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Tag: Awards Chatter

  • ‘Awards Chatter’ Podcast: Channing Tatum on ‘Roofman,’ Stripping and Overcoming Imposter Syndrome

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    It’s hard to imagine that a man who has been described by Esquire as “the first honest-to-God movie star of his generation” and by Vanity Fair as “the biggest male star since Pitt or Clooney,” and who was chosen as People’s Sexiest Man Alive and one of TIME’s 100 most influential people in the world, would feel anything but immense confidence. But Channing Tatum, on this episode of The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast, insists that he felt “imposter syndrome” throughout his career — until, that is, he completed his latest film, Derek Cianfrance’s Roofman, which premiered at last month’s Toronto International Film Festival — bringing Tatum the best reviews of his career — and will be released nationwide on Friday.

    Tatum’s path to Hollywood is highly unusual, to say the least, and literally the stuff of movies — the blockbuster Magic Mike films, which he produced and starred in, were inspired by his own youthful adventures as an adrift young man who turned to stripping for lack of a better idea of something to do. For Tatum, though, stripping, against all odds, eventually led to dancing in music videos, most notably Ricky Martin’s “She Bangs”; then to modeling for the likes of Abercrombie & Fitch, Dolce & Gabbana and Armani; then to appearing in national commercials for Pepsi and Mountain Dew; and eventually to acting.

    He landed his first film roles 20 years ago, and since then has proven to be a box-office magnet. Indeed, it can’t be a coincidence that 13 of his films have topped the domestic box office in their opening weekend: 2009’s G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, 2010’s Dear John, 2012’s 21 Jump Street and The Vow, 2013’s G.I. Joe: Retaliation, 2014’s 22 Jump Street and The Lego Movie, 2017’s Kingsman: The Golden Circle and The Lego Batman Movie, 2019’s The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part, 2022’s The Lost City, 2023’s Magic Mike’s Last Dance and 2024’s Deadpool & Wolverine.

    He also has shown himself to be a gifted and constantly-improving actor who top filmmakers want to work with. He has been directed by Steven Soderbergh (five times), Quentin Tarantino, Bennett Miller, Michael Mann, Kimberly Peirce, Jon M. Chu, Lasse Hallstrom and the brothers Ethan Coen and Joel Coen, among others. And if anyone doubts his chops, they should check out his performances in 2006’s A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, 2009’s Fighting, 2012’s Magic Mike, 2013’s Side Effects, 2014’s Foxcatcher, 2015’s The Hateful Eight and especially Roofman.

    In Roofman, which is based on a true story that is stranger than fiction, Tatum plays Jeffrey Manchester, a military veteran who struggles to provide for his family; turns to robbing businesses (in the most polite of ways); winds up incarcerated; and then escapes and secretly takes up residence in a Toys ’R Us store, while also embarking on a relationship with an unwitting single mother (Kirsten Dunst) who works there.

    The performance, which required from Tatum both emotional vulnerability and physical comedy, is the fruit of a collaboration with the writer/director Derek Cianfrance, who is best known for the 2010 masterpiece Blue Valentine — a film, it turns out, that Cianfrance offered to Tatum before the actor he eventually cast, Ryan Gosling. Cianfrance came back to Tatum all these years later, having co-written the part of Manchester with the actor in his mind, at a time when Tatum had grown disillusioned with the business and with fame, and had begun to work less than he used to. But this time, the actor was not going to make the same mistake that he made all those years ago by passing on an opportunity to collaborate with Cianfrance, among the most highly-regarded actors’ directors.

    And sure enough, as Tatum describes during this conversation, Cianfrance’s unusual way of working not only brought out the best in him, but also reignited his passion for acting and provided him with a sense of belonging in the business that he had never possessed before.

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    Scott Feinberg

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  • ‘Awards Chatter’ Podcast — Danielle Brooks (‘The Color Purple’)

    ‘Awards Chatter’ Podcast — Danielle Brooks (‘The Color Purple’)

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    Danielle Brooks, the guest on this episode of The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast, is a tremendously gifted stage and screen actress who is equally at home in dramas, comedies, musicals and everything in-between.

    Also, there’s something about Brooks and colors. Indeed, the two parts for which she is best known are prison inmate “Taystee” on the Netflix comedy-turned-drama series Orange Is the New Black, on which she appeared from 2013 through 2019 (The Daily Beast called her “the breakout actress of the show”); and strong-willed 1920s woman Sofia in the musical The Color Purple, which she was a part of on Broadway from 2015 through 2017 (bringing her a Grammy Award and a Tony Award nomination), and to which she returned for the film version that has been a huge hit since debuting in theaters on Christmas Day of 2023 (which has already brought her best supporting actress Golden Globe and Critics Choice award noms, with additional recognition likely to come).

    Over the course of a conversation at the London West Hollywood hotel, the 34-year-old reflected on her journey from Greenville, South Carolina, to Juilliard to fame; how her part on Orange Is the New Black expanded from two episodes to series regular to show-stealer — and how The Color Purple first entered the picture for her during Orange’s fourth season, creating a juggling-act for the ages; why she doubted herself even when she was garnering massive acclaim for both of those productions; how she, felt years later, when it was uncertain that she would be offered the chance to reprise her part in the big screen adaptation of the musical version of The Color Purple; plus much more.

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    Scott Feinberg

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  • ‘Awards Chatter’ Podcast — Olivia Rodrigo (‘The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes’)

    ‘Awards Chatter’ Podcast — Olivia Rodrigo (‘The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes’)

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    Olivia Rodrigo, the guest on this episode of The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast, is a tremendously gifted singer-songwriter who is, at just 20, arguably the biggest pop star in the world.

    The New York Times has called her “Pop’s brightest new hope,” “a modern and somewhat signature pop star,” “the promising new voice of her generation” and “the most important new pop starlet of the last few years.” USA Today has described her as “a hero among Gen Z listeners.” Rolling Stone has labeled her “One of pop’s biggest, brightest, most fascinating and most brilliant stars,” “an artist with her own voice… who is definitely here to stay” and has “managed to put together a one-of-a-kind catalog already… both of her albums sound like other artists’ greatest-hits collections.”

    With her 2021 breakout single “Driver’s License,” Rodrigo became the youngest artist to debut with a single that hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and two subsequent singles, “Deja Vu” and “Good 4 U,” also went to No. 1, staying there for eight weeks, two weeks and one week, respectively. Both of her first two studio albums, 2021’s Sour and 2023’s Guts, went to No. 1 on the Billboard 200. In 2023, she became just the 16th artist to simultaneously hold the No. 1 spot on Billboard’s three most important charts, the Hot 100, the 200 and the Artist 100.

    She is also a Grammy darling. In 2022, she was nominated for best new artist, album of the year and best pop vocal album for Sour; record of the year, song of the year and best pop solo performance for “Driver’s License”; and best music video for “Good 4 U.” She ultimately won best new artist, best pop vocal for Sour and best pop solo performance for “Driver’s License.” Ahead of the Grammys ceremony that will take place on Feb. 4, 2024, she is nominated for record of the year, song of the year and best pop solo performance for “Vampire”; album of the year and best pop vocal album for Guts; and best rock song for “Ballad of a Homeschooled Girl.”

    Plus, on Jan. 23, 2024, she may also pick up a best original song Oscar nomination, as well, for the first tune that she has ever written for a film, “Can’t Catch Me Now” for The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes.

    Over the course of an interview at the Los Angeles offices of The Hollywood Reporter, Rodrigo reflected on her path to performing, and how acting gigs on Disney Channel TV shows ultimately led to a record deal and “Driver’s License.” She also opened up about what it was like creating and releasing her first album in the middle of a global pandemic and her second in the immediate aftermath of mega-fame; how she approaches songwriting generally; and how writing a song for a movie is different than writing one for herself; plus much more.

    You can listen to the conversation (above) or read a lightly edited version of it (below)!

    * * *

    Olivia, thank you so much for making the time to do this. I really appreciate it.

    Oh, thanks for having me.

    Absolutely. Let’s go back to the very beginning: where were you born and raised, and what did your folks do for a living?

    I was born in Temecula, California, which is about two hours out of L.A. My mom is an elementary school teacher, and my dad is a therapist, so I was very nurtured growing up. My mom was a teacher at the school that I went to, and I was a child actor when I was young. I was very driven and really wanted to succeed in this acting world, so my parents would drive me to L.A. and back three times a week. That was sort of my interesting upbringing, but yeah, my parents are wonderful.

    Your dad is Filipino-American, your mom is white. Was being biracial something that you were conscious of — or that other people made you conscious of — when you were a kid?

    It’s funny, I actually don’t think I was particularly conscious of it until I made my way into the industry. The schools that I grew up going to were always very diverse, and I had a lot of Filipino friends growing up. But yeah, it wasn’t until I sort of started making music and being more front-facing that girls would be like, “Oh, wow, it’s so nice to see Asian representation in music!” And I was like, “Oh, yeah, that’s cool. Yeah, I’m that.”

