Im Never Again Sending Live Videos of Our Kid Moving

So I show up at Grimes's house on a Tuesday afternoon. Grimes's real name is Claire Boucher, and she answers to Grimes or Claire, or even better, c, equally in the speed of light. Simply always since she began dating the richest human being in all of man culture, and peculiarly since she had a child with him in May 2020—a boy they telephone call X Æ A-12, which she pronounces "X A.I. Archangel," or Ten for short—she's had to learn to brand peace with much of the world erasing her identity equally ane of the past decade's about fearless, adventurous solo artists and coming to know her, start and foremost, as Elon Musk's girlfriend.

For a person who has spent her entire life flinging herself at the world and making art out of the combustions, her new existence has required some adjusting. Discretion does not come naturally to her. Last year, someone posted a seven-minute mash-up on YouTube titled "Grimes oversharing in interviews compilation." "She has no filter—what is in her listen comes out her oral cavity," says Liv Boeree, a erstwhile Earth Serial of Poker star and trained astrophysicist, whom Grimes met through Musk and savage madly in friendship with after a marathon chat most artificial intelligence. "I find it so refreshing and exhilarating, but apparently it causes her trouble."

In one case upon a fourth dimension, this was part of Grimes's charm, simply at present an errant remark could follow her kid for life, or crater Tesla's stock, or tip off people about where she lives. Doxers and stalkers and paparazzi are nothing new for her—she'due south a female pop star in 2022—but these are people trying to outmaneuver the guy who runs Tesla and SpaceX (and founded the Boring Company and Neuralink). They rails his individual jet and post its location on Twitter. They swarm his factories with drones. Once they find him, they detect her presently plenty, so they find X.

"Nosotros move and movement and motion," she'll tell me later, "because people continue finding where nosotros live."

Grimes opens the front door wearing a double-layered cream and black shirt, made by a Korean designer friend'due south label, with the word algorithm stitched in red on the collar and cuffs. She invites me in with a cheerful hullo, then apologizes for the spartan conditions. She's only but moved into this business firm, which belongs to friends. X is with his begetter until tomorrow, so the firm is dim and silent.

Nosotros settle into a cozy nook off the entryway, the ane room she'south had time to Grimes up with some anime-inspired decor she purchased during a wee-hours Ambien-fueled spree on Etsy. For the next 4 hours, every bit she and I split a six-pack of some local craft beer and get slowly buzzed considering nosotros're both lightweights, Princess Mononoke glowers at me from a thin blanket behind her on the burrow. Covering the floor is an enormous Death Note rug, based on a gory 2006–2007 Japanese anime Idiot box serial nigh a teenager who tin dictate the time and manner of anyone's expiry by writing it downward in a volume. (Information technology's on Netflix.) Death Annotation is the chief inspiration for Grimes'due south recent single "Shinigami Eyes," likewise as the video costarring her pal Jennie from Blackpink. "I like making friends with demons," Grimes chants in her demon-baby singing voice. "Yous need special eyes to come across 'em."

Grimes is an invigorating hang. Fourth dimension flies around her in nonlinear fashion. Art and ideas are her ability source, and her energy is infectious. She speaks so fast, in a unique Esperanto of academic theory, Silicon Valley 3.0 futurism, and lodge-child slang. At 1 point she hops up to show me her new tattoo, a series of milky-white slashes on her upper trunk meant to look similar conflicting scars. Nevertheless for someone who might be from another planet, she's remarkably down-to-earth. For someone who's so excited near A.I., she sure does love the visitor of people.

Habiliment by Louis Vuitton; sleeve by Urstadt.Swan; rings past Egonlab. Throughout: hair past Garren; makeup by Kabuki; manicure by Mei Kawajiri; set design by Stefan Beckman.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY STEVEN KLEIN. STYLED By PATTI WILSON.

Almost 15 minutes after we sit downwards to discuss her new music, a "space opera" due this spring-ish tentatively chosen Book 1, I hear what sounds vaguely like a lone weep from an infant upstairs. I think I notice Grimes wince, simply I say zilch and move on. Could exist anything.

Some other few minutes pass. Merely as I'm about to bring up one of Book 1's highlights, a soonhoped-for-ubiquitous banger called "Sci-Fi" that she cowrote with The Weeknd and his longtime producer Illangelo, I hear information technology once more. This time information technology's multiple cries, and information technology'south unmistakable. I've got ii kids. That'due south a babe. And I can tell by the frozen look on my host'south face that she heard it too. So I brace myself to enquire the strangest question of my career: Do yous have another baby in your life, Grimes?

Her trunk clenches and she looks away.

