Australia. I’m in my own corner of the world.

DEMARCO: Very good. I mean, you have that fancy house that you can see the ocean in—

PARKER: I wouldn’t call it fancy. The view is fancy. But are there a bunch of rodents and stuff in the walls? Yeah, probably. 

DEMARCO: It’s the same with this house. Like, are there a bunch of rodents and stuff in the walls? Yeah, probably. But the proximity is cool…

PARKER: Wait, so paint me a picture of how remote it is? Do you have neighbors?

DEMARCO: There’s neighbors but they’re a ways away, an acre or two.

PARKER:  So it really is like Wave House.

DEMARCO: It’s like an ocean farm vibe and also kind of too cold to actually farm anything.

PARKER: Oh, okay. I have to apologize. They told me to read an interview with you to get up to speed on everything but I was like, “You know what? I’m not going to read it because then I’m already going to know everything.”

DEMARCO: Oh, it’s fine. And I thought you won a Grammy last night. [Laughs] How come you’re not in L.A.?

PARKER: Too far, my friend. Way too far.

DEMARCO: Well, congratulations. 

PARKER: Thanks, man.

DEMARCO: I was going to ask what the parties were like, but you weren’t there.

PARKER: Look, I’m going to be dead honest with you. I forgot they were even on.

DEMARCO: So did I. But the difference is, I’m not up for any Grammys. You are. 

PARKER: No, I forgot that I was nominated as well. You have to imagine my confusion because in Australia, we wake up and then we find out about what happened in America last night, so my phone has absolutely blown up. I’ve got 30 messages on my phone, all saying congratulations. None of them are saying what for. And I’m like, “What for, motherfuckers?”

DEMARCO: That’s a good place to be, I think. But tell me this… I saw you guys were on tour, West Coast of the States. I guess you did the East Coast, too. Is that it? 

PARKER: Well, it’s this classic story. We had a whole tour booked for a month in America and then the album got pushed back by a month and then we had to push the tour back and that went into basketball and ice hockey season, so we lost all those venues.

DEMARCO: [Laughs] I don’t have these problems playing in theaters. But you have to move over for the sports teams, I guess.

PARKER: Yeah. So we just played a handful of shows and it was kind of like a warmup tour, really. And then this year’s going to be the big dogs where we just go to America for fucking eight weeks or whatever it is. See if we can stay sane and see if our families still want to stay with us…

DEMARCO: I think it’ll be cool. A lot of kids in the band nowadays, aren’t there?

PARKER: There is, which is really beautiful. There’s going to be six kids or something across two extra tour buses. I remember right when we were starting out, we supported the Foo Fighters. And it’s funny how your perspective changes, right?

DEMARCO: Yeah, yeah. I mean I don’t have kids yet, but I probably will at some point. My drummer hasn’t been with us for a long time, but this guy Phil [Melanson], who just started touring on my album with us this cycle, he just had a kid. So looks like we’re right around the corner…

PARKER: Oh, yeah.

DEMARCO: We’ve known each other since, what, maybe 2013, something like that? I didn’t really meet you guys at Coachella, but I remember you guys came by and saw us play some fucked up show at a pool party. 

PARKER: I was going to say, I thought maybe we met in Paris the first time, because I was living there. That’s when I started listening to you, when your 2 album came out.

DEMARCO: I think the first time we actually kicked it was when you came and did lights for us in Perth, the first time we played in Australia.

PARKER: Wait, what?

DEMARCO: I emailed you. I was like, “We’re playing Perth, you should come out.” And I think we were playing with Ham Jam.

PARKER: Man, your memory is insane.

DEMARCO: Oh, it’s as sharp as a tack. But you were like, “Oh, I’m trying to learn how to do lights right now. Can I do the lights?” I was like, “Yeah, I mean, fuck.” 

PARKER: I don’t remember doing lights so I was probably just like, “Fuck it, I’m not going to do it and I’m just going to watch.” But I want to ask you about shows, first of all, because you’re sober now, right?

DEMARCO: For a few years—three, four years. I don’t know, something like that.

PARKER: That’s so awesome.

DEMARCO: I mean, it changes every day but it’s interesting. 

PARKER: Was there just a moment where you’re just like, “Okay, that’s it.”

