Loverboy was curious to talk to Glüme after listening to the latest single ‘What is the Feeling’ off her dreamy, debut Album The Internet – to be released on April 30th via Italians Do It Better. What would this a former child-actress in a Marilyn Monroe wig and baby-doll makeup be like in conversation? Would she be like the enigmatic character portrayed in her videos? What we found was a grounded, kind and talented artist making unique music; part Britney/part electroclash creating a bricolage of influences.
How did you come to music to begin with?
I started doing theatre when I was six, I played Shirley Temple on Broadway. Then I kept doing theatre and kid-acting until I was about 17. At night I started writing music when I was 13. My Dad played every instrument, so he taught me piano, guitar, a little bit of drums. By 19 I signed with a publishing company and just started writing songs for TV, film and stuff. But I wanted to have my own artist career and I’ve been trying to do that. Then I met Johnny Jewel and I love his production and vision; it felt like it was similar to my brain. For a long time, I was trying to get a hold of him through my manager or lawyer. Eventually their website had a “Submit Demo” button…
Oh, wow. A “Submit Demo” button?
I didn’t think they would actually get it, but I submitted my music. In the same half hour, I got an email from Johnny’s wife Megan (the artist known as Desire), and she told me ‘Give me a call at this number. Johnny loves it.’ I called, and they were just like, ‘Well, we want to put out your album, we love your music and we want to sign you.’ So, I was just like, “Submit Demo button, huh?”
Yeah, who would have thought? Sounds like something you might see in the early Internet! What’s your process of starting a song?
Okay, so usually I will start with a poem that I’ve made. Then I’ll come up with something on my keyboard and make a melody to that, or I’ll make a melody, match it on the keyboard, then send a little voice memo to Johnny. I can produce, I just generally find that Johnny, he’s better. But one of the songs I did actually end up making sounds pretty good. But I mostly do the visual aspect, and that takes up most of the 12 hours of my day, my roommate actually shoots all of the music videos, and then I edit them all. We have been pumping those out since last summer, and there has not been a pause since then.
Yeah, I was going to ask you about the video for ‘Get Low’. So, the two of you directed it and did all the production for it? I loved the tap dancing!
Yeah, I hired a choreographer. I have tap danced for 17 years, and I wanted to throw that in somewhere, so it wasn’t a total waste of all that time. I thought it would be kind of weird and cute on ‘Get Low’; you’d kind of expect twerking on that song. But I also have heart disease, and I didn’t want to mention that because I didn’t want the choreographer to give me a boring tap routine, so he definitely gave me a challenging one; I almost died!
Tap has this sort of old-world quality. I know you’ve mentioned in past press you identify with Marilyn Monroe’s story, but there’s an even earlier influence here like 1930s or 40s.
Oh, definitely. Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire and, I mean, Gene Kelly. I was homeschooled and I did the acting thing. I wasn’t really in touch with the Spice Girls and what was happening when I was a kid, and I just listened to whatever theater songs I was auditioning for or I’d watch a lot of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire movies. I repeatedly watched Breakfast at Tiffany’s and did not understand the premise until I was older. But then when I was like 12 or 13… Do you remember at McDonald’s those HitClips that you got in Happy Meals?
HitClips?
Yeah, they were like these little square things, and it was an MP3 of one song and a picture of like the single art, and it was Britney Spears or NSYNC. That’s what you got, one or the other. And you could press play and listen to the song on it. It was crazy for 2000 or 1999 or whatever. It was traveling music. That was the newest, craziest thing.
Yeah, I remember little cards that had one MP3 on them, right?
After a rehearsal for Annie, we went through a McDonald’s Drive Thru, and I got this little hit clip, and it was Britney Spears, ‘Stronger’. I just really hadn’t heard pop music; my parents weren’t attempting to keep me from pop music. It’s just I really liked old-timey stuff, and I think my Dad’s a little bit of a music snob, he wanted to listen to alternative bands in the ’90s. So, I played the song and my brain just exploded. I was used to a swing band, Judy Garland and this was just a really cool new sound. I was suddenly super obsessed with Britney Spears and pop music.
It’s funny that Britney was your entry to pop music.
It was my intro for sure. It was ‘Stronger’ by Britney Spears, and it has a very special place in my heart. I thought I’m going to make pop music but with some melodies that Gershwin would like, but then I really like Ladytron, so the synths have to be this way.
That’s a great way to explain your music! What do you think of the recent news, going on with the Britney documentary and her conservatorship?
I feel so sad for her. She’s worked so hard. Literally, people don’t know, but back when she started, when she got signed to Jive, the little machines…they made those people. I don’t know what she’s going through, if there’s anything going on with her mental health or if that’s getting played up or not. I don’t like that she’s been treated like a kid that gets an allowance.
