Sky Ferreira is not yet 18, and there are five weeks to go until the release of her debut single, but already her reputation precedes her. All of the rumours about her are true. She was a precociously gifted vocalist who made Michael Jackson cry when she sang at his house as a child. When she came to London last year, it was she, not her galpal Peaches Geldof, that the paparazzi chased down the street, much to the latter’s chagrin. She made a drunk and somewhat disorderly cameo in a documentary about the French dance duo Justice. Her exchanges via Twitter with labelmate Katy Perry, apparently a friend, have become increasingly bitchy. (When she posted a Tweet concerned that songs from her unfinished album were being leaked onto the internet, Russell Brand’s fiancée replied, “Maybe u should stop sleeping with so many DJs.”) But there is an upside to her furious networking — she managed to coax most of the world’s top producers into working on her album.
There is a lot resting on this 17-year-old. In fact, her beleaguered record company is reported to be banking on her to such an extent that, when I was in LA at Christmas, an A&R executive from another label told me: “Sky Ferreira is either going to make or break EMI in 2010.” If she fails, it won’t be for want of trying: it was through a mutual acquaintance, Frankmusik, that she contacted me last summer; her email was full of fighting talk. “What I’m going to say might come off as conceited,” it began, ending several hundred words later with the warning: “Do not underestimate me! I have a lot to prove, but I will do it.”
Ferreira has just moved from LA to New York, where she is doing interviews and fashion shoots, and rehearsing for live dates. She is getting used to having cameras and voice recorders trained on her. “It’s a little weird,” she says, picking at asparagus and cheese in a downtown restaurant. “But then I’ve had people writing about me since I was 14.” She laughs. “I’m one of those people who you either love or hate.” She looks up from the BlackBerry that she has been unembarrassedly texting on. “They say I’m an ‘It girl’ or a socialite, and I’m not really any of those things.”
People have been misjudging Ferreira all her life. When she was 11, her Brazilian father and Native American mother realised they could no longer afford to support her, so she went to live with her grandmother in Culver City, California, where she was mercilessly teased for being different. It was a scenario straight out of Mean Girls or a Larry Clark movie. “I didn’t like the social situation at school. I was painfully shy and got picked on a lot. Then, when I was 14, I suddenly grew tall and thin, so my features looked really exaggerated. Plus, I had dark circles around my eyes. I became very self-conscious and insecure. I looked like a crackhead, but I wasn’t.”
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Her classmates were so convinced she was on drugs that they arranged an intervention. “I was like, ‘Intervention for what? Not combing my hair?'"
Her grandmother — she refers to her as “mom” — was strict. “She raised me well,” she says. “People think I take drugs, they think I’m a crazy party girl, and I’m not. I work all day — I’ve been working for three years straight, writing my album and doing photo shoots. I went to nightclubs to watch DJs, and became friends with older people, but I wasn’t hooking up with them. People say, ‘Oh, she’s a slut’, but I’ve only had one boyfriend — I don’t even kiss random guys.” She was the “weird freak” at school, her classmates so convinced she was on drugs that they arranged an intervention. “I was like, ‘Intervention for what? Not combing my hair?’” The only drug she took was medicine for her attention deficit disorder; it made her drowsy, so she would either fall asleep or lie slumped over her desk, writing out the words to David Bowie’s Life on Mars over and over, or coming up with her own. “I started learning the structure of songs,” she says.
The decision to home-school her was prompted by her bunking off lessons to hang out all day in record stores on Hollywood Boulevard. “The sad part,” she admits, “was that I liked learning.” Her favourite poet was Allen Ginsberg, her favourite author Franz Kafka. “David Lynch should do a movie about him,” she decides. She was supposed to meet the director with the intention of collaborating on a song, but he had to cancel. Maybe he’ll direct one of her videos?
“Or if I was in one of his films, that would work, too,” offers Ferreira, who already has two low-budget Baltimore-based independent movies, Putty Hill and Metal Gods, under her belt. You could do six degrees of separation on virtually any celebrity and wind up at Ferreira. She has met Iggy Pop, who boasted to her about his new Ferrari, and the night before this interview, she had dinner with David Byrne and Björk, who was “sitting across the table from me with pyramids on her head”.