DEMARCO: Oh my god. I was a savage beast. But Australians are very similar to Canadians. We drink a lot. It’s a drinking culture. You know what I mean?

PARKER: Absolutely.

DEMARCO: And I think that I’m just used to it. People just get fucking hammered. And I love to do it. It’s part of touring.

PARKER: Absolutely. I didn’t know that about Canadian culture. 

DEMARCO: In certain parts of Canada, there’s a lot of it, but I think it kind of goes back to some maybe English roots or something. But I’ll say that in England, it’s healthier. The pub is kind of the community center. So I got sober in COVID, but I think before that, I would already experiment with not getting hammered before going out there because it’s kind of like, you’ve played a trillion shows, you get so used to the way it goes that sometimes I just wanted to try to bring some of those nerves back or something.

PARKER: So was that kind of your routine, getting pretty sloshed before you go out there?

DEMARCO: For a period, and then it was going out bone dry and getting hammered afterwards. Then other times, it was bone dry, getting hammered throughout the show. You look at videos of me from that time and I look like I’m about to die. It’s insane. I actually remember the last show you guys did because I probably gave you all COVID with that crowd-surfing. [Laughs]

PARKER: I still see videos of that on Instagram like, “Mac DeMarco crowd-surfs at Tame Impala Show.”

DEMARCO: It was at The Forum, right? And then it all shut down the next day. 

PARKER: Yeah.

DEMARCO: It’s funny, I don’t know if it’s partially the sober thing, but going back out and playing now it’s almost amplified. If it’s a good show, it’s really good. If it’s a bad show, it’s really fucking bad. In the moment, I’m kind of like, “Oh, that was horrible.” But it’s horrible in a way you can taste.

PARKER: Yeah, exactly.

DEMARCO: Sometimes I go out there now and I’m just like, “I’m a clown. This is what I do for my job?” But at the same time, there’s another side of that coin.

PARKER: It’s a thrill. That’s why we drink, right?

DEMARCO: Exactly.

PARKER: It’s just sort of to bring it down to a simmering sort of enjoyment of everything.

DEMARCO: Yeah, the sizzle. 

PARKER: Well, see, my relationship with drinking and shows is I’ve got this routine absolutely locked, and I follow it to the T. I don’t really drink much before the show, but I like to drink throughout because it’s fun and I’m up there with my friends. And for anyone who’s not, let’s say Australian, English or Canadian, the idea of getting drunk and then going on stage would be the challenge. But now the challenge is to do it sober.

DEMARCO: Exactly.

PARKER: It would be a real challenge for me to get on stage sober and stay sober the whole time. That would be like playing my first gig all over again. But more and more, I’ve just been appreciating the moments when it doesn’t go to script because the bigger the shows you play, the more everything has to be to a script. If you go off it, then the whole show falls apart because it’s all time-coded and everything’s locked in. So when things go wrong, for me, that’s the sort of spice.

DEMARCO: Yeah. Even with this new album that I just put out, I was kind of like, “I want to go back in a van. I want to play clubs.” I wanted to do it like it was 2015 again and everyone was kind of like, “Cool, Mac. We’ll do that. We’re all in our mid-30s now, but yeah, okay.” And I’ve been slowly realizing that maybe it’s a little bit unrealistic.

PARKER: I feel like I know the answer to this question, but why did you want to take it back to how you did it in 2015? What was it about that time?

DEMARCO: It’s not amnesia, but things have changed. Especially during COVID, a lot of things changed. Even before COVID, big promotion companies bought up most of the venues in the United States. There’s not a lot of independent stuff going on anymore. So I think that I’m remembering these shows that we did in a weird little place in Middle America somewhere on the West Coast. But the reality is, a lot of those places and local scenes are different. And I think that the way the internet operates now is different, so I want to almost cosplay this old version of how touring used to be.

PARKER: Isn’t that funny?

DEMARCO: It might not even be possible, but I’m looking for ways. 

PARKER: I’m always like, “Man, I just want to play a tiny little show in a pub somewhere.” And the Pond guys are always like, “My culture is not your costume.” [Laughs] And I’m like, “Hey man, I was doing that back when you were fucking learning keyboard.”

