Sky Ferreira & the Perils of Artist Development

Maybe "Artist Development" should be in quotes

I went to see Sky Ferreira play on Sunday, December 3, at the Masquerade in Atlanta, the wrong venue for an artist who’s trying to find her footing after a dysfunctional and destructive 14-year relationship with Capitol Records.

Some of you really don’t like it when I write about how the music industry treats women artists, so consider this a warning. Sky Ferreira could have been one of the major artists of the past decade if her labels and management had let her chase her muse instead of trying to shoehorn her talent into the role that women artists have been expected to play for most of the history of recorded music.

Here’s another warning: I’ve always treasured artists who try to take underground sounds and use them to make mainstream pop records. Sky falls into that category, and anyone who’s offended by the idea that an artist could find equal inspiration from Madonna and My Bloody Valentine won’t enjoy her music.

There’s faction in the business that would argue that smart artists who are willing to compromise today can earn the freedom to do what they want tomorrow. That very occasionally works out (cf. Taylor Swift), but most artists aren’t going to be able to negotiate that path. It should be the industry’s responsibility to adapt to talent and not the other way around.

The only time I’ve seen less of the lead singer’s face is when Jesus & Mary Chain played the Channel in Boston in December 1985 and Jim Reid had his back to the audience for their entire 20-minute set.

Sky Ferreira stubbornly tried to get everyone around her to see her own vision, managed to release one EP, one LP, and a pair of singles in her 14-year Capitol career. She’s finally a free agent and looking to establish a way forward on her own terms.

I can also hear the pushback. Who is this person that I’ve never heard of and why should I care?

Sky Ferreira was a teenager who got plugged into a female “artist development” model that was already dead when she signed to Capitol Records in 2009.

Here’s a short list of current artists who also would not have succeeded under that model: Lana Del Rey, Grimes, HAIM, Kara Jackson, Lorde, Mitski, Janelle Monáe, Japanese Breakfast, Angel Olsen, Olivia Rodrigo, Sharon Van Etten, Waxahatchee, Weyes Blood, Karly Hartzman from Wednesday, Lucy Dacus, and Julien Baker.

Here’s an artist who’s struggled with record companies who wanted her to conform to that old model: Selena Gomez.

And here’s one who’s prospered under that old system: Ariana Grande.

There’s more than one way to have a career. The old ways worked for some artists and it’s a method that may work for some artists in the future. The problem was that all women with pop aspirations were expected to conform to the model of hot girl singing songs written and produced by boy studio wizards and making viral (yet appropriate) social media content. Stay fuckable but don’t be too threatening.

Teenaged Sky certain looked like she fit the suit, but no one counted on her iron will and artistic ambitions. The short-and-dumb description is that she’s a songwriter groomed to be a pop star afflicted with an indie rock soul.

Everything Is Embarrassing

She made some recordings with the producers who signed her to Capitol, but Sky really began to find her own voice when she wrote “Everything Is Embarrassing” (Apple Music, Qobuz, Tidal, Spotify) with Ariel Rechtshaid and Dev Hynes, the artist also known as Blood Orange. Ariel produced the song.

Ariel Rechtshaid proved to be a good match because he’s moved freely between indie rock and mainstream pop, working with Vampire Weekend, Madonna, HAIM, Beyoncé, Solange Knowles, Charli XCX, U2, and Caroline Polachek. Many of those opportunities for him came because artists wanted some of that “Embarrassing” magic.

The song wasn’t a chart hit, but it caused a sensation on the blogs (back in the day when blogs were an important). There was huge anticipation for an album.

Night Time, My Time, the album Sky ended up recording with Rechtshaid was not the album Capitol had anticipated when they signed her.

Commentary or Exploitation?

Sky Ferreira turned in an LP cover photo shot by the Argentinian film director Gaspar Noé, a character known at the time for 2009’s controversial and hallucinogenic crime movie Enter the Void. Noé wasn’t known as a photographer, but his participation was sure to offer some credit with the international art community.

I can’t get past the fact that Sky was 20 years old when a 49-year-old man shot her this way. Was it a commentary of on the exploitative photography practiced by creepy old men like Terry Richardson or was Noé guilty of using his model in the same way (hopefully minus Richardson’s history of sexual assault)?

Now Safe for Retail

No matter the intent, the cover was too much for Capitol. Sure they released it, but they covered Ferreira’s breasts with stickers on the LP and CD, then immediately let both go out of print. Both now fetch ridiculous prices, and Sky Ferreira’s music has no retail presence whatsoever.

More suggestive than the real cover? Maybe!