She drops names with nonchalance, hardly surprising given that her grandmother was Michael Jackson’s hairstylist for 30 years, and she grew up around the King of Pop. Ferreira was vocally trained in classical and gospel music as a child, and her rendition, aged 11, of the gospel song His Eye Is on the Sparrow reduced Jackson to tears.
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Only when she reminisces about her run-in with Kim Fowley, the 1960s hitmaker and manager of the 1970s girl rockers the Runaways, does she stop texting and show me a message on her BlackBerry. It is from the svengali himself — Ferreira had wanted him to be one of a dozen producers on her album, with each allotted a single track, but Fowley wanted to do the whole record. She smiles at the curt last line: “Next time hire a platinum producer and you’ll go platinum — if there is a next time.”
Fowley might have been a risk for Ferreira — who loves 1970s rock so much, she “would marry Marc Bolan if he was still alive”, and seems seriously tempted to call on Bowie when she discovers where he lives in New York — but the line-up of producers for her album is fail-safe. After she contacted Bloodshy & Avant (the writing/production team behind Britney’s Toxic) through MySpace and got them on board, the rest fell into place. The track listing will feature at least a couple of collaborations with P!nk’s producer, Linda Perry, the R&B supremo Dallas Austin, Greg Kurstin (Kylie, Lily Allen), Paul Epworth (Florence, Bloc Party) and Teddybears (Robyn), and one with Frankmusik. Radiohead’s producer, Nigel Godrich, did the vocals for one number, and a further recording with the British rave-punks Friendly Fires is on the shortlist.
A voice coach and a choreographer is there, explaining that she is 'introducing acting elements to create an overall entertainer'
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Ferreira is disappointed, however, that her original vision for the album — 12 tracks and 12 producers for a tour of contemporary music styles — wasn’t realised. Not that she’s unhappy with her lyrics, comprising as they do “the story of my life so far”, a series of dark diary entries and savagings of the “pretentious people I see all around me”. Nor is she displeased with the music, which veers from the auto-tuned urban pop of the first single, One, to silky ballads, grunge lite, electro/R&B and Blondie-esque disco. She just wishes it had greater thematic unity. “They [EMI] said it needed a ‘sound’,” she says, and suddenly she is every inch the grumpy teen. “They make me do sounds I don’t want to do.” After being courted by all the labels, she signed to EMI because it offered her the greatest creative control; just maybe not enough. “They should listen to me more!” she mock whines, adding: “If record companies listened to artists a little more, they wouldn’t be in the position they are now.”
The next day, she is rehearsing in a studio in the trendy NYC district of Chelsea for a show the next week in Paris organised by a French style magazine, Jalouse. Her band includes a girl on violin, another on keyboards, and a boy on laptop duties. Also present are a voice coach and a choreographer, who explains that she is “introducing acting elements to create an overall entertainer”. Ferreira, in a Tupac T-shirt, leggings and Timberlands, looks exhausted after an Elle photo shoot and, from beneath a thick curtain of hair, barely acknowledges the choreographer’s instructions. It is odd to see this self-possessed woman, for whom control is crucial, relinquishing it in the presentation of her performance; perhaps as a consequence, she moves a little awkwardly. She wants a career like Damon Albarn’s or Jack White’s, with the freedom to pursue side projects. She is wary of comparisons with other female stars, yawning at suggestions that she is a hip Ke$ha, an arty Katy Perry or a new version of something old.
“People say, ‘You’re like Madonna or Debbie Harry.’ I’m like, ‘Please, how many people have you said that to?’” Like her ambitious blonde forebears, though, she sees a long career ahead. She might have to wait a while to show her quirks, but she’ll get there; she always does. She may joke about her daily meltdowns and panic attacks, but she’s no pushover. “I play stupid sometimes,” she says, reaching for her BlackBerry. “But I know what I’m talking about.”