"I'k not at liberty to speak on these things," she begins, and and then all in a tumble she says: "Any is going on with family stuff, I but feel like kids need to stay out of information technology, and Ten is just out there. I mean, I think E is really seeing him as a protégé and bringing him to everything and stuff.… 10 is out there. His situation is like that. But, yes, I don't know."

She's rattled, and I'm mortified past even accidentally making a adult female—a new mother, no less—feel exposed and vulnerable. I propose we interruption for a moment to discuss the surreal professional ethics at play, which are that I can't pretend I don't know she's got a hugger-mugger baby with the world'southward wealthiest human being hiding upstairs. Specially when she invited me here. Information technology's a calming period that breaks with a sitcom punch line: full-blown infant screams upstairs, followed past the voice of a woman pleading SHH. Now we both start laughing.

Did she really recall I wasn't going to hear a baby?

Grimes just shakes her head. "She'southward a piddling colicky too." She laughs again and buries her face in her hands. "I don't know. I don't know what I was thinking."

Congratulations to Grimes and Elon Musk on the birth of their second child together! It'due south a girl!

Y'all probably have some questions.

When Grimes was pregnant with X in 2020, she had a articulate sense of the boy he'd turn out to be. "I just had a vibe," she says. "I was like, 'I feel like he's going to exist a peaceful giant.' " She was right.

Grimes, meanwhile, used to get called "waifish" so often in profiles that she railed against it in a viral 2013 Tumblr mail. The terminal month of her pregnancy with X, she couldn't walk. "He was pressing on my nerves, so I kept collapsing," she says. "I took a few steps and collapsed. Information technology was kind of scary, because yous don't want to fall a lot when you lot're viii months pregnant. So I would only clamber to the bathroom and crawl back or whatever." At one point during the pregnancy, she thought she was dying. "Like, I hemorrhaged. It was scary." She and Musk wanted more than kids, just she feared serious complications.

Terminal autumn, though, Musk appeared to confirm rumors that they'd separate. "Grimes and I are, I'd say, probably semi-separated," he told Time, which named him its 2021 Person of the Twelvemonth. He chalked this up to decorated careers in afar cities. He was spending more time in Texas, where SpaceX operates its Starbase complex and Tesla is opening a new Gigafactory. Grimes was bunkered in Los Angeles with 10 and working on Book 1. Around the time of her daughter's nascence in Dec, though, she relocated full time to Austin, and that's where I'thousand coming together her—on a sleepy neighborhood cul-de-sac 15 minutes from downtown, less than an hour by private jet from Starbase, and a short drive from the Tesla factory.

Shut followers of Grimes on social media may think that she was definitely not pregnant during the latter months of 2021. She and Musk used a surrogate this fourth dimension, which in combination with the pandemic enabled them to keep their daughter a secret, right up until Y shared the news merely now on her own.

That'due south what they telephone call her, by the way: Y. She's got a full name, just this doesn't seem like the moment to ask for information technology. If today'south excitement turns out to be how the globe learns that Ten has a little sister, well, at least Grimes did it her mode.

And then, look—are Grimes and Musk still together?

Yes. No. What do you mean by "together"?

"At that place'southward no real give-and-take for it," she begins. "I would probably refer to him every bit my boyfriend, only we're very fluid. We live in separate houses. We're best friends. We encounter each other all the fourth dimension…. Nosotros just have our own matter going on, and I don't await other people to understand it." What matters, I offering, is that they're happy. So are they? "Yes," she says. "This is the best information technology's ever been.... Nosotros just demand to be free." They programme to take more than children as well. "We've e'er wanted at least iii or four."

Grimes was a musical autodidact who went viral in 2010 with some of the very first songs she made on GarageBand, then spent a decade creating every single annotation in a male-dominated industry, no matter how much unrequested help men kept offering. She continued with Musk through Twitter in 2018, which is how he discovered they'd made the same pun about a night theory of A.I.-authorized torture chosen Roko'due south basilisk. (He tweeted "Rococo basilisk"; years before, she'd made a music video featuring a character called Rococo Basilisk.) While the earth was huddled indoors, Tesla took off like a BFR—that's an within joke for the SpaceX junkies in the house—sending Musk's net worth into the stratosphere, and he seemed to delight in provoking his trolls. For Grimes, the dent to her reputation has been existent. Overnight, a chunk of her core constituency—the internet—turned on her. She was no longer a revolutionary. She was Marie Antoinette.