The streaming versions of the LP (Apple Music, Qobuz, Tidal, Spotify) feature a heavily cropped cover, zooming in on the Ferreira’s confused/sullen/defiant expression with just a hint of her breasts at the bottom of the frame. The crop changes the meaning of the cover, stripping out the confrontation and sexualizing the photo with a tease.

The young Sky Ferreira fan in my life insists that I’m making too much of the Noé/Ferreira age gap and that the image is Sky’s commentary on the invasive experience she’d endured with a record company, managers, and producers dissecting her intentions and telling her what she was supposed to think and do to have success.

There’s undeniably long-term fallout from this artistic choice. Sky has no physical product available, and no music available at her merch table when she’s on tour. Maybe some of you will like her shirts, and they were selling plenty at the gig, but I was bummed out by the design.

People were buying these, but I thought the merch looked like something you’d see from a metal band playing Monday audition nights.

What About the Music?

OK, I’m willing to accept that many of my more rockist readers are going to reject the very idea of a songwriter working in a mainstream pop idiom and smearing the tracks with musical influences from Spiritualized, Björk, and My Bloody Valentine. Y’all are excused now and can go listen to some Wilco.

Night Time, My Time is loaded with songs that could have been hits. “24 Hours,” “I Blame Myself,” and “Nobody Asked Me (If I Was Okay”) are among my favorite songs of the last two decades, with “Boys” and “Heavy Metal Heart” not far behind.

(I don’t have another 2500 words to get into all the ways this video undermines the expectations faced by young women making pop records. I’d subscribe if anyone with better film and fashion analysis chops wants to explain.)

Ariel Rechtshaid brought in some songwriting collaborators whose careers took off after Night Time, My Time. Justin Raisen went on to produce Kim Gordon, Angel Olsen, Yves Tumor, and Lil Yachty. Rechtshaid also recruited Daniel Nigro, fresh out of his indie band Tall Lions. Those of you paying attention know that Nigro has made his name as the co-writer and producer of Olivia Rodrigo’s Sour (Apple Music, Qobuz, Tidal, Spotify) and Guts (Apple Music, Qobuz, Tidal, Spotify).

I’d go so far as to say that Olivia Rodrigo is Sky with better impulse control. Rodrigo and Nigro are incorporating all the same underground elements into their massive hit records. Olivia is benefiting from Sky Ferreira’s spadework and an industry that’s finally realized that it can’t shoehorn every female artist into the same prefab mold.

I’m not the only one who likes Night Time, My Time. You can visit Sky’s Wikipedia page and see that virtually every high-profile music outlet ranked the LP in their top records of the decade list, including a few who panned the album when it first came out.

A few of these press outlets have lost patience with Sky after she only released a couple of singles in the decade since Night Time, My Time. While 2019’s “Downhill Lullaby” (Apple Music, Qobuz, Tidal, Spotify) and 2022’s “Don’t Forget” (Apple Music, Qobuz, Tidal, Spotify) may not scale the heights of her very best songs, neither do they represent a collapse in quality. Neither deserves the bad reviews they’ve gotten from critics who blame the artist for not delivering another LP.

WTF?

Here’s the Apple Music tagline for Night Time, My Time: “Sky Ferreira—a hugely talented pouty-lipped waif with an old soul—wrested what was to be her debut full-length away from her label and convinced them to grant her a do-over.”

Please contact me when someone objectifies the Kiszka boys from Greta Van Fleet this way.

He Said Shut Up

Sky’s been playing a cover of ’Til Tuesday’s “Voices Carry” on this tour, and what was written as a exposé of an abusive boyfriend turned out to be an accurate prediction of Aimee Mann’s brutal experiences with a series of major recording companies.

I worked with Aimee on Bachelor No. 2 (Apple Music, Qobuz, Tidal, Spotify), an album recorded for Geffen, dropped by Interscope in the wake of Aimee’s Oscar nomination for Best Song, and eventually released independently on her own Superego label.

My adventures with Aimee Mann, mostly involving frustrating conversations I had with industry people without her in the room, deserves its own separate post, but let’s just say that Aimee Mann was widely condemned in the business for having a clear creative vision. Determination to do things her own way, a trait that would have been celebrated in boys (Neil Young, Elliott Smith, Karl Wallinger, Frank Zappa, Garth Brooks, John Lennon, John Cougar, Bob Dylan, Prince, George Clinton, Paul Simon, Van Morrison, Tom Waits, Kevin Shields, Lou Reed, Morrissey, Don Henley, shall we keep going? ), led to an indictment of Aimee Mann as a “difficult” artist.