    Was music a big part of your life growing up? Were your parents into it? What were you listening to?

    Music was a huge part of my life growing up. I can’t ever remember a time when I wasn’t obsessed with it or where I didn’t write songs even. I was writing songs since I was 5 years old. My mom has old home videos of me just babbling. There’s this video that I watched recently where I was writing a song about being lost in the grocery store, which is a very 5-year-old issue to have! And I did musical theater in school and was in the choir. My parents listened to a lot of alternative rock, and I remember falling in love with that when I was maybe 12 or 13, and that’s definitely a big influence on me, as well as just female singer-songwriters. I remember I got a record player for Christmas one year — my grandma gave it to me — and so my mom and I would go to the thrift store, and we’d find little records to put on my record player. One of the records — she was like, “Oh, you’d really love this” — was Tapestry by Carole King. I remember hearing that record, and life just kind of changed after that. So I’ve always really revered female singer-songwriters.

    I think I read that ’90s stuff was particularly big for you — Alanis Morissette and people like that?

    Yeah, Alanis Morissette, No Doubt, The White Stripes, the Smashing Pumpkins, bands like that, I just was so obsessed with in my teenage-hood and still am now.

    I try to read everything that’s out there about my guest before an interview, and I recognize that sometimes things are inaccurate, but I was wondering, is it true that you lost some of your hearing? If so, that makes it even more amazing that you’re so gifted at music…

    Yeah, it’s kind of unusual. I am half-deaf in my left ear. I never knew until kindergarten or so when they’re doing the tests on all the kids, and they were like, “Oh, you’re a little hard of hearing.” It’s interesting. One of my friends is this great photographer, Petra Collins, and she has really bad vision, and so we always joke that I make music because I have bad hearing, and she takes photos because she has bad vision.

    What came first, the desire to make music or the desire to act?

    I always loved music so much. Funny enough, the reason that I got into acting was I had this singing teacher who was really lovely, and I would sing all these songs with such passion and fervor, and my singing teacher was like, “Oh, you should maybe do acting lessons. You really love expressing yourself while you sing.” So, the singing kind of always came first. I was on set when I was 14 or 15, and I just remember being so excited to go home so I could sit at my piano and write songs. It’s always been my first love. I love acting too, for totally different reasons. But yeah, writing music has always been first in my heart.

    In singing, you’re pouring out your own heart. In acting, you’re inhabiting someone else’s heart. With the exception of writing a song for a movie, it’s just a totally different ballgame, right?

    Yeah, it totally is. In some ways, I feel like my experience acting growing up has really helped me in my career now. I mean, for starters, I think when you’re working on a set that young, you really are taught professionalism and work ethic — it’s just ingrained in you — and I’m so grateful for those lessons. And I think it taught me to never be ashamed of feeling big emotions. I’ve never felt like I needed to make myself smaller or censor myself because I just grew up where it was an environment that fostered that sort of emotion. So I think that that sort of helps me be brave in my songwriting maybe.

    I think you do bring a performative element to your singing, putting an additional sugar on top with a little extra snarl or something when you’re singing. I guess the skills bleed into each other.

    Yeah. What’s so funny is my producer, Dan [Nigro], who I made my last two records with, if he’s not getting a vocal take that he really likes, he’ll turn on his camera on his iPhone and film me, and suddenly I’ll do a take that’s super emotional and perfect. I think it’s just, I don’t know, in my bones — the actor girl in me just has to have the camera on.

    I particularly feel that with “Can’t Catch Me Now,” your song from The Hunger Games film — you sing it like someone who’s being mischievous.

    Writing that song for The Hunger Games was such a cool experience. I got to put myself in another character’s position while writing the song, so it is sort of acting — it’s character-work for sure. I write lots of my songs from a very diaristic place, and when you sit down to start an album that’s full of diaristic songs, it’s sort of like the world is your oyster, there’s just so much that you can do, and sometimes it’s a little overwhelming. But having these parameters to work in as an artist are sometimes really inspiring — it’s nice to not have every color on the palette and as big of a canvas as you want. Sometimes it makes your brain work differently to have restrictions. So it was a really awesome experience. I’m lucky that I got to do it.

    In terms of your acting career, it seems like it almost didn’t happen because, from what I was reading, your early auditions were not quite panning out. Did you have a conversation with your parents about potentially stopping?

    Yes. It’s so crazy. It was so long ago. My parents are so not stage parents whatsoever. It was always me being like, “I need to go to these auditions! I really want to book this role!” They were so hands-off and so zero-pressure, which is nice. But I remember one September or something, my mom being like, “Okay, well, we should just try until Christmas, and if nothing happens ’til Christmas, then we’ll do something else and you can just do school. You love school, it’ll be fine.” I was like, “Okay, fine.” And lo and behold, as the story always works, you get something on December 24th or something like that!

    And, for you, that was the lead in an American Girl movie?

    Yeah. I did an American Girl movie when I was 12 years old.

    Only a year later, you got your first Disney Channel show, Bizaardvark, which was a big part of your life from 2016 through 2019. It was for that that your family moved to L.A.?

    Yeah. We took the two-hour drive up and moved here, and I learned guitar actually for the show. My character had to play guitar, so that turned out to be very fruitful as well. It’s a skill I use all the time now. But yeah, that was kind of the start of my working girl era.

    Your parents and you picking up and moving to L.A. — that must have been a big change for all of you, no?

    My parents were really supportive and I thank them to this day for making that sacrifice for me. But yeah, I mean, everything changed then, even beyond moving to a new place. I got out of school and started being homeschooled and just spent my time around a lot of people that were a lot older than me all the time, and that certainly affected me in my life. And I think it made me feel comfortable being alone, and I think that probably was good for my creativity.

    How did you get that first — but not last — show for the Disney Channel? Was it through a regular audition, or did they see you in American Girl or something else?

    Oh man, I can’t remember too specifically. I think it was just a regular old audition. I just walked in with my little sides and did my thing, and fate had its way.

    As you mentioned earlier, it was while you were working on that show that you started writing songs for the first time. Do you remember what inspired you to do that?

    That’s a good question. I don’t know. I think I really started taking it seriously around 14 or 15. I was sort of alone on these sets, and at 14 or 15 you have big emotions — there’s lots of angst going on — and I think I needed some place to put that. I needed to have some medium that helped me feel understood. It sounds so cliche, but it’s so true — especially when you’re that young, it’s like you’re talking to a friend. I was so dramatic. I remember sitting on my piano in my room and just crying. I needed to get it out.

    One of my favorite quotes of yours that I came across prepping for this was, “I literally wrote breakup songs before I’d ever held a boy’s hand or even remotely dated someone.” So you had your genre from the beginning?

    Oh my God, yeah. It’s so funny how that’s so innate in us sometimes. I was writing these devastating heartbreak songs — never had my first kiss. I remember the first song that I wrote on a piano — I was probably like nine years old — and it was this feminist song about how I don’t need a man. I’m now like, “What kind of sexism were you enduring at nine years old?!” I don’t know.

    So you go from Bizaardvark almost directly into — I’m going to just take a big breath before I say this — High School Musical: The Musical: The Series.

    It’s a hard name. It’s a hard title.

    Was that another audition?

    Yeah, it was another audition. I remember going in and doing chemistry reads, and I remember singing for the audition — it’s a big singing music show, obviously, I mean, it’s in the name — and I remember that being really exciting for me at the time.

    The guy who cast you, Tim Federle, has said that he didn’t know that you were as passionate about or talented at singing at the outset. But you wound up writing a song for the first season’s fourth episode, “All I Want,” which made it all the way to the Billboard Hot 100 back in 2020. Do you remember how that came about?

    Yeah. I am very grateful for Tim. He’s given me so many amazing opportunities. I don’t think I’d be where I am right now without that, but yeah, that’s so true. When I got onto High School Musical, I was writing all these songs, but I was so shy and I’d just keep them to myself. I think going on that show and having music be such a big part of it kind of emboldened me to be more open with it. I remember I posted a song on my Instagram — I forget what the song even was or how it went — and Tim really liked it. They were doing pitch sessions, trying to write a song for this episode, and I guess they referenced the song that I put on my Instagram, so Tim was like, “Well, why don’t we just have Olivia write it? If we’re trying to make a song that sounds like Olivia wrote it, let’s just do it.” And for the life of me, I don’t know why he took a chance on a super green 16-year-old like that. But I wrote that song “All I Want” and it did really well. I think TikTok had just started becoming a thing when that song came out, so it was one of the first songs to get traction on TikTok. We were like, “Music on TikTok? Wow!” Now that’s our whole world. But yeah, that’s how I got my record deal, and everything sort of happened off of that one song, so I’m very grateful for it.

    Is it possible that the song that he saw you put up on your Instagram was an early version of “Happier”?

    Oh, that might be right. I think there were a few, actually. The version of “Happier” that’s on my Instagram is how I found my producer Dan. Dan actually saw that video and was like, “Oh, I really like her,” and sent me a DM.