"I feel really trapped between two worlds," Grimes tells me. "I used to exist and then far left that I went through a period of living without currency, living outside." This was during and after higher at McGill University in Montreal. In one case she and a young man ran afoul of the police in Minnesota as they tried to sail a houseboat they'd built out of actual junk down the Mississippi River. The law impounded the boat and sent them on their mode. During her first shows every bit Grimes, she'd sleep in a tent when she couldn't afford a hotel. She's 34, now, though, with a job and two kids. "I hateful, when people say I'm a class traitor that is not…an inaccurate description," she admits. "I was securely from the far left and I converted to beingness substantially a capitalist Democrat. A lot of people are understandably upset."

We're approaching hr iii of talking, and beer three. Y is sound asleep upstairs.

"But at the same time…" I can physically find her brain cells saying screw it. "Similar, bro wouldn't fifty-fifty become a new mattress." This was dorsum when they were both living in Los Angeles. Her side of the mattress had a pigsty in it. When she raised the issue, he suggested they replace his mattress with the ane at her house. The mattresses are fine now. All the same: "Bro does not live like a billionaire. Bro lives at times below the poverty line. To the bespeak where I was like, can we not live in a very insecure $40,000 house? Where the neighbors, like, film us, and in that location's no security, and I'g eating peanut butter for 8 days in a row?" She is well enlightened that many encounter Musk every bit some apotheosis of luxurious backlog, and Grimes is here to tell yous she fuckin' wishes.

This home in Austin could be any firm in whatsoever upscale neighborhood. It's got a gorgeous view of the Colorado River in the dorsum and a tiny pool that she has no plans to use because she'due south not a big fan of sun. It'south a prissy house. It'south no Versailles.

"I'm not super into amenities," she says. "But, um, I need nutrition and stuff."

Grimes often describes her music as "post-internet," because the unabridged history of sound is just a click abroad, from Nine Inch Nails to Hildegard von Bingen's 12th-century chanting and Stravinsky to Mariah Carey's daunting octaves, ready for her to pluck, bend, shape, and morph. If you fall into the category of people who'd never heard of her until she met Musk, 2015's "Kill V. Maim," one of the biggest hits off her 4th album, Art Angels, is the perfect iv-infinitesimal crash course. It'due south a pulsing, menacing dance-punk rager, told from the perspective of Michael Corleone in The Godfather Role Ii, only in the Grimes remix, he'southward a genderfluid vampire wrestling with a moral conundrum. Just your garden-variety pop disquisition on the nature of man and the inexorable pull toward brutality and chaos. "Impale Five. Maim" has been streamed 72 1000000 times on Spotify alone. Decades from now, information technology'll still audio similar a revolution.

Book 1 remains a work in progress, but the 15 songs Grimes has got so far stand for her about audacious piece of work yet, each song its own planet of sound—crisp California pop, gild shakers, loonshit anthems, ethereal requiems, "fairycore." The anthology takes place in the distant future, at a stage of technological advocacy when you tin can upload your consciousness into a robotic body and essentially live forever as a Cymek, in the parlance of science-fiction aficionados. ("I feel similar Jeff Bezos is gonna be a Cymek," says Grimes.) Her space opera'due south antihero is a Cymek she calls "the dark male monarch," the world's greatest engineer, whom Grimes featured in the video for her contempo single "Player of Games." By the fourth dimension our story begins, he'due south pushing 10,000.

Grimes is still hammering out the plot, but i fundamental thread is a kind of cyberpunk spin on Swan Lake. There'due south a white swan (an exaggerated version of Grimes—the dark king's dream girl, a simulated courtesan who grows weary of existence a muse) and there's a black swan (an A.I. menace who wreaks havoc in the simulation), except in Grimes'southward feminist reboot, the swans ditch the Cymek, fall in dear, and fight for each other instead. From there it gets kind of complicated. "Despite all my rage / I am all the same just a doll in a cage," she sings, paying homage to Baton Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins, heroes of her wilding teens.

Book 1 is Grimes's Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, with a hint of Lemonade, and information technology was partly inspired by a theory of Musk's: that she'south a simulation. "We keep having this conversation where E'southward like, 'Are you existent? Or are we living in my memory, and you're like a synthesized companion that was created to be my companion here?' " If this sounds like he's request her if she's a virtual pleasure bot, that's not (entirely) what he means. Anyhow, she says, she's never felt entirely real herself: "The caste to which I feel engineered to have been this, like, perfect companion is crazy."

Does she mean the perfect companion for him specifically?

"Yes. Even just studying astrophysics and neuroscience. And information technology's actually abrasive because people think I'chiliad an airhead who went to art schoolhouse." (She actually wanted to, only it was likewise expensive.)