DEMARCO: Music is different. The industry’s changing. I don’t know if I’m trying to keep up or what I’m trying to do…

PARKER: It’s funny how things that were so chaotic back then become romantic ideas.

DEMARCO: I’m old now. I don’t know what to do. And here we are.

PARKER: Man, you’re 35. You’re a baby. Not to open a huge can of worms here, but has the term “imposter syndrome” ever resonated with you? 

DEMARCO: Absolutely. It’s completely insane what we do. But when you’ve had imposter syndrome for long enough, I think there’s nothing else to do except be like, “Well, I am the imposter.”

PARKER: Exactly.

DEMARCO: You’ve got to own it.

PARKER: Exactly. We outlasted imposter syndrome.

DEMARCO: Exactly. I’m not a good musician, but I am the musician that I am. 

PARKER: Well, my take on it all is that there definitely seems to be more of an immediate awareness of judgment for artists that go out and stuff. Feedback is so instant and so brutal.

DEMARCO: Yeah, for sure.

PARKER: Your bath’s probably freezing cold by now.

DEMARCO: Not too bad. 

PARKER: I haven’t heard you running any more hot water into it.

DEMARCO: It’s a cast iron, so it holds the heat okay. But I will probably get a bit more hot going in here pretty soon.

PARKER: Well, you’ve earned it, man.

DEMARCO: Yeah, absolutely. A pleasure talking to you. 

PARKER: All right. Good to chat, man.

The post Kevin Parker and Mac DeMarco Were Indie Gods. Now They’re Just Trying to Keep Up. appeared first on Interview Magazine.

Richard Hell, photographed by Alexandra Cabral.

When I moved to New York City in 2010, my first purchase at the St. Marks Bookshop on Third Avenue was Richard Hell’s 2005 novel, Godlike. Had the original punk rocker traded it in to become a great novelist? First issued by Dennis Cooper’s Little House on the Bowery imprint for Akashic Books, Godlike quickly became a lodestar for the life I wanted to live. Following two young poets who mirror Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud, transposed to the artistic scene of ‘70s Lower East Side, it is dense with sensation, action, thought, and location in the way good fiction strives to be. Unassumingly brief, with a low-key Christopher Wool cover photograph anchoring you in place and time, it’s loaded with at least as much creative energy and philosophical depth as his classic albums Blank Generation and Destiny Street, all of them part of a larger, innovative, aesthetic discipline under whose sign we still live. 

As the one-time publisher of Archway Editions (and a new company launching soon), I’ve regularly met with Hell to talk about his projects and the literary scene over at Knickerbocker Bar & Grill on University Place. For this interview, though, I joined him at his apartment nearby. He’s lived there since the ‘70s, and it resonates with the historical warmth of an old tenement. The hallways outside were dusty from the landlord renovating to jack up the rents, but inside there was coffee on the stove, a clawfoot tub in the kitchen, and Nan Goldin’s cover photograph for his novel Go Now framed on the wall. I caught him, as usual, in the midst of a bout of infectious artistic enthusiasm; in this case, choosing an original R. Crumb drawing on which to spend hard-earned savings. As we talked about his work and influences, he’d periodically disappear into a converted second bedroom to fetch more books and zines, including the original edition of Godlike. Long out of print, a reissue of the novel will be published this week courtesy of Edwin Frank at New York Review Books, with an afterword by Raymond Foye and supplemental notes, orienting generations of future readers to Hell’s singular work.

———

RICHARD HELL: There’s your coffee. Do you take milk or sugar?

CHRIS MOLNAR: No, that’s alright.

HELL: Cool, all right. Let’s get going.

MOLNAR: Well, you’ve talked about how, with Godlike, there was this idea of people reading too much into Go Now as a part of your life, and trying to scramble it so it was further from your life.

HELL: I mean, part of the direction I went in writing Godlike had to do with me reacting to criticisms of Go Now. I don’t even know if I should dignify it as a criticism, but people would treat it as if it wasn’t legitimately a novel because it was me, as if it was autofiction. And that was untrue; I made up the story. I used an experience I’d had to give me a structure or to actually enable me to dispense with structure, because that first novel was based on a commission I got to drive across the country in 1980 in an old Cadillac and write about the experience which took place. But I was too strung out at that time to produce the non-fiction book that the guy was commissioning. It was supposed to be just about me with the photographer Roberta Bayley driving in this Cadillac cross country in 1980, her taking pictures and me writing notes. I used that as the premise for my first novel, Go Now.

