FEATURE:
Spotlight
Griff
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THERE are some names that have…
been highlighted by a lot of people in the music industry as ones to watch. One such name is Griff. Perhaps the biggest honour was her coming fifth in BBC’s Sound of 2021. Before moving on and bringing in a couple of other interviews, I want to quote from the BBC article - one that spotlights an incredible and promising talent:
“How do you write a song about heartbreak when you've never had your heart broken?
For 19-year-old pop singer Griff, the answer is simple: Just look around you.
"There's lots of scenarios where you can experience heartbreak," she explains. "It doesn't have to be romantic.
"Like if a friend moves away, or you lose a family member. When someone leaves your life, you feel like there's a black hole there."
So, on the moving piano ballad Good Stuff, she sings about missing the foster children who passed through her family's home in Hertfordshire. On Didn't Break It Enough, she's blindsided by the lingering affection for someone who betrayed her.
Her sparse, dramatic songs about being a "hormonal teenager" have already won her a legion of loyal fans - not least the 160 music critics, DJs and musicians who voted her into fifth place on the BBC Music Sound of 2021 list”.
Born Sarah Faith Griffiths, she was schooled in soul and gospel music by her Jamaican father and Chinese mother, before falling in love with Taylor Swift's Fearless album when she was eight years old.
"It was such a contrast to all the stuff I'd been brought up on," she recalls. "The pop sensibility, and the fact she was singing about teenage stuff: It was my first memory of realising I loved pop music."
Griff had her first recording session at the age of 10, "just doing embarrassing things in a band". By the time she left school, she'd signed a deal with Warner Music, releasing her first single in July 2019, two weeks after she finished her A-Levels.
Despite the restrictions of the pandemic, she's already enjoyed a meteoric rise - ending 2020 by soundtracking Disney's Christmas advert, and receiving a personal endorsement from Taylor Swift after recording a cover of Exile, from the star's Folklore album.
"Honestly, this whole year feels super, super-surreal," laughs the singer, who calls the BBC from the bedroom where she produces all of her own music (complete with a limited edition Taylor Swift "Baby Taylor" guitar on the wall).
"I still feel like I should be doing my homework”.
“You started making music when you were still at school. Did your homework suffer?
I was actually a very good student! But, especially towards the end of my school career, I was doing my A-Levels in the morning, then travelling into London, doing a studio session, coming back home, doing a quick economics essay, then doing it all over again. It was like a split life I was living.
Mirror Talk was one of those stop-you-in-your-tracks debut singles. What made you choose it as your first release?
It's not your conventional love song. It's kind of about having melodramatic breakdowns by yourself, and your relationship with yourself, rather than other people. And there's literally two elements in the track - so it was super-sparse and felt different to everything else out there.
We put it out literally two weeks after my last exam, and Annie Mac premiered it [on BBC Radio 1]. It was my first ever radio play and, for me, that was like, "Woah, this is really happening."
Pop music has become a lot braver about tackling mental health, with artists like Halsey and Ariana Grande discussing depression and self-image. That's got to be healthy.
Definitely. It makes sense to have songs that tap into what people are really feeling, instead of this inflated, glossy ideal of what we should be feeling.
You've been compared to Billie Eilish and Lorde and Taylor Swift. Do you hear those references in your music?
Definitely! It's the biggest compliment ever. Lorde is probably my number one inspiration. But it's quite scary to think people would make those comparisons. I feel like I've got impostor syndrome and I've just been winging it until this point.
This has been a very strange year for anyone trying to launch a music career. All the things you're supposed to do - concerts, showcases, festivals, TV and radio appearances - have pretty much been off the cards. How have you found it?
It's been the best-worst year ever. I've been fortunate in that I've been busy. But I also feel like I'm just sitting in my music room and filming myself. Social media's suddenly much more important. So there's a lot more stuff to do: Influencer kind-of things, that I never thought I'd have to do as a musician.
What have you got up your sleeve for 2021?
Honestly, I'm playing it by ear. I've actually been writing loads over lockdown - maybe a hundred songs - but I never know if they're good or not! Hopefully, I'll release a single in January, and an EP in March or May”.