A chat with Grimes can be like staring at a Tokyo subway map when you don't speak Japanese. She's always using scientific terms and alluding to exciting concepts, and then checking with me to brand certain I know what they mean because unremarkably I exercise non. If in that location's an airhead in this room, information technology's not her.

"Do you know what a protopia is?" No. (A state of gradual progress toward utopia.)

"Effective altruism?" I mean, I know what those words mean. (Using data analysis to maximize resources deployment to help others.)

"The Overton window?" I idea then, only I looked it up while she was in the bathroom and I was wrong. (The spectrum of accepted discourse and achievable ideas.)

"What about neuroplasticity?" Now I'm worried she only thinks I'm stupid.

Grimes was raised equally a strict Catholic, which she struggled with, though she loved the spectacle of church. The Old Attestation was similar an ultraviolent blockbuster. Biblical manga. She spent year i of the pandemic taking care of Ten and plunging downward a rabbit hole of Homer, Herodotus, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the Icelandic sagas. An idea began to class: a space opera almost the milky way-altering events unfolding before her eyes, in which she has go an unwitting participant. A dearest story about some epic stuff. The future of civilization. Simulated protopia. The dawn of creative A.I. Terraforming Mars. Here was a golden opportunity to pry open that Overton window, Grimes-fashion. "The idea of the female Herodotus," she says, "almost doesn't exist."

Grimes isn't just the narrator, though. She's too a principal grapheme, and over the course of written history, her classic—the lover, the siren, the mistress—hasn't been treated with much respect. Book 1 alludes to Athena, Calypso, Persephone, the blackness swan, Anne Boleyn, courtesans, concubines, geishas. "These weren't but hot girls," she says. "They were the smartest girls, some of the most educated women of their time." They painted, sang, designed their ain clothing. They were the Grimeses of their day.

And then they got written into history as some rich guy's sidepiece. "I ate my cake / I lost my head / Villain of the internet," Grimes sings on a Law-inflected track from Book 1 called "Marie Antoinette 2077." "I'm super inspired by the way women get pulled into orbits in this manner," she tells me. "There'southward this weird dismissal of them. These are some of the most interesting characters in history to me, and they're so demeaned…. I feel like the almost radical affair I could do correct now is just go Marie Antoinette." She considers it for a second. "Infamy is kind of fun."

She rapidly adds that she doesn't desire this to become all almost Musk. She says it frequently during our conversations, and she'southward referring to this commodity, just she could just as hands exist referring to her life. The civilisation took sides on Grimes from the moment the couple appeared at the Met gala in 2018; their incongruous outfits, her looking like an interstellar Elvira, him wearing a prim white jacket, became an instant mismatch meme. Her Instagram mentions turned into a cesspool. She'd proceed social media and defend herself. Estimate how that went.

"It killed me at first," she says now. "I spent 10 years fucking producing, writing, engineering, every single fucking matter on my own. And I fucking proved myself." Her friends are still furious on her behalf, more for the erasing than the hating. "It frustrates me considering she's as brilliant as him," says Boeree. "When I see her referred to as the pregnant other of another person, it'south like, Oh, come up on."

Over the years, Grimes has slyly rebelled. She allow the paparazzi take hold of her in a Dune-inspired bodysuit and leggings while ostentatiously reading The Communist Manifesto. She lampooned her cyber-nymph persona past posting her "self-care regimen" on Instagram. ("I spend two–4 hours in my impecuniousness tank, this allows me to 'astro-glide' to other dimensions—past, present, and future.") Virtually half of the pop-civilisation galaxy thought she was serious. Until the day she dies on Mars, legitimate media outlets will be reporting that she had experimental surgery to remove blueish light from her visual spectrum.

In other words, rebellion didn't piece of work.

Grimes also started to experience unexpectedly conflicted about her role in this theater. For i thing, she liked beingness Musk'south girlfriend. She knows she's going to get slaughtered for saying this, but: "Personally, I don't call back 'manic pixie dream girl' is an insult. I exactly identify with all of those terms. I understand information technology'due south supposed to be a critique of certain things, but then I challenge that critique." She began to turn down what she calls "this misplaced idea of feminism of, like, I need to be my own affair, I need to exist divide." She has kids with Musk. "Divide" is off the table for skilful. "There is no way to extricate myself," she says now. And then she did what artists practise: She turned her gilt cage into source material.

According to her little brother Mac, the Bouchers' childhood in Vancouver was like Stranger Things minus the Demogorgon. Kids in nearly every house on the street. Secret clubs in the basement. Bikes. Vancouver is also a port urban center, though, with lots of criminal offense and pretty much every drug that enters Canada. By high school, they had more or less graduated from Stranger Things to Euphoria.