My only objective was to talk about what it was like to be a heroin addict because I hadn’t read a book that described it the way it felt to me. But I needed a story, and I’d had that experience maybe 10 years before I started writing a novel. I thought, “Oh, that’s a good setup for talking about this thing, the psychology of a drug addict.” I’m not much with plots, so using that story was basically just to give me a plot, or as I said, free me from plot, because a road novel makes its own plot. It’s going from place to place. I don’t have to come up with anything, it’s just incident after incident after incident, like picaresque.

Anyway, this is a long digression, but people would dismiss it as me just writing about myself and I kind of resented that. So when I was ready to start writing Godlike, I knew I wanted to write about poets, just like the first book was me wanting to write about being an addict and what that meant. I wanted to talk about poetry as your driving force, as your, as they say in French, raison d’etre, your reason for being. But then I thought, “Okay, how can I make it as extreme as possible so nobody can say he’s talking about himself?” So I made it about gay poets on acid instead of womanizing punk musicians on heroin. Though, of course, as it turned out, they still accuse me of writing about myself. But it was also super fun to have [Paul] Verlaine and [Arthur] Rimbaud’s lives as the bones of the story, but set in the New York that I knew and its peak period of wild and creative squalor in the early ’70s. It had all these fun aspects to it to keep me engaged and interested.

MOLNAR: And again, the reader is aware that you were around back then, but how much of the scene that you’re trying to describe were you actually participating in?

HELL: Well, I came to New York to be a poet when I was 17 and I started a press. I bought a printing press and a little tabletop that cost $300 to bring out magazines and broadsheets and little pamphlets, but I didn’t really have a community. I wasn’t part of a scene. I learned about St. Mark’s pretty quickly, and that’s where everything was going on. And I really liked their publications and was inspired by the poets that are known as the second generation New York poets, like Ted Berrigan and Ron Padgett and Joe Brainard and another ten, many of whom lived in this building. But I wasn’t part of that scene. I was too insecure and arrogant at the same time. I wasn’t looking to be accepted by an already existing group. In fact, Tom [Verlaine] and I would go over to open mic night and disrupt it. We’d get up and do stuff that was obnoxious and offensive.

MOLNAR: That’s not a million miles away from what T and Paul are doing in Godlike.

HELL: I’m not really proud of that, because I really loved those writers. So I knew everything about the process of being a high school dropout poet who printed magazines and wrote poems, but the characters are all made up. And I’m sure there are going to be some people or there have been people at St. Mark’s that were offended about the way I portrayed the poets that were part of the scene. But no, I was a big admirer of theirs, and I also kind of resented them because they had their own club and I wanted my own club.

MOLNAR: Have you ever felt like you’re in some kind of writing scene?

HELL: I was never in that kind of scene that they had back then where everybody came up at the same time with the same kind of poetic values. Even though they were street poets like me, they were all college-educated. I wasn’t, so I had to get everything I got from reading on my own. They had a kind of sophistication that I didn’t have, even though they were all drug heads and a good number of them were from working-class families. But they all went to Columbia and Princeton, et cetera. There’s been moments when I’ve felt the support and the comforts of community, but I just happened to be a guy who keeps to himself. It’s just not my nature. So even though I admire and envy people who have that, I haven’t ever really been part of a movement or anything. I mean, punk turned into a movement.

MOLNAR: Did it feel like that at the time? Like there were shared values and everything?

HELL: Well, it had offshoots. They had a whole set of standards that everybody had to adhere to. But even at CBGBs, there were certain things that people had in common. I mean, the way I felt about it was that the driving force was to write hard rock and roll that came out of real life again, instead of just being the usual comforting love songs and what all, about real experience which was kind of what it was like in the mid ’60s when I was a teenager. The music was where you got the news, and that wasn’t the case anymore. It just turned into this big industry of stadium tours and that part of it got lost. So that’s what I felt like we had in common—we were writing about actual experience again.