    So which came first: the record deal that you signed shortly after “All I Want” or Dan? I wondered if it was the record label that suggested you and Dan work together, but you’re saying that he reached out after you already had a deal in place?

    I think that I had a deal set up. But I met him on this very fateful day — it was the last day before the world shut down for COVID, and I remember I went into Interscope and met everyone. I think I knew I was going to sign there. And then right after that I went to Dan’s studio and played him all of my demos on a little guitar. And so that was one of the most important days of my career. It’s just so funny where a little Instagram DM can take you.

    You probably get a lot of random DMs. What made you say about Dan, “This guy is somebody I would like to explore the possibility of working with”? I know he has his own background in music, but was that something you knew? What did you know about him?

    I didn’t know much. I knew that he made my friend Conan Gray’s album, and I really liked that album — I was obsessed with it at the time, as I am still, so I was a fan of him for that. I think I was following him because I was just a fan of his work. But yeah, he’s really incredible — he was in an emo band growing up, so I think our tastes are very similar in certain types of music, and he’ll definitely send me so many references that I really resonate with. It’s a good match.

    Now, many people have come out of the Disney Channel and had some degree of a music career, certainly not many at the level that yours has gone to, but almost all of them first signed with the Disney label, Hollywood Records, and as a result, were very managed. Let’s just say “fame-fucker” would not have been possible.

    Yeah, that’s for sure.

    You seem to have figured out, in the aftermath of “All I Want,” that there’s an alternative to just going through the Disney pipeline. And the other thing, which is even more amazing, is that you knew to fight to keep your masters, which is not something that too many people do or get. What went into those decisions?

    I just think I’ve been so incredibly lucky. I’ve really had the privilege of having people work with me who are really actually looking out for my best interests. So I could sign to whatever label I wanted to — I had that carved out of my Disney deal — and getting my master’s. In every aspect of the business, I’ve just always wanted to forge a path for myself that will never infringe upon any of my creative decisions. I’ve always wanted to make every business decision that will allow me to do whatever the hell I want with my music. That’s always been my main prerogative besides money or any of that stuff. I feel very fortunate that people around me have been so accepting and have let me do what I want to do for so long.

    You mentioned that you signed your record deal and started working with Dan just before the world went into chaos. So how did that work? Because you essentially made “Driver’s License” and then Sour, which really introduced you to the world, during lockdown, right?

    When lockdown started, I made a promise to myself that I would try to write a song every single day. I was like, “Well, I’m not going to set anymore. I got to have something to do.” So I wrote a song every day for six months or so, and it was such a good exercise for me as a songwriter. I think I was really starting to find my pace as a writer, and Dan and I were both like, “Hey, I’m not going anywhere” — Dan’s like, “I’m just hanging out with my wife,” and I’m like, “I’m just hanging out with my parents. So I feel like it’s safe for us to come and work in the studio.” So those were really magical days. I think I found out so much about myself and about the music that I liked writing through those studio days with him.

    I hope I can tee up some questions about specific songs because I think it gives a little window into your creative process. The first one obviously has to be “Driver’s License,” which is the first one that anyone heard beyond “All I Want.” It came out on Jan. 8, 2021. Billboard called it, “A brilliantly detailed tear-jerker.” The New York Times called it, “Razor sharp, damningly intimate songwriting” and “one of the great singles of the 2020s.” It debuted at number one on the Billboard Hot 100, partly thanks to TikTok, and so you, at 17 years and 338 days old, became the youngest solo artist ever to debut at number one on the Hot 100. The song spent eight weeks at number one and set a new record for Spotify streams for a debut single by a female artist. Just unbelievable stuff. What first gave you the idea to do that song, and did you ever imagine that it could take off even a fraction as much as it did?

    Yeah, absolutely not, is the short answer. It’s insane thinking about it. I mean, I was just so heartbroken at the time. I was 17 going through my first heartbreak and I was literally just writing songs to survive and feel better. I wrote that song one morning after driving around through my neighborhood — after literally just getting my driver’s license. I remember feeling like it was really special, though. Sometimes when you write a song, it feels like it’s just coming through you. It doesn’t happen very often — it’s very rare — but when it happens, you get super excited. It’s really special. And I remember that being one of those moments, and I was really excited. I remember I walked into Dan’s studio a few days later and I said, “Dan, I think I just wrote the best song I’ve ever written.” He’s like, “Okay.” So I played it for him and we wrote the bridge together and kind of fixed things up and yeah — it’s insane, you reading all those statistics, it’s so strange. I was 17 and I just remember all of that happening and I was doing my statistic finals in my house.

    That’s where I want to go next. From the moment it first went out to the public, let’s say, can you just give me a little idea of how your life changed in the next week?

    I think I didn’t fully realize how much my life was going to change after that song. I was just like, “Wow, people really like it!” I’m like, “Billboard charts? What’s the Billboard charts?” I was kind of just learning about all of this stuff, and I was taking my finals. I was a senior in high school. The only thing that changed is that people started sending me flowers and stuff. I was like, “Oh, that’s nice.” It was lockdown, so you couldn’t really go out into the real world and see it. I couldn’t play a show. I couldn’t go meet people who were listening to the song. So it was very insular in a way that I think was actually really beneficial for my mental health. I think that’d been really overwhelming if I got the full brunt of it.

    And you were smart enough to know to get off of social media, right?

    I just deleted my TikTok and Instagram, and other people posted for me, or I’d redownload it to post and then get back off. I think I knew myself and I knew that I would get in my head. I was finishing up making Sour at the time, and if I was on social media and could see everyone’s opinions of me all the time, I think I would’ve made a record that was pandering to them or something like that. Not exactly what I wanted to make. But yeah, I’m proud of my little 17-year-old self for doing that. It’s a tough thing.

    Now, a week later, I believe, you went back to work on High School Musical: The Musical: The Series, only now as the biggest thing in music. Was that weird? Did they treat you differently?

    People were really wonderful. I mean, to me, I didn’t feel different, and no one really treated me different. I think that I didn’t fully realize the breadth of that song. I was just like, “It’s just another day. It’s just a song that I really love. Wow, cool. People like it.” I don’t know. It sounds funny to say now, but at the time I just didn’t really grasp it all, I don’t think.

    The other two singles that came out before the full album were “Deja Vu,” on April 1, 2021, and “Good 4 U,” on May 14, 2021. You became the first artist in history to have their first two and their first three singles in the top 10 of the Hot 100. Sour became the first debut album to score two number one singles on the Hot 100, “Driver’s License” and “Good 4 U.” So if anyone thought that “Driver’s License” was a fluke, that was quickly put to rest. Why was the album that they were ultimately all part of called Sour?

    I really love four-letter words — I mean, obviously I love explicit words too, but I think I was trying to write a song called Sour for a long time about, yeah, milk gone sour, a relationship or something like that, and it was just a bad song. But I was like, “‘Sour’ is good though.” And yeah, I don’t know, it just felt like angsty and brokenhearted, which is what I was feeling at the time.

    When you and Dan started putting that album together, did you sit down and say like, “Hey, this is going to be the theme of the album: it’s primarily going to be about heartbreak”? Or did you just write songs, which coincidentally turned out to have some things in common?

    At that point in my career, I was writing songs just to get through life. They were all to personally help me. I didn’t think that they were even going to come out, which I think is maybe sort of the beauty of some of those songs. There’s an innocence to them. But yeah, I remember not being happy that it was a breakup album, though — I was really dead-set like, “We have to put a love song on there, Dan. Let’s put a love song on!” But I was just nowhere even close to being in love. So that obviously didn’t work out.

    I think it’s hilarious that people are like, “Why do you write so many breakup songs or heartbreak songs?” And you were like, “What do you want me to write about, income taxes?”

    I know! I’m like, “Why are you listening to all heartbreak songs?”

    The other thing that many of these songs have in common, as you and others have noted, is that they are dealing with emotions that many times it’s sort of frowned upon for a girl to express — anger, jealousy, spite, sadness, etc.

    I think on a personal level, I’ve always felt more comfortable showing sides of my personality in my songwriting, sides of myself like guilt and shame and jealousy and anger and all of these feelings that I talk about a lot in my music that I try not to express in my daily day-to-day life, maybe for good reason. It’d be bad if I was just ashamed all the time in my regular life. But I think that’s sort of the beauty of songwriting, is that it can help you access those sort of hard to articulate emotions and give them somewhere to go, as a songwriter and also as a listener.

    You said about “Good 4 U,” at one point, that you probably wouldn’t say those words to someone’s face, but it felt nice to be able to get them out in another way.

    Completely. Writing songs is just getting stuff off your chest. That’s all it is.

    “Deja Vu” was one of the first times that people noted how specific your songwriting is — with references like Billy Joel and “Uptown Girl,” etc. — while still feeling universal.

    Thanks. Yeah, I try. I mean, I love specificity in songwriting. I think all of my heroes are really good at using specifics to get their message across. And so yeah, it’s always been something that I’ve really tried to achieve, so thank you for saying that.