"I was similar a mix of Jules and Rue," Grimes says, referring to the Euphoria characters played by Hunter Schafer and Zendaya, respectively. "That sounds about right," says Mac.

In other words, she was a hyper-smart, thrill-seeking, gender-exploring time bomb whose hobbies included rejecting commercialism, partying too hard, and dancing until sunrise, though Mac notes she was also an overachieving straight-A student, politically radical, and deeply involved with what was then called the Gay/Straight Alliance. She tried LSD for the commencement time when she was 13 and has lost multiple friends to opiate overdoses. She would pay for drugs by doing homework for Taiwanese loan sharks. Mac, who is two years younger, got involved in sports instead, and he sounds near amazed that he was the younger sibling. She was always doing what he calls "dumb Claire shit." He asks if she told me about the houseboat. Yeah, she did. "That was i of the first adult choices she made."

The Euphoria phase was less nigh defiance, Grimes says, and more about Deoxyribonucleic acid, peculiarly that of her grandfather on her father's side, whom she describes as "crazy" and "jarringly unwoke." "My grandfather is hard as fuck," she says. He grew up in poverty. "Super antiestablishment. Teach yourself. Don't rely on other people to teach you annihilation." She says he taught her how to shoot guns when she was six. Grimes'due south parents divorced when she was around 11, and her mother married a homo with two sons, bringing her brother count to 4. Her grandfather nursed her competitive burn. You gonna let your brothers defeat y'all? Existence outnumbered by the boys has never phased her since. She says he taught her to drive a standard transmission by instructing her to reverse the auto to the edge of a cliff. If she lets the automobile curl astern, she says, recalling it now, "nosotros're literally going to die."

She won't be forcing teenage X to pop a clutch or dice trying. He'll exist in a cocky-driving Tesla, presumably. And anyway, she won't take to thrust Ten and Y into brutal tests of their mettle. Just existence the children of Grimes and Elon Musk will be enough of a barrage, and the shields never seem to hold.

"It'southward going to be hard for them," she says, "in a unlike way."

Grimes's grandfather is however alive and however lives like a hermit in remote British Columbia. Once he gave her some professional feedback: You really demand to sex it up. Yous should exist more similar Miley Cyrus. "He was similar, 'Your career is going to be way better if you start showing more skin,' " she recalls. "I was like, 'Grandpa.' "

Grimes's first tape was a Dune-inspired concept album called Geidi Primes, a reference to the militaristic planet ruled in the recent movie past an enormous Stellan Skarsgård. (She dubbed herself Grimes considering MySpace allowed her to acquaintance herself with three musical genres, and she liked the proper noun "grime," then a nascent British music scene.) Her father read Frank Herbert's book to her when she was four. She loved it. At one Met gala, she cornered Sting, who starred in David Lynch'due south much-derided adaptation, and freaked him out with a heavy dose of Dune fangirling.

For years Grimes harbored a dream of directing her own accommodation of Dune, with the more problematic colonialist elements scrubbed out, only when she heard about Denis Villeneuve's two-part blockbuster, she fangirled all over again and signed on to help with the rollout, originally scheduled for November 2020. ("I was basically an influencer.") And then, she adds, she got canceled from Dune because of the Communist Manifesto thing. She was brokenhearted, simply she understood. "There are things that are deeply not woke in the Dune universe," she says, and so the studio had to be extra-cautious, and she was far from indispensable.

When she finally saw the moving picture, she realized to her astonishment that this story she'd adored since she was far besides young for information technology, that she knew almost past center, that inspired her commencement anthology—this story was now her story. Specifically Lady Jessica's story. This goes by fast onscreen, only Jessica (played by Rebecca Ferguson) is not a married woman but a concubine. Grimes saw herself in Jessica, and she saw X in Jessica's son, Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet). Paul is more than a knuckles'southward son. He's a called one, tasked with becoming a swell leader. "When I see X," she says, "like, I just know 10 is going to have to go through all this really fucked-upwardly shit that sort of mirrors Paul-type stuff." Watching information technology wrecked her. "I was merely crying my eyes out the whole film."

She knows this might sound absurd. Grandiose. She wishes it felt that way to her too.

"I experience similar there'south very few people in the world who could take like sentiments well-nigh their son than Claire with X," Mac says when I relay this to him. I inquire if it's surreal to sentry his sis alive this life. "Yep," he says, laughing. "But I'm also non actually surprised? Because she somehow ever gets into the most insane possible scenarios."

Past the summer of 2019, Grimes was in the early on days of her romance with Musk and getting canceled online for it, and she was also finishing Miss Anthropocene, her long (long) awaited follow-up to Art Angels, all while her longtime manager and closest daily confidant was dying of cancer. Her life, she says, has always been "level-10 chaos." This was level eleven. She'd been making everything past herself for a decade, and she was sick of it.