MOLNAR: When I moved to New York, Godlike felt like a roadmap to being a writer and living in the neighborhood, but it’s also very specific to poetry. But what brought you back to writing fiction, as opposed to memoir or poetry?

HELL: Well, I didn’t start writing fiction until I was in my 40s. It partly had to do with wanting to make a living. You’re never going to make a living from poetry, and I did not want to have a job. I loved poetry because it was the most concentrated form of pure writing, but I read plenty of novels and I liked the idea of trying my hand at it. So when I left music in the mid ‘80s, I had to figure out how to make a living. The first thing I thought was, “Okay, I left music because I was afraid to go back to music and pick up drugs again. And anyway, I didn’t really feel like I was suited for it. I hated the life on the road. And the only thing I liked about music was writing songs and recording in the studio.” So I thought, is there a possibility that maybe I could get work in movies? I’d been in like three or four obscure movies, but people had asked me to be in these movies. So I gave that a shot for about a year. I got an agent. I enrolled in an acting class where I broke my knuckles. [Laughs] I broke my hand by hitting the wall in acting class.  And I pretty soon realized that wasn’t going to work out either. For one thing, you have to be comfortable having very personal rejections week after week after week. And I don’t respond well to rejection, so I started doing journalism because I knew I had a little bit of an advantage there because I had a certain reputation in music and there’s a lot of music magazines.

MOLNAR: And you’d already done some [magazine stories], right? 

HELL: One or two small things, yeah. Just from being at CBGBs and meeting the magazine editors there. Opportunities came up, but that was all just random. The first major one was actually Legs McNeil’s idea, because he was doing a lot of writing for Spin at that time. And in 1986, it was the 100th anniversary of the publication of [The Adventures of] Huckleberry Finn. He had the idea of getting Spin to bankroll him and me rafting down the Mississippi, and we did. We just drifted down the Mississippi and camped by the side of the river each night for a week and then wrote a story about it. So I would be able to get gigs like that where I’d think of something I wanted to do. When there was a scandal in late ‘80s, when Boy George got busted for junk in London, that threw heroin way up into the news. And I’d been thinking a lot about heroin, what it was and how it works in society, so I got Spin to send me to London for a week. It wasn’t anything to do with Boy George except that he brought the thing into the news. It was me just going to London to feel out what was going on over there, how prevalent dope was and what the situation was legally. So anyway, it was working, the journalism thing, and I was figuring out how to write sentences that succeeded. So I started thinking, “Well, the next stage is to try a novel.” So that’s how Go Now came about.

MOLNAR: What was it like publishing Godlike, and also its afterlife? It’s not common to do an interview about a reissue. 

HELL: Well, the original came out in 2005. I was working on it probably for five years. That’s usually how long it takes me to write a book. And I had a good agent, Betsy Lerner, who was Patti Smith and Jim Carroll’s agent. So then when I wrote this, Betsy tried to find a publisher and none of the big publishers were interested. So I can’t remember how Akashic [Books] arose, but the guy, Johnny Temple, he came out of a band. Anyway, he agreed to take it on. He liked it and wanted to publish it. After he’d accepted the book he said, “Oh, by the way, I have another imprint called Little House on the Bowery that is edited by Dennis Cooper, and I’ve shown him your book and he’d like to be the one who brings it out. Would that be okay with you?” And I was a huge admirer of Dennis. I think he’s the best novelist in America. So, hell yeah, sure, I would love to be edited by a writer who’s better than me. I didn’t expect that ever to happen. But he’s a very hands-off editor. He made like, three suggestions.

MOLNAR: What were some of the suggestions?

HELL: There was a comma. [Laughs] And something that I’d already thought through in a very early part of the book, where it says there’s a microphone in the corner of the bar where they’re holding poetry readings. I have it “leaning thinly,” and I knew that that was technically incorrect. How do you lean thinly? But I liked it. I thought it was effective. So Dennis queried that, but it’s not like he really had a problem with it. He just said, “You sure you want to say that? ” And I said, “Yeah, I do. ” And that was about the extent of it. Anyway, it got rave reviews from four or five intelligent people who reviewed it, but it’s a small press that doesn’t have any way to promote anything, and it’s a difficult book. I mean, I find it compelling. I find it keeps you reading, but it has its challenges.

