Switched on Pop is running Newcomers, a three-part series of interviews with breakout artists. This week, Reanna Cruz interviews Porter Robinson. No, he isn’t exactly a newcomer, but he is heading in a new direction, with his latest album, SMILE! :D.
Porter Robinson’s intentions for writing a new album? “Burn everything down and start fresh,†he says. The 32-year-old producer and DJ’s new record, SMILE! :D, sees him moving in a pop-oriented direction for the first time in his career and working through his thoughts on stardom in the process.
Take the first track on the record, “Knock Yourself Out XD,†a hook-laden song filled with tongue-in-cheek lyrics about what it means to contend with nuclear levels of celebrity. “‘Knock Yourself Out XD’ was me indulging that fantasy of, like, This is so not a Porter Robinson song. Everyone’s gonna hate this,†he says. “But this is what seems really fun to me right now.†Fun meant writing cheeky lyrics like “Bitch, I’m Taylor Swift,†which he began teasing before the song dropped. “I posted the ‘Bitch, I’m Taylor Swift’ part, and that was some interesting exposure therapy for me,†he adds. “I used to live in fear of getting dragged, and then I was like, well, what if I thought about this as a way of oiling the machine and turning eyeballs?â€
The rest of SMILE! :D juggles two truths about Robinson: his innate desire for a positive relationship with the culture that surrounds him, and his dark, introspective nature, highlighted on tracks with stark names like “Is There Really No Happiness?†“My instinct on this album,†he says, “was: Anything I’m scared of being said, I’m just going to say it.â€
You can read excerpts from the conversation below. For the full interview, check out the latest episode of Switched on Pop.
Let’s start with a question I’m sure you’ve gotten a lot. What does the lyric “Bitch, I’m Taylor Swift,†mean to you?
I’m a Red and 1989 person. That’s my favorite work from her. I have such a musical sweet tooth — I love big, cute hooks. I think that comes through in my music. But what that lyric meant to me was, despite being somebody of middling fame, I was writing an album about the pressures that I was feeling and the desire to both be consumed by it but also to escape it. The words “Bitch, I’m Taylor Swift†came to my mind, and I thought, This is so stupid. But then I couldn’t get away from it. It was like, anything I tried to replace it with just felt weaker and less memorable. I was really chasing that feeling of something that would have that bigness and that catharsis and that shamelessness, you know?
What better way to convey the level of fame you’re grappling with on the record than invoking the most famous person in the world?
That’s definitely what was on my mind. It was like the more I keep talking about somebody coming up and saying hi to me in the airport, the more I was thinking about Taylor. I think I’m a person who feels a huge amount of self-consciousness and shame. So, I started off trying to play this unashamed rock-star character. I think what ultimately ended up happening was it kind of crumbled as I was writing the music. And I started telling the truth more and saying how I was really feeling. But I was able to tap into it for a split second, and it felt nice.
It’s fascinating that on SMILE! :D you’re pursuing more traditional songwriting approaches, when the record is contending largely with your relationship with fame. What made you pursue this kind of full pop pivot?
This record is reckoning with the downsides of fame, but I’m also addicted to it. And that’s just the reality. I feel like that’s something that people don’t want to say, but it is true, in the same way that I’m addicted to, like, my phone, or addicted to caffeine, or League of Legends. Fame is something I would miss if it went away, and it would be hard for me to deal.
I think the much larger part of it is that my taste just changes over time. One of the things that was really starting to hit for me on this record was the rock music of the 2000s. I never had really listened to the Killers, Coldplay, or Radiohead before. I was always such an electronic-music person. Another weird micro thing that hit me hard was listening to the Warped Tour–era emo bands for the first time. I was like, I want to get as close to the feelings that this music gives me as I possibly can. And my way of doing that is to try to embody it and to live it. When I love music or any idea or aesthetic, I just feel like I need to drown in it.
Even if I wanted to alienate my fans deliberately, the creativity shows me the path when I’m in the studio. When I’m making something, five options will emerge in front of me and one of them lights me on fire. And it’s like, I don’t really have much say in that. Like, I’ll strum a certain chord and it just screams at me.