    Sour spent 52 non-consecutive weeks in the top 10 of the Billboard 200. It was Spotify’s most streamed album of 2021. It went four times platinum. And then came the Grammy nominations. You got seven nominations, one in each of the big four categories, which is something only 12 other people had ever done — album of the year, record of the year, song of the year and best new artist — and you end up winning three, including best new artist. Can you talk about the significance of the Grammys — not just being there, but the fact that they, as much as anything, are sort of an indication of the music business that you were entering essentially embracing you.

    That was one of the craziest days of my life. I had always followed the Grammys from a very young age. My mom and I would watch together. The Grammys usually happened in February, and I always said, “February’s my favorite month, first because of the Grammys, and second because of my birthday [on Feb. 20].” But yeah, I loved it, and my mom and I would always make predictions of what we thought was going to win Song of the Year, so it was just so fun even just go as a fan of music.

    Had you ever gone before? Sometimes people buy tickets or whatever.

    No, I’d never gone, but I loved going to the Grammys Museum in downtown L.A. I would go all the time when I was a kid. I used to live near there, and my mom has a funny story of taking me there when I was 14 or 15 or something, and I told her, “Mom, one day I’m going to win a Grammy.” And she remembers saying to herself like, “Okay, that’s not going to happen.” But she was like, “Okay, I believe in you, Olivia!” So I maybe did her proud on that one.

    I don’t know for sure, but I imagine best new artist might have been the one that you wanted the most, and you got it.

    Yeah. I mean, it’s so exciting to even be in the running for something like that. It just is so cool to be included in that community of musicians. You sit in the Grammys and you look around and it’s like, “My God, Joni Mitchell’s over there, Brandi Carlile’s over there,” and all these people that you just grew up being so inspired by, it gives you chills.

    And now they all knew who you were, right?

    Overwhelming!

    You talked to Joni Mitchell, right?

    Oh my God, yeah. She said she liked my dress. I was like, “Thank you!!!”

    I recently had on the podcast somebody who I know you recently did our songwriter roundtable with, Dua Lipa. You and she were the two breakouts of lockdown. You both put out a great first album that everybody loved, and then faced the big question: what do you do with your second? Do you kind of double-down on what worked the first time? Or do you take this opportunity to show that you can do other things? But what if that doesn’t work out? Take me into your thought process.

    It was incredibly daunting to start out writing Guts. I had so many voices in my head and there was so much pressure. There were lots of days where I’d walk in the studio and — me and Dan, we jokingly called it, “the dread.” We’re like, “I can see the dread in your eyes, producing that song.” “I can see the dread, writing that verse.” “I can see the dread in your eyes.” So it was a really challenging experience for me as a songwriter to try to tune out all that noise and just try to make something that inspired me, because, at the core of all creativity, that’s where it should come from. It shouldn’t come from trying to make a song that you think is going to do well on the charts. That never actually does well on the charts, if you just try to make something like that, I think. But yeah, it was a lesson, I think, in discipline and perseverance for me, just showing up every day and sitting at the piano, even if you feel really overwhelmed and scared, just showing up and sharpening your skills as a musician or a songwriter.

    You went into the first album not unknown but at a very different level of being known. Going into the second one, you were very known, as you reference in “Vampire” and other songs on it. After releasing the first album but before writing the second, did you have time to go experience life? Even with people behaving very differently around you?

    Yeah, I definitely did experience a lot of life. I mean, the albums were two years apart, two fairly formative years for me. I made Sour when I was 17, 18, and I made Guts when I was 19, 20. I feel like I’m a completely different girl than I was back then. Lots of personal growth. I did talk about how my life has changed in regards to success or public attention. But I don’t know, I like to think that if you boil any of those songs down, they’re about betrayal or heartbreak or anger, all things that are very universal. And so I think if you just try to concentrate a feeling into the most essential parts, that’s sort of what I tried to achieve.

    With Guts, you leaned into rock much more. Is that just how the songs you were writing happened to turn out, or did you consciously set out to write an album that was more rock-heavy than the first one?

    I wanted to do something more rock. I’d always loved rock music, like we were talking about before, but I never quite knew how it fit it into my voice and my style and my style of songwriting. And I think we were just starting to figure that out towards the end of the Sour process — we added “Good 4 U” and “Brutal” last in the track listing. So I think I just wanted to expand upon it more on this record, and it was so much fun. I am really excited to play all those songs live. They feel very much like me.

    All 12 of the songs on Guts were very well-received but particularly “Vampire,” which debuted at number one on the Billboard Hot 100, fell out and then came back to number one, which doesn’t happen very often. That one seems to be about heartbreak, like songs on Sour, but also about being taken advantage of as a famous person, right?

    I think it’s about betrayal. It’s a very angry song to me. I think that it’s also about me taking responsibility for putting myself in those positions. I think that was a big theme on this record, is growing up and realizing that you’re not always the perfect victim in every situation. Sometimes you are, but most of the time not. I think it was just me maturing and realizing the part that I had in all of these situations that I was writing about.

    It’s a song that starts out quiet and then builds to a rock operetta — it really explodes. What came first, the words or the music?

    I wrote an early version of that song by myself on the piano, and I wrote [sings] “Blood sucker, fame fucker,” and that was the part that Dan was like, “Oh, yeah, that’s good!” So I wrote the verse in the chorus, and we kind of fixed it up together and wrote the song on piano to begin with. The production took so long. God bless Dan, he was the most patient man in the world. I would just go crazy. I really wanted a song like “Come On Eileen,” where it gets faster and then there’s like tempos all over the place. So if you listen to the song, it gets faster towards the end, but oh my God, we were stressed over half of a BPM and like, “Oh, this voicing of this chord isn’t right.” It was really a labor of love. So that one took a while, but I really love that it shows.

    “Teenage Dream,” which seems to be about your apprehension about following Sour, is a very different genre. I believe you regard it as one of your personal favorites. What is it about that one?

    That was the first song that we wrote that made it on the record. I wrote that song when I was in the studio and I was experiencing “the dreads.” I was 19 years old and I was like, “Wait, is all my best work behind me?!” Which is a crazy thing to think when you’re 19 years old — your whole life is ahead of you, like the song says. But I think it just succinctly captured not only my fear of making a sophomore record, but my fear of just growing up in general. The line that’s my favorite is, “They all say that it gets better the more you grow. But what if I don’t?” I remember writing that and being like, “Oh, that’s exactly how I feel.” It just always feels nice to have your anxieties and fears put into a song. It feels like more manageable when you can listen to it and be like, “That’s exactly how I feel.” It makes everything kind of feel smaller.

    The last of the songs from that album that I want to bring up, and I think you have said that this is your favorite, is “All-American Bitch,” with a title referencing Joni Mitchell’s The White Album. It starts out with you sounding angelic, and then it just goes nuts.

    Yeah, that one’s my favorite on the record. I really love it. I’ve always been fascinated with this sort of duality of being a woman and feeling all of this rage, but also feeling like you’re in this box and you have to be classy and gracious and never complain and all of this stuff. I feel like that was always a struggle that I was pushing against when I was younger. And so it’s just always been at the top of my mind, and I always wanted to write a song about it. And in this song, I feel like I kind of addressed that. It’s very dynamic. Like you said, the verses are really small and sweet, and the choruses are super enraged, and it’s just really fun. It just captured something that I’ve been feeling for a while, so that’s always a nice feeling as a songwriter.

    So this brings us to an undertaking that was different from anything you’d done before, as far as I know: being asked and agreeing to write a song for a movie, as we started to talk about earlier. How was the request presented to you? Was it, “We would love a song,” or “We would love a song for this specific moment in the movie,” or “We would love this specific kind of a song,” or “We’d be thrilled with anything you care to contribute”?

    Someone just asked me, “Do you like The Hunger Games?” And I’m like, “Of course, I like The Hunger Games! Duh.” So they’re like, “Oh, you should watch [the new one] and see if you’re inspired. They’d love a song for it.” And I was so honored to watch the movie, and really resonated with the main character, Lucy Gray. I think she’s a really interesting, fascinating, complex character. And so after watching that, I did a few iterations of the song that ended up coming out, but it was so much fun to kind of challenge myself as a songwriter to do something like that. It feels collaborative. Someone gives you the character and the plot, and you just kind of inject your own personal feeling into it and paint with your colors. It was so much fun, and I feel really honored that I got to do it.

    You have said that there’s a scene in the movie that sort of inspired the song you wrote for the film, “Can’t Catch Me Now.” Which scene was that?

    Well, if you haven’t watched The Hunger Games movie, don’t listen to what I’m about to say right now, turn off the podcast. But it’s the scene where Lucy finally leaves — she just disappears — and Coriolanus is looking into the sky and shooting, and there’s all these mockingjays around in her voice speaking words that she said, and it was just so fulfilling to watch her finally kind of disobey him and stray from the pack and break away. But there’s always still this mystery about her, which I think was reflected in the song.

    Once you agreed to do the song, how long did it kind of take to come together? Is it something that just poured out, or was it a real process?