I don’t know if Sky Ferreira has heard about Aimee’s struggles with the label industry, but she sure as hell understands the sense of entrapment that runs through the song, and, when she sang the bridge (“He wants me for only part of the time/He wants me if he can keep me in line” and the out chorus (“He said shut up/Oh God can’t you keep it down”), she might have been mourning the last decade of her career instead of some dirtbag boyfriend.

A Visit to Hell Heaven

When the Masquerade got kicked out of the old Excelsior Mill on North Avenue so developers could turn it into luxury condos, the venue made what was supposed to be a temporary move to the empty shell of Underground Atlanta. Plans to move to the West Side were scotched by neighbors who didn’t understand that living in a city means being surrounded by restaurants, moving, and nightclubs.

Somehow, this photo makes the empty shell of Underground Atlanta look far less depressing than it actually is.

Now the Masquerade is trapped in a hellish purgatory with its three concert rooms surrounded by abandoned real estate. I always think of Mad Max or The Omega Man when I make a rare visit. This was only make second trip since the pandemic, after the blistering Gang of Four show I saw there last spring.

Sky played the big room a/k/a Heaven (the smaller rooms are Hell and Purgatory). The show was great even though the venue was only 2/3s full and the room was completely wrong for the audience. I wish she’d played at the Variety Playhouse or (even better) Terminal West, a smaller room that would have been a sellout.

This is what the stage looked like for most of the set. I’m willing to believe it was artistic choice and not lighting tech incompetence.

Sky seems remarkably fragile, wearing a trench coat for the entire set and Wayfarer sunglasses for almost every song. She was incredibly late going on, so much so that I was itching to leave. I still haven’t been able to completely jettison my old A&R rep impulses, the bad habit of wanting to bail if a band went on more than 15 minutes after the manager told me they were supposed to play. I’m glad I held on.

I expected everyone to be underrehearsed on a tour that seemed to be thrown together after it was announced that Sky was leaving Capitol. Wrong. The band was tight and thrilled to be backing Sky. No one ever got a spotlight during the set, so it was hard to see what was happening, especially with the lead singer.

Sky looked glam from the front but, when she turned to the side, you could see that she had a full rat’s nest going on in the back, just like the one Dave Pirner from Soul Asylum sported back in his band’s Twin/Tone and A&M days.

Again, why are we talking about this?

Sky Ferreira should have been one of the most celebrated artists of the past decade. If you buy the undeniable Olivia Rodrigo connection, she’s definitely one of the most influential.

We’re at a fascinating moment in the history of rock music. Why are so many of the important songwriters of our era women? What happened to the men? Is it that the old way have finally broken down enough to allow women an equal shot?

I think a lot about some of the women I’ve worked with. Would the Go-Go’s have enjoyed a longer first run together if they hadn’t been constantly pelted with condescending comments about whether women could play rock? I’ve talked about Aimee Mann, but even Lisa Loeb was subjected to vile and sexist public commentary from a self-styled “industry insider,” trash talk that impacted the way men in the industry evaluated her career.

I’m not saying everything’s fixed now, but I’d like to note that a generation of women have fought their way into the boy’s club that ruled the label industry and music press. Because of them, things have gotten better.

Ideally, there’s another label that can help Sky Ferreira get some music out and take advantage of the new opportunities an artist like her always deserved.

Next Time on Stars

I wrote this post while streaming Sky via Qobuz to a pair of $2199 HED Unity over-ear headphones, which promise (and deliver!) full-fidelity lossless audio via a wireless connection to my iPhone.

How they achieve this black magic might surprise you. I’ve been enjoying them for a few months now and will explain in my next post (newsletter? article? ’stack? What are we supposed to call these?).

Sorry to anyone who’s been wondering what happened to me this month. Writing this one proved to be more of a challenge than I expected. I’m not entirely convinced that what I think on this topic matters at all whatsoever, but I figured I’d bring it up since no one else has had much to say about Sky Ferreira’s Capitol drama.

8-Track of the Day

It’s 1982. You’ve got a problem with the tricked-out car stereo system you had installed in your Chevy Camaro back in 1979. Your local Musicland store cleared out its 8-track racks and replaced them with cassette tapes. Sparkomatic comes to the rescue with this heavy-duty metal adaptor that lets you play your new cassettes in that car 8-track system.

Anyone who used one of those cassette tape adaptors plugged into a Sony Discman CD player in the ‘90s will understand. The pictured cassette is “GEMS,” an internal Geffen release for the A&R department that features the legendary J&H Productions recording.