She needed to figure out a new way to be an artist, which meant figuring out a new way to make money being an artist. "I hate touring, and I hate selling merch," she told her new manager, Daouda Leonard, during their first FaceTime call. He laughs at the memory. "If yous know anything about beingness a manager in the music industry.…" At this bespeak nigh managers would take hung up. Instead he said, "Cool, you're going to bout in the metaverse and you're gonna sell digital avails, digital appurtenances. Okay. Problem solved."

They got to work creating an avatar of her body, dubbed WarNymph, and in February 2021 Grimes became amid the first musicians to sell an NFT collection of digital artwork, some with accompanying music. Mac'south idea. She generated $6 million from that one drib—more than than she's ever made from any of her albums. They engineered a deepfake of her voice that she plans to release with other IP inside metaverse experiences and gaming platforms similar The Sandbox, a sort of open-source artistic experiment. Expect at fan fic, she says. So much inventive stuff is happening there if you lot know where to wait. She has similar plans for an A.I. girl group she's designing named NPC, which is gamer speak for "nonplayer character." She puts the A.I. girl group out into the world, you become make something with it.

The NFT projection was so lucrative that if it had happened two weeks earlier, Grimes says, she might not have signed her showtime major-label deal with Columbia Records. No shots at Columbia, she adds—they've been bully—but she only did it to pay for the ambitious videos she had in heed. The one for "Shinigami Eyes," a futuristic dance-pop phantasmagoria, was among the offset music videos filmed on an extended reality (xR) stage similar to what was used to make The Mandalorian.

Of form, signing with a major label was considered withal another betrayal by the Grimes purists, just where they see a sellout, she sees creative liberation. You sign with a label—whatsoever label, of any size—for coin, which yous tin either put into your pocket or plough back into the mission.

The pes traffic is heavier the adjacent afternoon when I return to Grimes's firm, including little X. He arrives about 30 minutes after his mom and I have settled dorsum into the anime nook, and as he charges through the door she leaps to her feet with a delighted yelp. He says a friendly howdy to me and after makes a bid for her laptop so he tin lookout man My Neighbour Totoro, Miyazaki's classic with the giant Catbus.

In solidarity with all the new moms out there, Grimes is wearing the same outfit every bit yesterday. She hasn't touched her makeup. Respect. While she gets X on his way for a playdate, I accept in the view of the Colorado River from the living room. I look down and run across a groovy pile of picture books, and at the lesser, Time's Person of the Year effect with X's begetter on the comprehend. The room is dominated by a massive red couch shaped like a behemothic Tootsie Gyre, and it looks amazingly comfortable, but the kids have done a number on it, possibly both numbers, so Grimes sits cantankerous-legged on the floor instead, and we talk over the Elephant of the Year in the room.

"We live in this lodge right at present where people expect everyone to conduct right, and talk right," she begins. "You have these manifestations of genius, only then you desire them to behave normally—only the reason they're like that is because they're then disconnected from correct beliefs." Humans are beautiful and toxic in equal supply, she says. "Like, we fuck up. We're all gonna do bad things in our life. We're all gonna do stupid things." She's talking well-nigh Musk, merely once once again she could be talking about herself. "They're both such securely original thinkers," says Liv Boeree, whom Grimes drafted to costar every bit her black swan in the video for a Book ane rails chosen "100% Tragedy." "The lines mistiness with them about whether it's fifty-fifty art versus engineering or science, considering actually nosotros're talking about creating something that does not exist."

From the moment they stepped out at the Met gala, every PR mess Musk created—calling an explorer who helped in the Thailand cave rescue a "pedo guy"; tweeting that "pronouns suck," which elicited a pained, now-deleted answer from Grimes; referring to Elizabeth Warren every bit "Senator Karen"—has turned into a referendum on Grimes. "When y'all hate me / think it fixes yous to break me," she sings on Book 1. "I'll never fight yous dorsum because / everything you hate is everything I dearest."

Grimes can get far more wound upward on Musk's behalf than her own, but one thing that really pisses her off is how many people think that she surrendered her bureau to him. They took her silence for complicity, rather than how she viewed her silence, which was not submitting to their sexist horseshit. Why should she have to respond to every scandalous matter he says? You don't think he drives her crazy likewise sometimes? Have yous e'er been in a relationship?