    Dan and I wrote it. We wrote the chorus one day and then came back to it. We’re like, “Oh, that was pretty good,” and wrote the verses. It was just a real fun challenge, and it was so fun to sing from another person’s perspective. It’s not every day that I get to do that.

    Rachel Zegler, who stars in the film, is also a talented singer. Did you guys meet before the premiere?

    Yeah, we had actually. I randomly met her in the bathroom at the Grammys. It was like some dingy bathroom, and she was like, “Hey, I know you.” And I’m like, “I know you.”

    The film has proven to be a huge blockbuster. Do you have a theory about why particularly young people are so into the franchise, generaly, but especially this latest installment?

    I think that The Hunger Games is so great at portraying wonderful, complex female characters, and I think that that’s something that we all are craving. Just a great concept. Great books, great movies, great soundtracks. I love all the soundtracks.

    In our last minute or two, here are some sort of assorted, random, big-picture questions. Who are you listening to the most right now?

    Oh, OK! My Spotify Wrapped just came out. I think my number one artist was Chappell Roan. She just put out her first album, and Dan, my producer, produced it, and it’s amazing. So I’m listening to a lot of her. And I think number two was Simon and Garfunkel.

    You performed in some very intimate venues after Sour. Now, for Guts, you’re going to be performing in stadiums and arenas starting February 23, 2024. What are you most excited about or most curious about, as far as that level of a production?

    I’m so stoked. I think it’s going to be so much fun to play those kind of rock songs in an arena too. I’m so excited to feel that energy. I’m so excited to go places that I haven’t been before. I’m really excited to go to the Philippines — I’ve never been — so that’s going to be fun. And I love my band. I have an all-girl band and they’re so wonderful and such great musicians. It’s going to be fun.

    Do you know who’s opening for you? Does it change from place to place?

    Yeah, there’s a few. Chappell is opening, The Breeders are going to open for me, which is really cool. PinkPantheress is going to open for me. A few others. It’s going to be fun.

    What are you most excited for about the Grammys, which will happen just a few weeks before the tour, on Feb. 4, 2024? You’re going in with six nominations, including a bunch of big ones.

    Wow. I get butterflies in my stomach even just answering this question. It’s a very nervewracking night. I just think it’s so fun to get to see all the songs that get performed. It’s just like you get to see some of the greatest artists perform some of the greatest songs, and it’s just an honor to be in the audience and witness all of that. So very excited. Yes.

    I’m sure they’ve asked you to perform. Do you know if you will, and, if so, what you will be performing?

    I don’t know if I will yet. I haven’t had the conversation, but I mean, I would be honored.

    If you could do one of your songs, would it be “Vampire”?

    Yeah, probably. That’s a fun one to sing.

    Okay. Favorite line of a song that you’ve ever written?

    I’m going to say a crazy answer. It’s actually a bonus track that’s on Guts. There’s a song called “Scared of My Guitar.” If you buy a vinyl, it can be on the vinyl, but it kind of exists on TikTok, little snippets. There’s this line that says, “How could I ever trade something that’s good for what’s right?” And I think that was a big thesis for what I was going through in my life these past few years. Things were good and things were happening, and I had so many people around me, but lots of things just weren’t right for me and weren’t in alignment with who I was as a person. And so writing that line kind of made things clearer for me.

    I heard another favorite is a line from “The Grudge”?

    Oh, yeah. I mean, “It take strength to forgive, but I don’t feel strong.” Why couldn’t I think of the lyric? Yeah. “It takes strength to forgive, but I don’t feel strong.” I was listening to The Smiths on my way to the studio, and there’s a song, I forget which song, where he goes, “It takes strength to be gentle and kind.” And I remember being really angry listening to that song and being like, “What if I don’t want to be gentle and kind?!” And so I wrote, “It takes strength to forgive, but I don’t feel strong.”

    And then just one other potential contender, I think — was there something in “Enough for You”?

    Oh yeah. It’s such a sad song. I listened back to it and I was like, “Oh, you were so heartbroken.” I really loved writing the line, “Someday I’ll be everything to somebody else.”

    If the world was on fire and you could only save one of your songs, which song would it be?

    Oh my God, that’s so hard! Maybe “Driver’s License.” I really love “All-American Bitch” too. So one on each album.

    I heard that you took a class at USC.

    Oh, yeah.

    What inspired you to do that, and is that something you might do more of?

    I hope so. I had never really gone to a brick and mortar school — I mean, I stopped going to regular school when I was 12 years old — and I always had a desire to do it, and always had a desire to learn in a classroom about all these things that I was really interested in, in an environment that was a little more structured. So yeah, I went to USC for one class, and I took a poetry class, and it was wonderful. I had a great professor, and I wrote a bunch of poems and learned so much — and I actually turned one of the poems that I wrote in the class into the song “Lacy.” That’s on Guts.

    And were the kids cool?

    Yeah, kids were super cool in the class. They were so sweet. I actually — have you watched Legally Blonde?

    Of course.

    I had a very Legally Blonde first day there. I actually walked into the wrong classroom and sat there and was like, “Oh, I don’t remember this on the reading list. This is strange. Maybe they’re just all really advanced.” And then I walked into the right classroom and I realized that everyone had iPads, and I was like, “Oh, iPads. That’s what kids do these days.” I just had a little notepad and everyone was typing on their iPads and I was writing down little notes with my pen. But yeah, everyone was really sweet and welcoming.

    Are you interested in continuing to act while making music, or is acting now in the past?

    I’m open for whatever. I think acting’s so fun. It’s so nice to be, I think, a part of a community that’s collaborative and creative like that. With music sometimes it’s very individualistic. I am writing my songs and making a lot of the decisions by myself, and that’s wonderful and so much fun. But sometimes it’s nice to kind of have some people to lean on.

    Are you open to doing other songs for films?

    Yeah, I think that’d be so fun. I had such a great time writing this Hunger Games one, and it’s just such a nice challenge as a songwriter. It really stretches you.

    And lastly, if you go to karaoke, what is your go-to karaoke song?

    Okay. Really hard one. If you want to be really advanced, you do “Wuthering Heights” by Kate Bush. “Bohemian Rhapsody” is always fun if you’re with a group of people because then you can each do the little part. But usually, without fail, it’s “Dancing Queen.”

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    Scott Feinberg

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  • ‘Awards Chatter’ Podcast — Dua Lipa (‘Barbie’)

    ‘Awards Chatter’ Podcast — Dua Lipa (‘Barbie’)

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    Dua Lipa, the guest on this episode of The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast, is a three-time Grammy-winning singer/songwriter who is one of the biggest pop stars in the world. A Brit who has been described by The New York Times as “a powerhouse young artist,” by Vanity Fair as a “bona fide superstar” and by TIME as one of the most influential people in the world, she has to her name hit singles like “Levitating,” “Don’t Start Now,” “Cold Heart,” “Last Dance,” “New Rules,” “Houdini” and, from Greta Gerwig’s critically acclaimed summer blockbuster Barbie, “Dance the Night,” which on Nov. 10 garnered Grammy nominations for song of the year and best song written for visual media, and is now very much in the running for a best original song Oscar nomination as well.

    Over the course of a conversation at the London West Hollywood, the 28-year-old reflected on her childhood split between London and Kosovo; how she wound up signing her first record deal in 2015; the origins and bangers of her 2017 self-titled debut album and her 2020 pandemic-era second album Future Nostalgia; how she came to be a part of Barbie and wrote, with Mark Ronson, Caroline Ailin and Andrew Wyatt, “Dance the Night”; plus much more.

    You can listen to and/or read the conversation below.

    Dua, thank you so much for doing the podcast. Can you tell our listeners where you were born and what your folks did for a living?

    Yeah. I was born in London in 1995, and at that point, my parents were working in bars and restaurants while at the same time studying in the evening.

    People talk about your work ethic, and I know it’s major, but theirs sound pretty incredible too…

    Yeah. Well, I think I get most of my — not most, I get my work ethic from my parents and seeing them really adapt to any situation.

    Now you’ve spoken about how a lot of your mindset and worldview has been shaped by “the immigrant experience.” You were born in London, but your parents were not. How did they wind up there?

    They fled the Yugoslavian War. They left Kosovo then. My dad was in a band — he was in a rock group — but he was studying to be a dentist, and my mom was studying law at the time. In 1992, they decided to leave Kosovo and come to London. And their life completely changed at that point.

    The fact that your dad had been involved with music, was that part of what got you into music as a kid? How early on were you listening to and kind of a fan of music?

    I think from the moment I came out the womb I was listening to music. Music was so present in my life. Both my parents have always been singing around the house, playing artists that they love. I think I had a good range of knowledge of a lot of amazing artists and songs way before I could even speak. And so music just felt like second nature to me.

    When we listen to your music now, it makes sense based on who you were personally into as a kid…

    Yeah. Artists that my parents listened to a lot were David Bowie and Elton John and Oasis and Blur, and then Blondie. It was such a mix of so many different artists. And I think for me, after listening to and loving all the music that my parents listened to, that became then my favorite music and the music that I always go back to as the music that makes me feel the best. Then, I was maybe nine, 10 or 11 when I discovered my favorite pop artists. And that was like—

    Nelly Furtado?