MOLNAR: The first-person, third-person?

HELL: Well, there’s a lot of poetry in it. Who cares about poetry? And it’s deliberately offensive. I mean, it’s full of people doing stuff that’s obnoxious. But it just had the usual life of a small press book. It had its enthusiastic partisans and a much larger number of people who were completely unaware that it existed. Anyway, I was careful when I went with a small press with it. I wasn’t actively trying to find a publisher for any of those books, but in the last four or five years I’ve been thinking, “I’d like to get Godlike on the shelves again.” But I didn’t really have a plan. Then after I published What Just Happened, I started really feeling motivated to find somebody to bring out Godlike, thinking about who would be my fantasy, ideal, dream publisher for this book. And NYRB is the first thing that came to mind, because I got my college education from the New York Review of Books and that series that they do is probably the most interesting thing going on in publishing.

It must have been like six months after What Just Happened was published. Edwin [Frank, editorial director of the NYRB Classics series] said, “All right.” I wrote him describing what the book was and I gave him a link to one review of it by somebody I knew he knew. And I said, “Would you be interested in considering this? ” And he wrote me back saying that he’d been at my reading at n+1. He loved the reading and he said, “Send it to me right away.” That was a total dream come true. He’s really a saint of literature. What he’s doing is really admirable. So that was a real bit of good luck.

MOLNAR: Back to the book, I love the part about how T’s poem sources weren’t characters, but  a pure version of a mood or insight. That’s something that gets at writing any kind of fiction too, beyond poetry. I don’t want to presume, but do you think of the characters–

HELL: Well, I do think that, in the past century or so—I mean nothing is really new—but there’s been a kind of flourishing of the idea that the poet’s eye in a poem doesn’t necessarily refer to the poet. The idea that identity is multifarious. I tell this story a lot, but when I was writing my autobiography, my mother and my sister would send me stuff they had in files or whatever, relics of my life that might help me in working on the book. My sister sent me a letter that I’d written to her the first year that I came to New York. I was on my own in New York and I wrote her this long letter about what things were like. And if I hadn’t known when I read that letter, I would have had no idea that it was me who wrote it. I did not recognize the person. And I think that’s what I’m getting at. That’s part of the reason why memory is so slippery—because you are actually a different person.

Ezra Pound wrote Personae. Whitman had “I contain multitudes.” It’s a thing that’s been in the air for almost 200 years now as a different kind of lens for looking at literature, but specifically poetry—that it’s not necessarily confessional or some kind of solid, permanent identity. It doesn’t have to be consistent. You can write a poem that seems to completely contradict everything about another poem that you’ve written, and they can both be good and both be valid. People’s identities are really fluid and multifarious. Just like whenever somebody murders somebody, all their neighbors say, “He was such a nice guy. He gave candies to the …” Or Nazis crying while they’re listening to Bach or whatever. I mean, people aren’t consistent. Oliver Sacks has this cool thing in there that he discovered as a young neurologist that not only are we totally subject to powers that we don’t control—in other words, free will is a fantasy—but we’re composed of components where there’s not a real person there. You think that somebody cruel can’t be somebody sensitive, but that’s not true. And for me, always from the beginning, I wanted to have multiple voices. I didn’t want to be restricted to one voice. I didn’t think that was true to life or a worthy objective for me to find my own voice. I just wanted to write well. It could be in anybody’s voice. I didn’t give a shit.

MOLNAR: How do you think that fits into the idea of the title? Because in the afterword, you’re recalling how Raymond Foye asks about Godlike as a title and you’re saying that T is “godlike” because he’s talking about how he’s true to how things are.

HELL: I mean, we’re always searching for how things are. That’s what I’m always searching for. To me, it’s the logical definition of god in the sense of “it’s how things are.” It’s what made you and everything else and what your fate is—it’s how things are. And the object is to try to do your best. It’s not something I’m prescribing for others. It’s just for me, to try to figure out what the fuck is going on in the hopes of being able to be comfortable in it, find harmony with it somehow, so that you’re not always uncomfortable and dissonant and have a little peace of mind.

The post “I Don’t Respond Well to Rejection”: One Hour With Richard Hell appeared first on Interview Magazine.