Sky Ferreira: 'I have this reputation for being difficult, but 50-year-old men were telling me how to be a woman!'
Her debut album has been more than five years in the making, but now Sky Ferreira is one of the most exciting prospects of 2014. She talks about battles with her label, being arrested for drug possession and speaking out about sexual abuse
Sky Ferreira: 'I used to get nagged about combing my hair. They told me I needed more makeup.' Photograph: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian
Back when +Sky Ferreira was 15, newly signed and attempting to make it as a pop star, her record label sent her for media training. "It was at the bottom of the Capitol building, in the basement with no windows," she recalls. "They said: 'Don't talk about religion, don't talk about sex, don't talk about drugs … basically, just look pretty and smile.'"
Skip forward to 2014, and it's safe to say that some of the media training didn't quite stick. Over the course of 75 entertaining minutes in a Manhattan restaurant, the 21-year-old singer talks about religion, sex and drugs, as well as a whole load of other things they might have disapproved of down at the bottom of the Capitol building. At times it's hard to keep up with her as she skips from one story to the next, her huge parka threatening to send drinks flying each time she waves her arms or leans in to whisper something conspiratorially, as if the top-secret information she is imparting is not likely to end up in the Guardian.
Ferreira is here primarily to discuss her debut album, Night Time, My Time, which has been more than five years in the making, thanks to disagreements with the label, changes of musical direction and scrapped songs (10 albums' worth, she reckons). But there are other topics: her abusive childhood, a family friendship with Michael Jackson and the controversy that surrounded the album's artwork, for which she was photographed topless in the shower by the controversial director Gaspar Noé ("It's my body," she reasons. "I can do whatever the fuck I want with it.")
There is also her recent arrest in upstate New York, in which she and her boyfriend – Zachary Cole Smith from the band Diiv – were accused of, among other things, possessing ecstasy (her) and heroin (him). In the mugshots, Ferreira stares out of an orange jumpsuit with impossibly sad eyes.
It is hard to know quite where to start with all of this, but given that her album has a song called Nobody Asked Me (If I Was Okay), that seems an apt place. So is she OK?
"Right now I am," she says, fiddling with a vodka and tonic that lasts her the full interview. "But, like, yesterday I just got overwhelmed. Sorry if this is a bit much but I think I was PMSing or something. My bank card got lost, the shower head wasn't working …" She looks up. "But I'm never, like, super smiley. If I see people that are too happy it makes me anxious."
Anxiety, self-doubt and vulnerability are themes that run through Night Time, My Time. After years of being pushed as a more mainstream pop prospect, Ferreira's album feels very much like a personal statement, even down to the leftfield influences she has incorporated into her sound: krautrock, for instance, or the electronic thrum of Suicide. Ironically, given its protracted birth, the record was written and recorded (with Ariel Rechtshaid and Justin Raisen) in "pretty much two weeks", despite the fact her label was planning to release different material altogether.
"I do a lot of stuff behind their back," she admits. "I have to because nobody ever listens to me! I do have supporters at the label, but I still have to deal with a lot of people who are like: 'Er, I don't want to spend that money on her.'"
She rolls her eyes, then continues. "I have this reputation from 'insiders' for being difficult, but people only considered me difficult because I wouldn't just agree with everything they said. Like, 50-year-old men telling me how to be a woman! Seriously, I used to get nagged about combing my hair. They would tell me I needed more makeup and that I had circles around my eyes. I've had that since elementary school – I used to get called zombie."
Sky Ferreira performing at The Scala in London. Photograph: Gus Stewart/WireImage
Ferreira grew up in the Venice Beach area of Los Angeles, but it wasn't a conventional upbringing. She was raised primarily by her grandmother ("My parents were around, but they weren't ready for children") and developed an independent streak. Even her grandmother's job – she was a hairdresser – was far from conventional when you take into account that her employer was Michael Jackson.
"She went everywhere with him, so I was always around him and his kids," says Ferreira. "I had birthdays there, I sang gospel music for him – he was kind of my mentor, so he influenced me, but more as a friend than as Michael Jackson, the pop star." When she heard the news of Jackson's death, she says: "Everything just kinda stopped, it was the first death I'd ever experienced. But sometimes something will remind me of him and I feel a lot better."
Ferreira hated school, comparing it to jail, but she soon discovered the music industry was just as bad, with its cliques and constant criticism. "I went from being at school to getting on aeroplanes to see various producers and kinda being whored around, you know? I did this to escape high school and got treated way worse."
Life in the pop world hasn't been easy for Ferreira. Over the past few years it's felt as if her career was on the verge of being launched over and over again, with precious little product at the end of it (she featured in the Guardian's New band of the day column as far back as 2009). She says she felt written off by the time she was 19, and got obsessed with her critics on blogs and Twitter. "It took a toll on me mentally," she says. "It was literally like being spat on. And because I didn't believe in the music I was making myself, it was hard. I felt like the worst person to ever exist."