    Nelly Furtado. It was the Whoa, Nelly! album that really changed my life. Then it was Misunderstood by Pink. And also Songs in A Minor by Alicia Keys. All of these women have such a strong identity, and when you’re a young girl and you hear these artists and their stories — I just felt so connected. So all I wanted to do was sing their songs and listen to their music. They had so much independence and strength and attitude that I was like, “When I grow up, I want to be just like them.”

    That being said, I’ve heard — and I could not believe — that you were being told as a kid that you didn’t sing well?

    I wanted to sing for the school choir, and I have a very deep voice. I think my speaking voice is quite deep, and my singing voice is also like — me being able to go down octaves is my forte. At the time, my high register just wasn’t developed at all. There was a school choir and the music teacher was like, “Okay, who wants to audition for the choir?” And I was like, “All right, I’m going to get up and I’m going to sing.” And he starts playing on the piano and I’m trying to reach this high note and nothing but air comes out and I’m so embarrassed — and it’s in school assembly, so I’m in front of all the kids of all ages, and I’m absolutely mortified in the moment, and he’s like, “Oh, maybe next time.” And I never got the place in the choir. But it was a big moment for me, in the sense of having the confidence to stand up in front of people sing — and not having the outcome that I wanted.

    I was very young to have that experience, but because I loved to sing, my mom signed me up for Saturday classes at Sylvia Young Theater School. I was nine years old when I started going there, and every Saturday I would go and do singing lessons. I had this really great teacher there called Ray, and he heard my voice and really liked my low register, and he was like, “You know what? I’m going to change your class and I’m going to put you in the 9:30 am class,” which was with the 14 and 15 year olds. I was terrified. I was like, “Oh my God, I have to go in with the teenagers — how am I going to get up and sing in front of them?!”

    And he really helped me to believe in myself and have the confidence to stand up in front of the teenagers and sing and feel good about it. It wasn’t that my parents didn’t tell me that I could sing; my parents always told me, “Oh, you’ve got a good voice and you can sing.” But I think hearing it from somebody that’s not your mom or your dad means a lot.

    Then, just as you’re developing some belief in your own abilities, you guys end up leaving to go back to Kosovo?

    Yes.

    What were the circumstances that led to that?

    My parents always had the idea of going back to Kosovo. I think whenever somebody leaves a place because of the war, they leave because of the potential of having a better life, but always wanting to go back to your home, to your family, to the things that that you’ve grown up around. And Albanian was my first language. I’d always spoken English at school and with my friends, but I also spoke a mix of English and Albanian at home, and so when my parents decided that we were going to move back to Kosovo when I was 11 and finishing year six, which is just the end of primary school, I was like, “Okay.” All my friends from my primary school were going to go to different schools anyway. I was going to go to a different country.

    So you weren’t terribly devastated.

    I wasn’t terribly. I was quite excited at the idea of going back. I lived in Pristina for four years, from 11 to 15. I think the thing that was the most interesting was adapting to being the new girl in school and being like, “Not only am I starting in a new school, but I have to adapt to people already having formed friendships.” At the same time, I knew I could speak Albanian, but I thought I could speak it way better than I did because at home everything was fine. When I went to Kosovo, everyone was like, “Oh, you’re speaking Albanian, but almost with an English accent or something.” So it took me a little while to not only get down with the slang — to learn it grammatically — and read and write properly in Albanian, but also be thrown into new friendships and new studies that were so much more advanced than what I was learning in London. I was doing fractions, and then I went and was doing algebra in Albanian. So it was a very big kind of push for me out my comfort zone, while at the same time giving me the opportunity to be really in touch with my roots and my family and my language and my heritage.

    And were you continuing your singing when you got back there?

    Yeah. I had music lessons in school there, so I was singing there. And I think that’s when I did my first performance in front of a crowd. It was like a school event, and I chose to sing “No One” by Alicia Keys. I think there’s a video of it online. I’m so small.

    It went well?

    It went well. You can see me holding the mic and being quite nervous, and then people clap, and I think, with confidence, I put my other hand on the mic. But also, my time that I spent in Kosovo made me realize how badly I wanted to do music and how I needed to go back to London and be in a place where everything was happening — where I maybe might have the opportunity to try and do this as a job. I didn’t feel like I could get discovered in Kosovo. Things were completely different then.

    You were there when they declared independence, right?

    I was there when independence got declared, yes.

    But it was still going to be a long shot to get any kind of career going there…

    Absolutely. Our world’s just getting so much smaller, but at that time, when I was 13, 14, 15, living in Kosovo, it just wasn’t possible to be in a place like that and hope that you might get heard. And so I wanted to go back to London.

    So how does the conversation go? You’re 15 and say to your parents, “I’m out of here” — how did you get them to go along with this?!

    I have younger siblings — I’ve got a younger sister and a younger brother — and when I saw them turn 15, in my head I was like, “I have no idea how I managed to pull this off and get them to let me live on my own.” I was just so determined that I wanted to be in London. I wanted to go back to school in London. I also wanted the opportunity to maybe go to uni in London — I had to go and finish my GCSCs there and get my exams done. Anyway, I’m a very convincing young lady. I think that’s what I’ve gathered from when I go back and ask my parents. Every time, I go and ask my parents, “How did you let me do that?!” It’s so amazing that they had so much trust in me. They are like, “You were just so determined.”

    I feel like I always knew what I wanted to do from a very young age. In order for them to feel safe about the situation and good about leaving me in London — of course I had so many friends and family in London, but a family friend of ours, their daughter was moving to London — to study at the London School of Economics — from Pristina. And so we decided that we were going to flat-share — we were going to live together — and I was going to go to school and she was going to go to uni. And that was that.

    I believe you also did some waitressing, some hostessing, and a little modeling during that period?

    I always loved having a job. My first job was when I was 12 or 13 years old. I was in Pristina and I remember walking home and there was a pharmacy that I had just passed by and there was a woman selling makeup products. It was like the Avon equivalent, but it was a Swedish brand. And I was like, “Oh, I could do this,” slang makeup to the girls in school. I just love the idea of always working. I love to work. And then when I moved to London, I worked in different retail stores. Then as I got older, I started going out, and I was going out a little underage—

    The statute of limitations has expired…

    I was going out and I made some friends in a club, and my first job in a club was when I was 17 and I was working at the door. It was fun. I made some very interesting friends — interesting people in my life that I think just really shaped my experience of being young and living in London and that club culture — and I think that all of those things trickled into my music and my inspiration and where that all came from. Then I left that job because I remember one night my friends couldn’t get in to the club — they didn’t let me let them in — and I was like, “I just don’t want to do this anymore, this is just so horrible.” So then I went to work at La Bodega Negra, which was an upscale Mexican restaurant in Soho. And I worked there up until the point that I got signed.

    This was when YouTube and SoundCloud were really starting to get going — things that may have made it feel more possible to make it when you were in Kosovo, if they had existed. But now you were posting covers online, and then I think you were doing some vocals for a commercial, right?

    Yes, exactly. That kind of goes back to what you were saying about modeling. While I was in school, I was posting covers online — I would just be like, “Hey, I’m Dua, I’m 15 years old and this is my cover of ‘Super Duper Love’ by Joss Stone.” And I was posting a lot online and also, at the same time, always working. I had been scouted in Oxford Circus for a modeling agency, but I was put on a commercial board and got sent out to do some auditions and stuff. And basically, I did a commercial — I had to do the singing for it — and I worked with a producer for two weeks on that, and afterwards he was like, “Hey, do you want to maybe write a song?” And I was like, “Absolutely, I would love to get in the studio and write a song together!” We wrote a song, and then I didn’t hear from him for a while. And then he contacted me and he was like, “Hey, I would love to talk to you about a potential publishing deal.” I was like, “A publishing deal? I don’t even know what that is.”

    Through the covers that I’d posted online on YouTube and on Twitter and SoundCloud, there was a young producer called Felix Joseph who had heard my cover of Chance the Rapper’s “Cocoa Butter Kisses” from SoundCloud. He had contacted me and was like, “Hey, if you ever want to work in the studio together, let me know, but in the meantime, if you need anything, this is my number.” I’d never met him, but I called him and I was like, “Hi Felix. I know we’ve never met, but I was just wondering — I’ve been offered a publishing deal and I don’t even know what that is. Do you have anybody who could help me?” And he was like, “Well, I can’t really give you advice on that, but I’ve got a really good lawyer who you should go and meet and he can chat to you about it.” And so at 17 years old, I go to this law firm in Hammersmith, in London, and I sit down with my lawyer — well, he then became my lawyer, but a lawyer called Lawrence — and he basically was like, “Look, don’t sign this deal. Let me help you find a manager.” And he was the one who kind of sat me down and explained the ins and outs of what a publishing deal was and the different aspects of it. And that was the beginning of everything.

