You may know her as the female vocalist featured on Dr. Dre & Eminem’s “I Need A Doctor,” Diddy’s “Coming Home,” Lupe Fiasco’s “Words I Never Said,” or Fort Minor’s “Where’d You Go,” but Skylar Grey insists there’s more to her artistry than just singing hooks on or writing other musicians’ songs.
Earlier today, Grey premiered the cheeky music video for “C’mon Let Me Ride,” the lead single from her highly-anticipated debut album, Don’t Look Down (slated for release next spring). Shot in Detroit, the video is set in a trailer park and marks another collaboration with Mr. Marshall “Eminem” Mathers himself, who also happens to be executive producing Grey’s entire record.
“Working with Marshall has taught me so many valuable things,” Grey revealed to me during a recent interview. “But one piece of advice that really stuck with me was when one day he told me to ‘just be you.’ It’s something that seems so simple but I think about that almost all every day. As a musician, it’s so important to stay true to yourself.”
That idea of staying true to yourself is one that’s on full display in the “C’Mon Let Me Ride” video. Appropriately complimenting the song’s lighthearted lyrics, the video is campiness at its best: totally over the top while being entirely self-aware. In its thesis, the video pokes fun at the lengths people go to in order to beautify themselves – depicting things such as tanning and plastic surgery as darkly comical forms of self-mutilation. Thus, Grey uses her video to define “sexy” as embracing who you are, rather than conforming to a pre-conceived notion of what the word means.
It’s no surprise, then, that the singer/songwriter has enlisted the same self-empowering attitude about working on Don’t Look Down. “A lot of people know me as that girl on all those hip-hop songs, and while there are lots of hip-hop beats on the album, I definitely wouldn’t call myself a rapper,” she said of the expectations about her upcoming album. She would then go on to describe the sounds of the record as spanning the whole spectrum from the acoustic tranquility of The Buried Sessions of Skylar Grey (an EP the singer put out earlier this ear) to the bombastic and radio-friendly major pop sound of “C’mon Let Me Ride.”
“This album is really going to give her a chance to connect with the fans who probably know her music, but might not know her yet,” stated Eminem in a recent press release about Don’t Look Down. “I think they will be as impressed as I am.”
As for that sample of Queen’s “Bicycle Race” that helps make “C’Mon Let Me Ride” so damn catchy? “That was all Marshall,” Grey confessed with a chuckle. The song was already in its final stages of mixing when Eminem decided that it needed one final Midas touch before it was complete. And the end result is a sexually-charged anthem that is as witty as it is celebratory and fun.
But possibly what’s most interesting about Grey’s artistic journey is that for a while, she turned her back on music. She explained that a few years ago, she did some soul-searching by moving to an isolated cabin in the woods. There, she cut herself off from the world to force some necessary introspection after not feeling creatively fulfilled during her first foray into the industry.
“I experienced somewhat of a rebirth,” the singer explained. “I taught myself to be completely happy living in the wilderness completely on my own. That showed me that as long as I set my mind to something and work hard enough for it, I can make it happen. So that’s when I wrote Love The Way You Lie, and the rest is history.”
Grey was of course referring to the song she co-wrote which was later made popular by Eminem and Rihanna and would go on to become one of the biggest singles of 2010. A literal life-changing song for Grey, Love The Way You Lie also scored two of the five Grammy nominations she already has under her belt and inspired her to give making music professionally another chance.
For years now, Grey has been slowly inching out of the shadows onto the center of the stage. Yet with the release of “C’Mon Let Me Ride” (now on iTunes) and her upcoming album, Don’t Look Down, Grey is ready to bask in the spotlight and establish herself as a solo artist who can not only write a smash, but also be the voice and face to sell it.
ABOUT SKYLAR GREY
Skylar Grey is a singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist who is responsible for co-writing some of the most memorable songs to light up the Billboard Hot 100 and iTunes sales charts, totaling more than 25 million singles globally. Grey co-wrote the biggest selling single of 2010: Eminem’s “Love the Way You Lie,” which earned her two GRAMMY Award nominations for Best Song and Best Rap Song of the Year. She also co-wrote and appeared on Dr. Dre’s “I Need A Doctor,” which she performed alongside Dre and Eminem on the 2011 GRAMMY Awards telecast and for which she was nominated for two GRAMMY Awards. This past January, Grey released The Buried Sessions of Skylar Grey, which featured special acoustic performances by Grey of three songs she wrote and produced: the original demo of “Love the Way Part III” (the original “Love the way You Lie” made popular by Eminem and Rihanna), “Coming Home Part II” (originally performed by Diddy-Dirty Money) and “Words” (originally “Words I Never Said,” performed by Lupe Fiasco).