When I ask who she had to help her during this confusing and unstable time in her career, she looks sad. "Uh … myself?" she offers. "I don't know. I really didn't have anyone." She refused to quit, though, not least because she knew she would never get a job doing anything else: "I daydream, I run late … at least in this job I can put those things to use!"
Ferreira's breakthrough came with Everything Is Embarrassing, the sparkling pop song she wrote with Dev Hynes, which was released in August 2012. She acknowledges how much it helped her but is also defensive about it, saying: "This album proves that I am more than just that one song."
Her caginess appears to stem from the fact that her relationship with Hynes has gone downhill recently, with Hynes apparently upset over comments she made as to whose song it was. According to Ferreira: "He wrote the demo, and I've always given him credit, all I said was that the song wouldn't have been made without me on it. I think it's a shame because Dev's really talented and he's my friend. Well, was my friend – it's kinda sad that we can't be [friends] now."
It seemed to signal the start of a fresh chapter in Ferreira's career. But just as things looked to be on the right track, the story of her arrest broke.
"I'm not saying the arrest was funny," she says, before leaning into the dictaphone – "It was not funny … OK, Mr Judge?" She then proceeds to tell her version of the arrest, which involves so many amusing anecdotes it's hard to know which parts exactly she didn't find funny. There was the prison guard who had to accompany her to the bathroom and flush the toilet for her: "I had a kidney infection at the time and I was pissing bright orange from my medication. She must have thought I was an alien."
There was the police refusing to accept her bank card to bail herself out because the signature was different from the one in her passport: "But I got my passport when I was, like, 16 so obviously my signature is different now – it's not like there's still a heart on the 'i'." And then there were the notorious mugshots: "They handed me this orange suit and some Crocs and I'm like: 'Nooooo! Not Crocs! This must be my real punishment!'"
As you might expect from a model, the aesthetics of the arrest especially bother Ferreira: "Personally I prefer the blue mugshots they took when we were first arrested," she laughs. "The orange one is after I've been crying for, like, 12 hours. Which was a bad idea because they were telling me I had to stop crying otherwise they'd put me in a mental institute."
The arrest was bad, but the reaction to it was worse. Her mum found out through CNN because Ferreira hadn't worked out how to tell her. Her dad, meanwhile, flew out to New York, "which is saying a lot because we're not exactly best friends". It was the reaction of some of her friends that hurt her the most, though. "They were posting my mugshot on Facebook and making fun of me as if I wasn't going to see," she says. "Then once my album got an 8.3, 8.2 or whatever [8.1, in fact] on Pitchfork they're suddenly all calling me: 'Can you sing on this for me?' I was like: 'Fuck you, pretending you think drugs are all bad when I know you get way more fucked up on drugs than I do.'"
So does she have a heroin problem? Ferreira says not: "I've never done hard drugs. I am the world's first heroin addict who's never taken heroin."
There are plenty of songs on Night Time, My Time that sound as if they're referring to her arrest. I Blame Myself, arguably the album's standout track, features the chorus: "How could you know what it feels like to fight the hounds of hell?" But the album was actually written before it happened. Rather, the running themes of insecurity are, Ferreira says, a consequence of her enduring sexual abuse as a child and not dealing with it until it came to writing the album.
"I think I literally just snapped and hit rock bottom," she says. "I didn't understand it when I was younger, and then it happened again when I was older and that's when I decided to move to New York." She mustered the courage to tell the police about the abuse, but says they were useless. "They blamed it on me for being quiet. They said being quiet made me the target for it."
She looks uncomfortable telling this story, but says she thinks it's important to be honest because it might help others going through the same to get help: "At school there might be an ad that says, like: 'Rape is bad – tell a counsellor', but it doesn't really work like that."
If there is some kind of positive to be taken from this, then it's this: Ferreira thinks that dealing with the trauma is the reason why the album has connected with people. "Because not everyone's happy. Most people aren't in love, and even when they are they're miserable a lot of the time."
Given the available evidence, it is possible to depict two completely different versions of Sky Ferreira. One is the vulnerable, messed-up kid who has spent half a decade procrastinating over a solitary record and is perilously close to losing contact with the rails. The other is a tough, independent-minded young woman who won't let record labels – nor her troubled upbringing – dictate what she wants to be. That is what makes her such a compelling pop star. Earlier, this interview started with the question "Are you OK?", and after spending an hour with Ferreira it is a question I still want to ask. She seems tough, yet fragile, too.
"I think I'm both," she says, instantly, before adding: "I think you need to be both if you want to be successful and stand out." She says this with a look of steely determination in her eyes. Then, as if to prove her point, she averts her gaze and goes back to awkwardly stirring her drink.
• Night Time, My Time is released in the UK on 28 January on Universal. Tim Jonze's trip to New York was paid for by Universal.
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