Despite the fact Griff is getting a lot of love and focus now, her The Mirror Talk E.P. arrived in 2019. She has been on the scene a little while and, every year, she is making some big steps. I think she is going to be one of the main artists to keep an eye out for in 2021! I will finish off with a couple of interviews but, if you are new to Griff, I would advise you to check out her social media channels (links are at the bottom) and investigate. I really love her sound and how she is accessible and relatable but sounds so different to many of her peers. I want to bring in an interview from The Face, where we discover some revealing insights:
“20%: At what point, did you realise you’d be able to do what you love for a living?
I think I started to realise it when there was a bit of industry interest I think, like I started doing sessions with anyone that would do one with me and I think that made my music go around a little bit and yeah it was crazy hearing that publishers and record labels wanted to work with me and I didn’t really know what that meant. I think I only knew it would be a career for me when I signed when I was 17 but I was still in school so I had just finished my A‑Levels.
40%: What kind of emotions and experiences influence your work?
I draw inspiration a lot from any relationships I’ve had in my life whether that’s like friends, family or a relationship with myself, because I think even though most of the stuff I write will end up sounding like a love song a lot of isn’t actually a romantic relationship it’s just kind of about the feelings I have towards different things and people. I think you can always twist that into a generic kind of sounding love song that everyone can identify with.
60%: What can artists do to help save the world?
Woah, that’s such a big question. I don’t know, I would argue that every artist is kinda saving the world a little bit, like as long as anything they put out someone’s enjoying it I feel like you’re saving a part the world and your allowing someone to escape from their mundane every day and like enter a different world.
If you’re talking about like all the problems in the world, I don’t know I guess artists these days should stand for something and be passionate about issues in the world and like where they are passionate about something should speak up about it”.
I will wrap up soon, but I found an interesting article from Bringin’ It Backwards, as it is quite detailed and illuminating. There are a few passages that caught my attention:
“It didn’t take long for GRIFF to begin embracing her difference, in music and in life. A rotating cast-list of foster children passed through the Griffiths household, where she still lives, probably fifteen in total. “It teaches you something about selfless love,” she says of having so many foster siblings. “The first is and always was going to be the hardest to say goodbye to when they went to be adopted.” She was eight years old. “And I was the only girl, and the youngest. You learn not to be the focus of attention, really quickly.”
There is something in the music of GRIFF that speaks of a wisdom far beyond her years. Though Mirror Talk addresses her generation’s anxious relationship with self-perception, set against a spinetingling spider’s web of beats, she is pleasingly devoid of neuroses. “That doesn’t mean I haven’t been around them, though,” she says. GRIFF could not wait to get out of school. “Teenage girls can be hard to be around all the time,” she says, “I found my place but eventually, by the time it came to leave, that was just me and my best friend, who is now at St Martins.”
Being mixed race left her, she says “kind of not feeling like anything. I’m used to being around white girls but I’m so obviously not. I am a bit of a white girl but I never will 100% be because I look so different and I am so different. The Chinese family would come around and I’m obviouslay so westernised and removed from that. Then the black side comes round and I’m not really in touch with that, either. You’re always in this weird limbo.”
All these esoteric emotional states would be parlayed directly into the quizzical nature of her music, married to a natural ear for a pop hook. GRIFF’s production and song-writing skills were honed at home, utilising her brother’s computer software and the family piano after school. “It came naturally,” she says. “But writing music, actually, is kind of a ridiculous thing. Every day you’re expected to reinvent eight notes and marry them to a new concept.”
She found her well was deep for conjuring new worlds in song and soon attracted the attention of a family friend who began encouraging to her seek contacts in the industry. Her only worry, on signing a deal just prior to heading into the big bad world from school was that something so beloved, such a safe space for her, would now be swallowed by the machine. “My biggest fear was that music was a hobby before and it was so exciting to do, especially when school was awful. It was such a relief to go home and write. My fear was that it suddenly wouldn’t be a hobby anymore. Would the ideas still be there”.
I am not sure whether an album is planned for the near-future from Griff - though I know there will be new singles and releases soon. She is an astonishing talent; a musician who has a very prosperous and bright future ahead. If you are new to her work, rectify that deficiency now and check her out! It only takes a single song to realise that Griff is…
AN incredible young artist.
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