Sky Ferreira: ‘I never feel like an adult, but I’ve never felt like a child either’
As she prepares for her first Australian shows in a decade, pop’s enigmatic rebel opens up about ‘feeling defeated’ by the music industry, her battle with record labels, and her long-delayed second album, Masochism
The enigmatic pop star Sky Ferreira has a reputation for running late to interviews. Read any feature with her, and you’ll likely find an anecdote about a last-minute cancellation or location change. Then take note of the tone, and notice that the writers are rarely ever miffed about being dicked around — lateness and false starts are all part of Ferreira’s unknowable allure. This considered, it was a shock when The Australian got a call at 9am, the scheduled time of our interview, to let us know Ferreira was ready to talk.
When we catch up, over a crackly phone connection, Ferreira is busy packing her suitcase, preparing for the “painfully long” flight from Los Angeles to Sydney, ahead of her first Australian shows in a decade. Ferreira, who is friendly, upbeat, and prone to talking in circles, admits it feels “pretty surreal” to be welcomed back after such a long time away.
Ferreira has not had a conventional — or easy — pop career. The 31-year-old musician grew up in Los Angeles and spent her childhood around Michael Jackson; her grandmother was his hairdresser, and he encouraged her to take gospel lessons.
At 14, she signed her first record deal after building a following on MySpace, where she would upload videos of herself singing her original songs. At the time, MySpace was an ever-propagating petri dish of homespun pop talent that would go on to conquer the charts, such as Katy Perry, Charli XCX, and Lily Allen. Ferreira released two heavily backed singles through the label, but after staunchly refusing to be moulded into a palatable bubblegum star (“spaghetti straps are not my thing”), the label lost interest, and the funds dried up.
At 15, she jumped ship to Capitol Records. Same deal, different flavour. Ferreira once again found herself in the A & R abyss, where she was shaped into something that didn’t quite fit: this time, a bratty, panda-eyed seductress, churning out songs like “Haters Anonymous” and “Sex Rules.” “There were a lot of things that people wanted me to do and wanted me to sound like,” Ferreira says exhaustedly.
Capitol, too, lost interest and shelved her long-awaited debut record. Instead of giving up, Ferreira, then 17, moved to New York alone and turned to modelling, becoming a muse to the then-Saint Laurent Paris designer Hedi Slimane. She used the money she earned to finish her debut album, Night Time, My Time, in 2013.
That album, released when Ferreira was 21, was a critically adulated word-of-mouth hit. It struck a nerve in disaffected internet teens who found the unblemished pop girls of the 2000s unrelatable, and who yearned for something scruffier. Here were strikingly self-aware, angry songs that mined cooler sonic influences — Suicide, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Madonna, Krautrock … The hype was only bolstered by the album’s cover, shot by the provocative French director Gaspar Noé (Irreversible), which features a topless Ferreira shrinking into herself in a shower. It was catnip for Tumblr and the “soft grunge” aesthetic movement that fetishised bruised knees, pallid skin, and general scumbaggery.
It’s the kind of major-label wonder that could only come from rebelling against a major label. “I managed to create my own system. I kind of feel like that’s what I have to do now,” Ferreira says. She is talking about what it will take for her long-promised follow-up album, Masochism, to be released.
Masochism was announced in April 2015, with Ferreira promising the first single would be released in the coming months. It never did. On New Year’s Eve that year, Ferreira obliquely addressed the delay on Instagram— “In 2016 you will hear it.” 2016 came and went to radio silence, and it would be three years until fans heard the first single, “Downhill Lullaby,” a five-and-a-half-minute goth ballad that sounds like a Nancy Sinatra record was put through a hardcore grinder.
Three years later, she released a follow-up, and her most recent single to date, “Don’t Forget.” The venomous, synth-drenched single took a direct jab at her record label, Capitol, who for years she has publicly accused of sabotaging the release of Masochism, a delay she calls “infuriating.”
“I had so many versions of this album, and so many people squashed it in so many ways. I almost feel a bit defeated,” she says, before quickly adding, “Not defeated enough to quit. It’s definitely created a battle within myself that I didn’t use to have.”
What will it take, does she think, for the record to be released? “It’s about getting back to the place where I truly feel that I’m there, without questioning myself or letting people get into my head about it, which I didn’t use to let happen as much.
“It’s just like, how do I get back to that place of just being able to do something the way I did with my first album? How do I get to that space again, to not have this big dark cloud looming over me?”
Is there any fear about releasing the album now that so much time has passed? Or is she just fed up that it has taken so long? “I battle both things at this point,” Ferreira says. “I don’t have a fear of releasing it. I’ve just been frustrated about it for so long that I have a fear of having to start the whole process over again.”
In the decade since Night Time, My Time, Ferreira has busied herself with touring and acting, with prominent roles in Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver, David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return, and Eli Roth’s Green Inferno, but one gets the sense that music is what she is truly about.
She doesn’t care whether Masochism is a hit, but she “doesn’t want to disappoint people that have waited so long for it.” Though, she adds, “It’s inevitable that’s going to happen.”
She shouldn’t be so sure … Ferreira is the rare kind of artist who inspires such devotion that even her flubs are celebrated. At a recent show in Los Angeles, Ferreira took the stage two hours late and performed the second hour of the set in complete darkness (“One of my favourite concerts I’ve ever attended,” one fan tweeted). Last year, a fan-run organisation, dubbed “Free Sky Ferreira,” paid a plane to fly over the Capitol Records building with a banner emblazoned with their titular demand.
Does Ferreira still relate to the 21-year-old girl who wrote that music? “It’s strange, but I do. I know a lot of people usually feel a bit annoyed or something when they have to play the same stuff over and over again. I still really enjoy playing the songs. I think it’s pretty rare to have that. I’m not embarrassed when I play it.”
“I’m still very connected to that album, in a way. It’s not who I am completely, but it does represent a part of me. It had a lot more weight to it when I was younger. And there’s a different kind of weight when I play it now. It did come from a very sincere place, and I knew that at the time.
“Part of me never feels fully like an adult, but I also never felt fully like a child either. I think that also might make me seem a little stunted or something, but I’m not immature emotionally, I don’t think. There’s a part of me where I don’t think like I’m 31 years old in a lot of ways.”
Catch Sky Ferreira in Sydney as part of Vivid LIVE at Sydney Opera House on Sunday 2 June and in Melbourne as part of RISING on Tuesday 4 June.