    Yeah. I guess he then connected you with Ben Mawson, who had been working with Lana Del Rey and became your manager. And you’ve said at that point everything changed, in the sense that you soon had a record deal of your own.

    Well, I was just going to the studio every single day and I was writing nonstop. There was a song that I’d written with my friends Tommy Baxter, Adam Midgley and Gerard O’Connell called “Hotter Than Hell,” And that song kind of caught the attention of some record labels. Everything just started happening so fast. That was when I met my A&R, Joe Kentish, who is a dear friend of mine — we still work together to this day because we just have such a great relationship just creating records together. But I don’t know, I felt like he immediately understood who I was as an artist and gave me the space to really grow. I just felt really connected to him and I was like, “You know what? I’m going to sign to Warner Records.” And that’s where I signed my deal.

    And then I threw a little drinks party at La Bodega Negra on the night that I signed, having also kind of handed in my resignation, with the hopes that maybe I wouldn’t have to come back.

    That was in 2015. I know there was a lot of touring and writing over the next two years, and milestones along the way that may seem not as big now as they did at the time — like going on The Tonight Show to perform “Scared to Be Lonely,” I think?

    Yeah. Well, the first ever TV I did was The Tonight Show in 2016 — they were the first American TV that had me — and I actually sang “Hotter Than Hell.”

    Oh! And all of this leading up to the release of your first, self-titled album, in 2017, which people now know went platinum, with six singles that went platinum. I wonder if we can talk about a couple of “case studies” from that. “Last Dance,” you have said, “was the song where we figured out what my sound was going to be.” I know that you’ve separately said that you always wanted to combine hip-hop and pop. But how would you describe what your sound was as a result of “Last Dance”?

    It’s quite interesting hearing that back because I haven’t thought about that process of making my first record in a little while, especially as I’ve been just busy and caught up in working on my new record. But there’s always one song that for me dictates what the rest of it’s going to sound like. Even though looking back on my first record, when I listen back to it, it feels to me there’s so many songs of me figuring out where I was heading next. I was learning so much about myself in the process. I was writing for about three, four years, while at the same time releasing a lot of singles because I felt like I needed to put out a lot of songs in order to be heard before I even put out my first album. So it was a really, really long journey.

    Also at the same time, I basically toured the world three times with that one album, seeing the rooms get a little bit bigger every time. But the idea of merging hip hop and pop, it was because of my love for Nelly Furtado and then my love for J. Cole or my love for Kendrick. What I loved was the storytelling in hip hop and then the way that pop records — dance records — made you feel. But how was I going to put the two together? With the first album, there’s so many songs that sound so different, but they really changed my life in so many ways, where I was learning and leaning in to the songwriting process of being vulnerable and talking about my experiences and emotions, with the idea that maybe someone out there might hear them. This was me spilling my guts essentially for everyone to hear.

    But yeah, it was just such an amazing experience. And for “Last Dance,” in particular, what I loved was the electronic sounds in it, but at the same time, dancey pop sounds sonically with a real personal story intertwined. That was something that I really emotionally made me feel like I was on the right track for that record.

    And it was about being homesick, because you had been out on the road for so long?

    It was about being homesick. I’d written that song in Toronto. It was, I think, October, and it was really cold, and I knew that I was going to be on the road for a really long time, and I was starting to get a little bit of my London blues. And that was the song that I wrote. I think it was more about people telling you that you’re not good enough — it was a bit of an in-your-face record, like, “I’m not going to take that and I’m going to stand my ground and I deserve to be here.”

    Also on that first album was “New Rules,” your first No. 1 in the U.K., first to break into the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100, second song by a woman to hit a billion Spotify streams. You’ve also talked about how, when you’re singing, it’s almost acting, as well, or at least inhabiting a character. So even if what you’re singing about is not your experience or your feelings, you can flip it in your mind. Was that what you would say this was an example of?

    Yeah, definitely. It was also very interesting because I love to write all my own songs. I definitely felt like, “Oh, I don’t know if I want to sing this song because I didn’t write it.” But it was a song that I resonated with so deeply. I embodied it. When I sang it, it was mine. And I felt like it was such a strong song about the things that you should or shouldn’t do in your dating life, essentially. I felt so strong and empowered when I sang “New Rules.” Sometimes you manifest an energy into your life — as time’s gone by and I’ve written other songs, I’ve really felt that to be true. It’s like the more you sing something, the more share it with people, you really embody that energy.

    And that was also the case, in terms of flipping things around, with “Hotter Than Hell,” which is also on that album, right?

    Yeah. I was going through a bad relationship when I was writing my first record. And now, looking back— Once I put my songs out, I really don’t listen to them unless I’m preparing for tour or something. But it’s very cathartic to just put them out into the world, and then they no longer belong to me. So now, looking back in hindsight, all the themes that were going through this record were a feeling of wanting to reclaim my strength and my power and where I stood in a relationship, and wanting to give myself this feeling of confidence and that no one could put me down. So it seems to be a common theme in the self-titled record.

    And it’s interesting because what you said you were striving for there could be summed up in the phrase, “I don’t give a fuck,” which is I think the last single that was actually written for that album, “IDGAF”…

    For the album, yeah. It was the last record that made it onto the self-titled album.

    So after that, but before the great second album, was the first time you worked with Mark Ronson, which is obviously going to connect back with Barbie in a little bit. Can you talk about how you guys first connected, with “Electricity”?

    It feels like it’s all very full-circle now with everything Barbie-related. But I met Mark Ronson through my friend Andrew Wyatt. Andrew Wyatt and I had written the very first song I’d ever released, called “New Love” — it was me, Andrew Wyatt and Emil Haney — and it was the first thing that I ever put out with a video. I was very excited. And Andrew’s a very, very close friend of mine — we did two songs on my first album together — and when Mark was working on Silk City, he was speaking to Andrew and was like, “I’m looking for an artist who wants to write a song with me, but who has a deeper, maybe soulful voice”—

    Which he had a little experience with, with Amy Winehouse, right?

    Yeah, exactly. Oh my gosh, I mean, I’ve always just been such a big fan of Mark’s work, but the Amy records are something that I hold very, very dear to my heart. But going back to Mark wanting someone with a deep kind of raspy voice, the first person that came to Andrew’s mind was me. I’m so grateful that I was the person that came to mind, and Mark reached out to me and was like, “Hey, I’m a friend of Andrew’s, and I really like your work, and I would love to write a song with you if you’d be down. I’m doing this thing called Silk City with Diplo.” And I came to the studio here in LA, which was when Mark was living, and we worked on “Electricity.”

    At the Grammys in 2019, you won best new artist and best dance recording for “Electricity”…

    Yeah. It was all happening at the same time. It was just a really surreal moment in my life, that night at the Grammys. I mean, us winning the best dance recording and then me going on and getting best new artist, I just couldn’t believe it. I was absolutely gobsmacked. I feel like even when I think about the speech or how I felt when I got up to accept my award — I think I blacked out in the moment. It just felt so unbelievable that it was happening to me. I was just so grateful. And really from that moment on, my whole life changed.

    I was going to ask about that. I’d love to hear how, on a day-to-day basis, it changed, but also, did you start feeling pressure or putting pressure on yourself? The sophomore album is usually intimidating, especially when you’ve received so much positive feedback for your first album and then this single with Mark, because the question is, I guess, “What do you do? Do you do more of the same kind of thing that’s worked? Do you instead branch out and take a chance that people are going to respond to something very different?” Take me through your outlook and thought process in the aftermath of suddenly becoming somebody that everybody knew…

    Well, gosh, I mean, it was an interesting time in my life because I had a feeling of being celebrated, which was a really lovely feeling after doing something that you really love. But there was also this video online of me dancing and people were laughing at it or whatever. And that was really hard for me as a young artist because I was doing something that I really loved, but I felt the wrath of the internet. I had people telling me, “Oh, she’s got no stage presence,” or “She doesn’t deserve to be here,” or “She’s just not good enough,” or whatever. So I had a lot of that also weighing on top of feeling like I’m on cloud nine and I’m in this really special place in my life and let’s see where I’m going to go next.

    It was an interesting thing to juggle, but what I decided, which was the best decision I’d ever made, was I was like, “Right, I’m going to have to start making my new record. I’m going to get off Twitter — I’m deleting this thing off my phone. I don’t want to look at it. I don’t want to think about what other people might want me to do. I don’t want to recreate the success that I had with my first album. I’m so grateful for everything that that record gave me. But I want to branch out. I want to do something different. I want to push myself outside of my comfort zone and prove that I’m here to stay.”

    I had that real fire in my chest. I was adamant to create something that I was really, really proud of, that felt very refined in the sense of, like with my first record, a lot of different songs of me figuring out who I was. This Future Nostalgia album was very much carefully curated for it to all be one world. And it was my first kind of experience of creating an “era,” I guess.