Again, she doesn't want this to become all about Musk, but…she wishes his progressive haters would bear witness some respect for the work, for really accomplishing their goals. He's done more than than any other private citizen to wean the planet off fossil fuels. He helped protect internet service in Ukraine by making his Starlink satellite terminals available. And Grimes is baffled that so many people view his Mars ambition as some billionaire's boondoggle, rather than the essence of being human and maybe, just maybe, the central to our survival.

"The Mars project is hard," she says. "There's no income for it. At that place's no way for it to make money." You can't make coin, after all, without customers. "It'south for the benefit of humanity, and it's unsafe and it'due south expensive, and people are similar, He's hoarding money! No, he'southward spending everything on R&D." She knows she can sound too admiring, and she knows it'll become her mocked. Screw it.

"Bro might say a lot of stupid shit," she says finally, "simply he does the right thing."

In the days after I render home from Austin, I settle into a new morning routine: Wake upward, check my phone, and read the texts that Grimes sent the nighttime earlier at effectually 2 a.m. She's as nocturnal every bit always.

"I would literally die for a fourth dimension automobile only especially for similar pre civ type stuff," she writes during an exchange about the earliest known tattoos. "Like man information technology must accept been HARD. The aesthetics of that time r just like next level similar haha they had insanely good style." She sends a photo she found online. "Like this girl looks like she'southward dressed in Yeezy." She gives me fun assignments, then checks to see if I've done them. ("Did u read the omegas short story at the beginning of life iii.0 by Max tegmark yet?" I did. Mind-blown emoji.)

One morning I wake to a text about Musk. "Hahaha eastward says he'll do an interview with you surprisingly."

A week afterward, shortly before midnight on a Friday, Grimes calls from Musk's Tesla and puts them on speakerphone. It'south date dark. They've got a sitter for X and Y, and they're going to the movies—an early cutting of dailies by a manager friend. We've got 12 minutes to talk. Musk is in the driver's seat letting the car do the driving, and Grimes is refreshing his retentivity about the chorus to "Player of Games," which dropped in December and is more or less about him: "If I loved him any less I'd make him stay / but he has to be the best histrion of games."

"I wouldn't say I have to be the best player of games," Musk says. He thinks the guy in the song sounds "somewhat overwrought." Grimes concedes a bit of dramatic license, just "it rhymes well." He does like strategy games an atrocious lot, though, and she asks for permission to share that he has the top score on a popular civilization-building game called The Boxing of Polytopia, which Musk describes as a "much more complex version of chess." He'southward even bested Polytopia's creator, Felix Ekenstam. "I literally vanquish him at his own game," Musk says. (He'southward too lost a bunch to Ekenstam too.)

Grimes and Musk agree that living separately is wise. They're simply too different on the basic stuff. He likes things "reasonably neat." She likes to be able to see everything she owns, all at once. He likes quality pattern, clean aesthetics. She likes Decease Note rugs from Etsy.

"You lot did take that cool vintage Japanese Metropolis poster for a scrap," Grimes points out.

"That was yours."

"Oh yeah," she says. "True."

As the Tesla beeps and begins to park itself, Musk sums up his position: "I simply don't like things to be messy and anime."

When "Player of Games" first dropped, Grimes's fans assumed it was about her rumored dissever from Musk, when in fact they were welcoming their second child and spending the holidays together as a family unit. The idea for the song came to her during a chat with friends 2 years agone while she was three or 4 months significant with X, when Musk casually mentioned that he planned to depart for Mars in ten years. She froze.

"I was like, 'Uhhh….' " She remembers laughing nervously. "I said, 'Could we go far twenty?' "

"It wasn't new information," Musk says in the car, lightly protesting when I bring this up. "I've been saying since before she was pregnant that I was going to Mars." Sure, she replies, simply "I didn't know y'all were going, like, this soon." She is still trying to convince Musk to stick around longer, just either mode she came out of it with a killer song for her space opera.

"Player of Games" isn't nigh their breakup. It's well-nigh going into space (sort of). For most parents, even twenty years from now would exist besides soon. Non for Grimes. "The thing is, I fuckin' live and die past the mission. I believe in the mission." She'd used that phrase ofttimes—"the mission"—and gradually I realized it was a proper substantive. Uppercase M. When I asked what she meant by it, she replied without hesitation: "Sustainable energy, multiplanetary species. The preservation of consciousness." Final March, Grimes wrote on Instagram that she was "set up to die with the red clay of Mars beneath my feet." Now she talks as though it's a fait accompli. "I will probably go when I'm, like, 65 or so," she tells me, the same mode you might say it'southward always been your dream to visit the Galapagos. Hard to reach, probably out of your price range, but doable in theory.