I’m sure you also identify with her as someone who was a child actress. I actually auditioned back in the day for the New Mickey Mouse Club during the same era as her.
Oh my gosh, amazing. I think that was a dream of mine. I don’t know. It never came to fruition, but wow. Who was it, Justin Timberlake or Ryan Gosling or which one?
Both of them, and Christina Aguilera. It’s a dehumanizing process for a kid, do you feel like as someone who has been in the entertainment industry for a long time, that it’s affected you and what you write about?
Yeah. I mean, to this day, I have to remind myself of my basic needs because I’m just constantly in ‘go mode’. Sometimes in kid-acting, normal things like when you’re seven, and you’re about to go on stage and need to use the bathroom, they say ‘Well, you have to wait an hour-and-a-half.’ It’s just things like that, and then you get coffee really young, no one checks. I don’t think it makes you very healthy. My health is not great, so probably it didn’t help that…
Speaking of health, you have been bringing awareness to having an auto-immune heart disease known as Prinzmetal. How has it affected you as an artist and has the pandemic heightened any of your concerns?
Well, I definitely thought when I first got it, I wasn’t going to be an artist anymore because I spent about a year in bed and in and out of the ICU. It’s basically, your coronary arteries closed shut, and then like a blockage, so it tries to have like a heart attack or cardiac arrest.
But at first it was so hard because the symptoms were so severe. I woke up one morning in the ICU to like 12 different people, and it was like six cardiologists and six student cardiologists. I was like a guinea pig. I was like, ‘I’m sleepy. Who are you?’ And they’re like, ‘Okay, so do you feel like you’re going to have a spasm?’ And I was like, ‘Well, yeah. You woke me up in the middle of a REM cycle. I kinda do.’ And they’re like, ‘Okay, okay, turn the machine on. Let’s watch.’ Then they turn on this big nitroglycerin machine, and it just all clears up and the EKG went normal. And they’re like, ‘So that opened her arteries, and now her EKG is normal. Oh, thank you so much. You can go back to sleep,’ and I was like, ‘Thanks for almost giving me a heart attack. Have a nice day.’
But I just want to encourage people who are chronically ill. I think often the reaction is ‘Well, I guess I’ll garden the rest of my life and take up crocheting. I had big dreams…’
And it’s scary to go for those dreams to begin with…
Yeah, and so I want to encourage people. I’m making a series called Chronically Ill Bitches that I’m starting in a couple of weeks. I made one Chronically Ill Bitches a year ago, and it went crazy; Vanessa Hudgens and Lena Dunham posted it.
It’s a TikTok series?
It’s a bunch of reels and TikToks, but it’ll highlight the difference between me going to the hospital, getting all of my MRIs and ECHOs, then going to photoshoots, recording music, going to the mastering studio and balancing it all. People generally just go into a sweatshirt cocoon after they get diagnosed with a chronic illness and I’ve really finagled my way into not doing that. I’m literally doing what I wanted to do when I was six. And it’s taken a lot of creativity, but you can.
I noticed, too, that you make lyrical references to your health. There’s a lyric in Get Low, ‘You light up my nervous system, save me from this autonomic prison.’
I wished when I got sick that there was something that I could listen to that would make sense to me. Everything was just about heartbreak or falling in love, and I just didn’t give a shit about either of those things at that time.
I can’t drink wine, and I have to be careful when I’m having sex. I was friends with this guy, and I had been with him before, and I was like, ‘Listen, I need to do like a science experiment. This is not fun. I just need to see if this works. I need it to be boring.’ It worked fine, but I felt a little weird afterwards. It definitely took away some of the fun of that. And that’s super annoying because it’s like, ‘What did Sex in the City promise me at this age?’
Carrie Bradshaw and her false promises! Finally, Loverboy is named after the biggest-selling single of 2001, so we always ask what is your favourite Mariah Carey song?
‘Hero’! I don’t know, I just loved that song. Whenever I hear it, I’m like, ‘Oh man, it’s like that HitClips thing for me.’ I think someone played it a lot backstage at one of the shows I was doing. We had this one guy who was like super, super into Mariah Carey, but there was this one season where it was just like ‘Hero’ back to back at the end of every curtain call, and it was exciting, everyone was crying. So I have a lot of nostalgia with that song.
The single, ‘What a Feeling’, is out now.
The album, The Internet, is out 30th April.
Glüme: Instagram / YouTube / Facebook
Interview: George Alley
Photography: Paige Margulies
Wardrobe: Serpenti
