Grimes Says She Once Beat Up A Predator With Her Banjo, Reveals She Cannot Burp In “Delete Forever” Interview

Grimes Says She Once Beat Up A Predator With Her Banjo, Reveals She Cannot Burp In “Delete Forever” Interview

Grimes recently released her new album Miss Anthropocene, and in the latest installment of The New York Times’ Diary Of A Song feature, she breaks down standout track “Delete Forever.” Grimes has talked in the past about how she wrote “Delete Forever” in the week of Lil Peep’s tragic death from an opioid overdose; one of Grimes’ close friends died under similar circumstances when she was a teenager. “I’ve been wanting to write a song about it for a long time but I also felt shitty writing a song about it,” she explains. Like, if it was all streaming and I didn’t have to sell it on iTunes and it wasn’t on the vinyl, it would make me feel better because there’s something about selling it that just makes me really uncomfortable.”

Grimes also gets into some of the technical details of how she recorded the country-influenced track, which is built around a “Wonderwall”-esque guitar loop. “Do you ever go to a punk show and someone just plays an acoustic? I love sort of violent acoustic punk music,” she says. “The guitar is weirdly actually from a sample pack that I stretched and pitched a bunch. I wanted it to sound really raw because I was feeling really raw.” There are live instruments in there too, though: “There’s a real banjo, real violin. I had just always dreamed of making music with a banjo. It was sort of this dream that was cut short tragically.”

“The first instrument, before I made Visions, I bought a banjo,” she recounts. “And it was like 126 dollars, I remember this whole thing, it was my first instrument and I was like, ‘Oh, I love Dolly Parton, I’m gonna make a country record and be a country artist.” Which is so crazy. And then as I was bringing the banjo home — I got it on Craigslist — and this guy fucking followed me off the bus and followed me into this stairwell of my apartment building. I was like, ‘Wait, is this guy going to like, attack me right now?’ So I just turned around and started screaming and beating him with the banjo and I destroyed the banjo. But he left.”

But perhaps the most shocking revelation of the entire interview is saved for the very end, when Grimes attempts to burp. “This is probably TMI but I can’t burp,” she confesses. “I have this burping issue. Never burped. I’ve burped like two or three times in my whole life.” Watch the full interview below or at the NYT site; you’re not doing anything else anyway.

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