    It was the idea of going back to my early influences, the things that made me feel nostalgic, that made me feel like there was a place where I could be seen and heard — and disco music did that for me. Disco music has done that for history. It’s always been a place of freedom and community and togetherness, and it was the genre of music that brought people together from all walks of life where they could feel like a unit or feel like they were around like-minded people. And that was really the energy that I wanted to bring into Future Nostalgia, but also with influences of Jamiroquai and Maloko and these artists that were just so inspiring to me when I was younger, that I loved so much.

    You poured your heart and soul into this album, which was supposed to come out on March 27, 2020, and then on March 12 or thereabouts, the world shuts down because of the pandemic. How close did we come to not having Future Nostalgia come out when it did?

    It was so heartbreaking because I had started promoting my record already. The last thing I did was I performed at Mardi Gras in Sydney. I remember landing back home in London and all of a sudden things were getting very, very serious. Then it was like, “Okay, things are going to shut down.” And I was about to go on tour, so it was like, “Okay, we’re going to postpone the tour for a couple of months and see.” And then things were just like, “No, they’re completely shutting down.” And so then it was a whole conversation of, “Well, are we going to release the record at this time? What should we do?” And I felt so strongly: Even though in my head I’d envisioned that this was an album that was going to be heard out and get people dancing, I don’t know, it felt necessary to me to get it out there. And I was like, “You know what? Whatever’s supposed to happen with it will.”

    Of course, people loved it. It lifted a lot of spirits.

    And it kept people dancing — in their homes. I’m very, very grateful, that it was the album that did that.

    As we did with the first album, can I just prompt you for a couple more “case studies”? Of course, we’ve got to talk about “Levitating.” This was as big as a song can be: it spent 77 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100, becoming only the fifth song ever to spend 70 or more weeks on that chart, which goes back to 1958; most weeks ever on that chart for a song by a woman, passing LeAnn Rimes’ “How do I Live?”; 41 weeks in the top 10, the most ever for a song by a woman and second overall, behind only to The Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights”; the longest charting single in the history of Warner Records; and the list goes on. How did that one come together? And why do you think that of all the great songs on that album, that’s the one that took off in that way?

    Well, you never really know with a song, I think. But when I was working on “Levitating,” I went into the studio and Koz [Stephen Kozmeniuk], the producer, basically played a track that he was working on. And absolutely immediately, I pressed the record button on my Voice Memo app and just started the melody of “Levitating.” It was just such an instant feeling for me. I also did it with my really close friends, Sarah Hudson and Clarence Coffee Jr., and when you create something with really close friends and there’s such a beautiful energy and you feel the excitement in the room, you hope that it translates the same.

    I feel like that with a lot of experiences that I’ve had with my music. I always go, “I hope people feel it the same way I felt when I wrote it.” And it was the song that dictated what the rest of the record was going to sound like. That was the one. And it was the time when I left the studio and I was like, “Okay, I’m onto something. I know what I’m doing now.” Yeah, that was the one.

    “Don’t Start Now” went to number two on the Hot 100, making it your highest-charting single to that point, and it went on to be nominated for the record of the year, song of the year and best pop solo performance Grammys. You spoke a bit already about your love for disco. I also read that you, like I, love that documentary about the Bee Gees—

    Oh my God — God, I love that documentary about the Bee Gees! So good. How Can You Mend a Broken Heart.

    And this song was an instant disco classic…

    That was the first song that I released from the Future Nostalgia record, really illustrating what the rest of the record was going to be like. It had all these nostalgic influences, disco influences, live instrumentation — but at the same time, it felt so fresh and new. And it was the moment where I revealed my two-tone hair, like the blonde with the dark underneath. And it was my first experience of really starting to create a world around my music. I have so many beautiful memories connected to that, and getting to work on it with my friends Emily Warren and Ian Kirkpatrick and Caroline Ailan. It was just such a massive kickstarter for me in getting people to see a whole ‘nother side of me creatively.

    And then there’s “Break My Heart,” the writing of which, you have said, took you out of your comfort zone — which showed you that it’s actually a good thing to be out of your comfort zone when writing?

    I was out of my comfort zone because it was very personal, it was very in-the-moment. Sometimes when I write things, like I said, I feel like maybe I manifest them. I was like, “Oh my God, am I going to write a song about a guy that’s about to break my heart? I don’t know if I’m ready for this right now.” But that’s really how I felt in the moment, and I think I just learned how amazing it is to be so open about my own experiences. And actually “Break My Heart” was the last one that I wrote for Future Nostalgia.

    So obviously everyone loved Future Nostalgia. Then there was “Cold Heart” with Elton — it was fun to see you two perform that together at his last show in America. And then “Dance the Night,” which I imagine was already in the works before that in order to be ready to include in Barbie. How did your involvement in that project come about? Who reached out, and what was the pitch?

    Mark [Ronson] was the one who reached out to me. He was like, “I’ve been working on the music for the new Barbie film by Greta Gerwig, and it’s quite possibly the funniest script I’ve ever read. There’s a big dance section in it, and I would absolutely love for you to write it with me.” I was on my Future Nostalgia tour, so I was like, “Oh, I for sure want to do this” — I’m such a fan of both Mark and Greta, and to get to work with them in this capacity would be incredible — but I was like, “What’s the deadline? And am I going to be able to do this while I’m still on the road?” Mark and Greta were so excited that I was up for it, and we just made it work. I flew to New York and we spent so much time crafting this bespoke dance blowout party banger, essentially, which was just such a different experience from any of the other experiences that I’d had writing music for myself. Because when I write music for myself, I have such a personal vision in mind. Here, I was writing a story about Barbie, about her character. It was interesting to work to an assignment to write a song about what in the film is Barbie’s best day ever — and then she starts having, as the day goes on, thoughts of death, and from that point on everything kind of goes upside down and she has this existential crisis and has to go into reality and discover the patriarchy. There’s a lot that happens.

    It sets it all up…

    It sets it all up. And it was like, “How do I create a song that really does that moment justice?” Especially with all the cast members in it, all the Barbies dancing in there! And how do I have this underlying story alongside it? It’s like, “Yes, it’s a big disco moment in the film, but lyrically, although it’s got to be fun, I have to be able to tell Barbie’s story in this way, and how are we going to do this?” I wrote it with Andrew Wyatt and Mark Ronson and Caroline Ailin, and it felt like a very 360 moment on how we all got together in the first place.

    Are you thinking, as you’re working on a song like that, “Yes, it’s for a movie, but it also needs to be able to stand on its own at a club? In other words, that the lyrics have to mean multiple things? And would you say it’s harder than writing a song that’s not for a movie?

    Well, I think when you’re writing from personal experiences, you are putting yourself out there in a very vulnerable position. What was interesting here with Barbie is, although we were tailoring the song, pretty much like a score, to the visuals to make it really fit in, the song also stands alone. When the song was finished, what I realized is how much I relate to Barbie, to “Dance the Night,” to the idea of resilience through the adversity of whatever life throws at you, and being able to just carry on and, I don’t know, show a completely another side of me.

    Also, “Dance the Night,” to me, felt like my farewell to Future Nostalgia. When I think back to the time when people told me I couldn’t dance or I had no stage presence and I decided to instead make them all dance with the music I was making, that’s what “Dance the Night” represents to me, that complete shift in my life where I was able to find myself again and really feel like I can stand through anything as long as I have passion and a dream and a want to create something.

    You also play a part in this movie. Are you interested in doing more acting moving forward?

    Maybe. I had a lot of fun doing the cameo for Barbie. Just to be on set and feel the energy of all the cast and crew members — everyone was so passionate and so generous with themselves in every aspect of wanting to make this the best thing that they’d ever made. You can really feel that dedication. Like I said, when I make a song, I hope people can feel the energy of how I felt when I made this record. The same thing goes for the way that this film was made.

    Grammy noms came out last week. How did you learn that “Dance the Night” had been recognized?

    I got a text from a friend who was like, “Did you know that you just got nominated for two Grammys for ‘Dance the Night?’” And I was already on such a high because I had just released my new single “Houdini” and that was just absolutely flying, and then I get this news! I was just absolutely in a massive whirlwind. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I was just so happy to be nominated, especially for a song that means so much to me. I just feel like it’s such a big part of me.

    “Houdini” is the lead single from your next album, which is coming in 2024. You have said this one is going to be more personal than the others…

    The reason why it’s personal is with every experience, with every moment that I’ve spent in the studio, I’ve learned to just open up more and give more of myself and not be afraid of that aspect of my vulnerability. And also just with every record, I’ve been learning more about myself and wanting it to be more organic in different ways, to grow sonically and change it up. This one’s a lot more psychedelic in its production, and I’m just very excited because it feels like a new step for me.

    Lastly, can a song change the world?

    Can a song change the world? That’s interesting. I think music gives people the feeling that you can really imagine a world with peace. It gives you that space to, I don’t know, dive into another world that gives you a lot of comfort and clarity, even when things in the world aren’t going so well. It’s a safe space. So whether or not it can change the world, I don’t know. But for me, it gives me comfort and it makes me feel very much at home, wherever I am.

    Transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

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    Scott Feinberg

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