Trivia / Grimes

• Absurdly Short Production Time: Visions was recorded in just under two weeks in her Montreal apartment.
• Breakthrough Hit: While not exactly a "hit" in the mainstream sense, the single "Oblivion" garnered lots of praise from music publications such as Pitchfork, which boosted her into indie stardom.
• Bury Your Art: The "Nightmusic" video was removed from her Youtube channel, due to her being unhappy with the final result. It's still available to watch via some courteous fan reuploads.
• Celebrity Break-Up Song:
  • "Devon" is a sad breakup song, which shares the name of her ex-boyfriend Devon Welsh.
  • "Player of Games" is about a cold lover who'd rather sail into space than stay with her. Take a wild guess of who it's about.
• Content Leak:
  • Miss Anthropocene was leaked several months before the album's release. She wanted to release the album immediately after the leak, but the label made her wait.
  • Raw footage of the unreleased music video for "So Heavy I Fell Through the Earth" leaked onto Reddit, and then the rest of the internet. Grimes said on Twitter/X that she didn't mind that it leaked, and decided to finish the video and release it officially. According to her, she originally didn't like the video because she was sick while filming due to being three weeks pregnant.
• Creator Breakdown:
  • "Oblivion" was written about Grimes' own experience with sexual assault and PTSD.
  • "Delete Forever" was written about the many friends she lost to opiate addiction, and the resulting grief-induced self-destructive behavior.
• Creator Couple: Has been in relationships with other musicians, such as Devon Welsh, Pictureplane, and Jaime Brooks.
• Cut Song:
  • The tracklist to Miss Anthropocene originally included two songs,"Dark Souls" and "Shall I Compare Thee," that ended up not being on the official release. According to her, "Dark Souls" became an "engineering nightmare" and wasn't finished in time for the record. She has said she would like to release both songs at some point in the future.
  • Other song titles that were teased prior to release are "Favourite Psycho," "Blaze forever like a useless star," and "Death Angels."
  • She played two songs live on tour in 2014 that have never been released, "David" and "Sleepwalking." It's widely believed that these songs would've been on the "lost album" from 2014.
• Dye Hard: Her natural hair color is, as she puts it, "mouse brown," and she admits that she dyes it frequently because she finds her natural color boring.
• God Never Said That: News outlets still cite a misquote her saying that she "hates Art Angels," even though she has refuted that statement multiple times.
• In Memoriam:
  • Miss Anthropocene was dedicated to Lauren Valencia, Grimes' manager and close friend who died from cancer in 2019.
  • In the liner notes for the Visions vinyl re-issue, Grimes dedicated the song "Be a Body" to Hannah Sarah Myrberg, a dancer and friend of hers who was going to star in the video for the song, but passed away before it could be released.
• Promoted Fangirl: Was an outspoken fangirl of Lana Del Rey and often posted about her music on her Tumblr circa 2013; Grimes ended up opening for Lana on her "Endless Summer" tour.
• Reality Subtext:
  • "I Wanna Be Software," an upbeat track about abandoning humanity and joining the computers, was released a few months after she open-sourced an A.I. version of her voice for other producers to use on their own songs. Grimes literally is software now.
• Referenced by...:
  • "Genesis" was sampled by underground rapper Xavier Wulf on his song "Morning Dew."
  • Artists such as Yeule and Magdalena Bay have directly cited Grimes as an influence.
  "...yeule first started toying around with music production as a young teenager in the early 2010s, after they saw a live video of Grimes on the internet and thought, 'This fucking bitch does it all by herself… so I’m gonna try.'"
• She Also Did:
  • Appeared (and sang) in the short film Tabula Rasa by Matthew Rankin as Saint Boniface.
  • She wrote and sung the theme song for the Netflix cartoon Hilda. Even the voice of Hilda herself, Bella Ramsey, follows Grimes on Instagram!
  • She played Lizzy Wizzy in Cyberpunk 2077 and provided the original song "Delicate Weapon" (credited in-game as her character) for the soundtrack.
  • Made a cameo appearance in the short film Discord: The Movie.
  • Appeared in Doja Cat's "Need To Know" music video as one of the alien girls.
  • Co-stars in Bella Poarch's "Dolls" music video as a brainwashed cyborg.
• Screwed by the Lawyers: The publishing company for the specific edition of The Art of War (Sun Tzu) Grimes is reading in the "Violence" video filed a complaint around 6 months after the premiere about it being used without their permission, leading to the book being blurred via YouTube's video editor.
• Throw It In!: The drums becoming off-time towards the end of "Caladan" was a production mistake she decided to keep.
• Troubled Production:
  • Grimes locked herself in her apartment for two weeks and blacked out the windows to make Visions. She said she was attempting to emulate Hildegard von Bingen, and "wanted to go insane" during the album's creation. When she finally finished the album and re-emerged from her room, she was shaking.
  • The "Vanessa" music video was filmed in a day, after the previous video shoot for "Crystal Ball" fell apart. The dancers were paid in booze and cookies. The final result ended up paying off, and gave Grimes an initial boost of attention in 2011.
  • The "Shinigami Eyes" video ended up going through massive technical difficulties, and some of the footage was lost. Most of the footage used in the video was from the final hours of the shoot.
  • Miss Anthropocene was meant to be released in 2018, but was delayed two years due to problems with her label.
• What Could Have Been:
  • It's widely believed that Poppy was originally supposed to be the featuring artist in "We Appreciate Power" rather than HANA, but was replaced due to a personal falling out. Poppy — having already collaborated with Grimes, featuring her on the track "Play Destroy" earlier in 2018 — originally claimed the two were working on multiple songs, with the "song about power" heavily hinted to have become "We Appreciate Power", but for whatever reason, the role went to HANA (a now-deleted Instagram teaser suggested that Poppy was even meant to feature in the song's lyric video, reshot to include HANA instead). It should be noted that Grimes appears to be pretty indifferent to Poppy and their collaborations, while HANA actively denies Poppy's claims and says the song was with her and Grimes from the start.
  • A collaboration with rapper Azealia Banks went up in flames for reasons too insane to recount in full here.
  • Lil Uzi Vert apparently reached out to her to produce an EP for them, but then they "didn't write [her] back." "Darkseid" was one of the beats she made for them that she reworked to put on her own album instead.
  • A music video for "Be a Body" was made, but the dancer who starred in it passed away before it could be released, so it was shelved.
• Working Title:
  • Halfaxa's original title was Glossolalia.
  • "My Name Is Dark" was originally titled "That's What The Drugs Are For," but she was unable to name it that.
  • "Delete Forever" was "Black Swan Blues."
  • "You'll miss me when I'm not around" was "Last Call."
  • "IDORU" was "Adore You." (She said in an interview with the Grammy's that she hated the original title for being too trite and overused).

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