She tells me she's worried she came off ranty and cynical the previous 24-hour interval, when in reality she's closer to a pure idealist. This extends to A.I., she says. Why is anybody and then gloomy about our cybernetic future? What if A.I. likes humanity? What if information technology winds up being all of our creative best and none of our tearing worst? What would that look like? I suggest later via text that her proverbial drinking glass is lx percent full, and she replies: "Im drinking glass ninety% full."

Martian travel, she argues, "is just some other Overton window conversation." Airplanes have existed for just over a century. The space plan was fighting for survival a decade ago. And yet Michael Strahan—an ex-NFL star turned morning-show fixture—went to infinite final December. She snorts at the thought, though, of Mars as space tourism for the 0.i percent: "At that place's not gonna be any makeup or Postmates. It's definitely gonna suck. And definitely early death for sure." Either manner, she's volunteering. "I'd rather die trying to do something impossible and peradventure failing," she says, "than just continue releasing beautiful popular songs."

In the meantime, Grimes gets to turn the whole experience into fine art, and her kids become a digital-age version of Jedi training. When Musk and Grimes starting time met, he was Tony Stark and she was his kooky Pepper Potts. Now their domestic life is more like the Incredibles. Her office with X, she says, is "handling his artistic stuff." She'south ready to outset him on Ableton Alive, the digital audio software, and she's taken him to his beginning rave, though he left at xi:thirty p.m.

Grimes has grown semi-comfortable with Musk treating 10 similar his lilliputian captain of industry, simply she says things will exist different with their daughter. Quick story: In 2016, when my own daughter was half dozen, I took her to her first concert, Grimes opening for Florence + the Machine at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. The side by side dark, before the show, the FBI warned Grimes that a stalker known to them was believed to have bought a ticket and could be in the audition. This was just days later on Christina Grimmie, a singer who rose to fame on The Voice, was murdered after a show by a deranged fan. Grimes played half her set that night through panic attacks, and so walked off.

Suffice to say the public won't be seeing much of her daughter.

"The best situation here," she says, "is me grooming the daughter and him"—Musk— "training the male child."

Y'due south face may exist off-limits to the outside world, just since date nighttime with Musk, Grimes has been mulling whether to share her daughter'due south full name. She knows it'll surface eventually, and likewise she's proud of it. "It'due south fire," she texts on Sunday night. Screw it, she decides. She'll do information technology her style.

"Her full name," she writes, "is Exa Dark Sideræl Musk."

Exa is a reference to the supercomputing term exaFLOPS (the ability to perform 1 quintillion floating-point operations per second). Night, meanwhile, is "the unknown. People fear it but truly it's the absence of photons. Dark matter is the cute mystery of our universe." She texts me a phonation memo with the pronunciation of Sideræl—"sigh-deer-ee-el"—which she calls "a more elven" spelling of sidereal, "the true time of the universe, star fourth dimension, deep space time, not our relative earth time." It's also a nod to her favorite Lord of the Rings character, the powerful Galadriel, who "chooses to abdicate the band."

Grimes is prepared for Y to dislike her name or get tired of it—Grimes got tired of Claire a long time ago—and if she ever decides to change it, her mother volition be first in line to help her cull a new one. She's already got dozens of ideas. She might even modify information technology herself before this article comes out. In addition to Y, she and Musk occasionally call her Sailor Mars, a nod to the Crewman Moon manga series. Exa Dark Sideræl was actually something of a compromise, and she worries information technology's a little boring.

"I was fighting for Odysseus Musk," she writes. "A girl named Odysseus is my dream."

We speak once more by phone on the eve of Lunar New Year and talk over Mars again. I repent to her for the cheesiness of what I'thou about to inquire: When you imagine your future life on Mars, is Elon there? Is he with you? Are you doing information technology together?

"Hopefully," she says, and then goes quiet for a few moments. She hasn't considered this earlier. "Wow. Wow. Because, aye, you're right, he'll probably get and and so I'll come later. Wow."

Mars would still be a brutal place to live, it'd still suck, but at to the lowest degree East and c would exist together, dandy that Overton window to bits. And if X and Y want to join their parents, they would have a free ticket waiting for them. The rocket ships would depart in synchrony with the narrow window every two years when Earth's orbit is the shortest distance from the red planet, tens of millions of miles away. Grimes tin can run across it in her mind's eye now, them together on Mars, one large happy thermonuclear family unit. Possibly information technology really is all merely a simulation, only information technology still makes her smile.

TAILORS: LUCY FALCK AND ALEXANDER KOUTNY. PRODUCED ON LOCATION Past THAT ONE Production. FOR DETAILS, GO TO VF.COM/CREDITS.

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Source: https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2022/03/grimes-cover-story-on-music-and-mars

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