In September, Griff took the stage at New York’s Terminal 5 to a sold-out audience on her Vertigo world tour. The space holds a capacity of nearly 3,000 people, but for the duration of her set, the British singer-songwriter and producer transformed the venue into a room that matched the energy of a show at Madison Square Garden. Before she emerged with thundering live renditions of songs from her debut album, Griff joined Rolling Stone backstage for an episode of The Green Room to discuss the making of Vertigo, carving out space for herself as a producer and performer, working and touring with Coldplay’s Chris Martin, and more.
“The longer I’m in this industry, the longer I’m trying to find comfort and just like my own marks of success, instead of looking over there and being like, oh my God, she’s doing that, or like, they’re doing that,” Griff said. “Growing up, I’ve never been able to compare myself. It’s been impossible. Being Chinese and Jamaican, it’s not like there’s loads of Chinese-Jamaican London girls. I think every day I need to remind myself to just remember that I’ve never been on this planet in a very conforming way.”
For her, at least for now, success looks the way that it did in that room full of people singing each devastating lyric back to her, while also dancing around in circles. “Being able to sustain a really long career where I can write songs that I love and that people feel moved by them is actually what success is,” Griff added. With Vertigo in particular, those songs were born from a place of trying to stir up that same emotion within herself.
“When I was writing this album, I was feeling so much. I was so lost and so heavy and empty at the same time, but desperately trying to write these songs, almost to evoke feeling in myself,” she said. “It was almost like I was writing mantras for myself.” This exercise manifested on records such as “Into the Walls,” where she gives herself permission to disappear for a moment to recenter while also wondering if anyone will notice that she’s gone. It’s one of the more somber moments on the record, not unlike “Astronaut” — which only transformed into a ballad after Martin, who plays piano on it, suggested that Griff strip it back.
“I’m drawn to writing really broken songs,” Griff said. “I think there’s a side of all of our human hearts that are deeply empty and deeply searching, and I think when I write music, that’s kind of where I go. But also I just think there’s something so beautiful about sad music you can dance to. Like, there’s a reason why ‘Dancing on My Own’ by Robyn is just like, over and over again, no matter how many times you hear it, you want to dance and you want to cry.”
It’s all in search of release. Griff has found this in spiritual songs from Kirk Franklin and Mary Mary, as well as in the raw emotion of Whitney Houston’s performances and the euphoria that defines releases from Lorde. She also spends a lot of time listening to Taylor Swift, who she joined as an opening act for one night on the Eras tour at Wembley Stadium earlier this year. And outside of music, Griff has a fond appreciation for films from Wes Anderson. But her guiding light has been her own work, often born from looping a beat and improvising on the microphone until the record starts to take shape.
“With Vertigo, it’s almost like this album marks the bridge of adulthood where the world becomes super heavy,” Griff said, noting a shift from the more carefree nature of her early releases like the One Foot in Front of the Other EP. “I lost my confidence. I lost myself. I found it again. I lost it again. It was like, there’s so much confusion and sadness in this album. It’s quite unfortunate that that’s what’s changed, almost. But I also think on the other side, I’ve got a lot better at producing. I think I’ve written some of my best songs on this. So as the themes maybe get heavier, I think those songs, hopefully, are better.”
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