Singer Grimes
Sorry for Coachella debacle
Grimes wants to do better next weekend.
© Regina Wagner/Future Image
At the Coachella Festival, Grimes experienced what was probably a singer’s worst nightmare: technical problems made it difficult for her to perform.
“A sonic chaos”
While still on stage, Grimes tried to explain to the thousands of festival visitors: “All my tracks have double tempo and I can’t calculate that.” The 36-year-old later explained in more detail what led to the chaotic appearance in a long post on X (formerly Twitter). She also assured fans that she would do everything she could on the second weekend of Coachella to make sure her set went “flawlessly.”
Her statement said: “I would like to apologize for the technical issues with tonight’s show. I wanted to come back strong and I usually take care of every aspect of my show myself.” But this time she wanted to save time and therefore let others “organize the tracks on the SD card, etc.”. That’s why she had “a bad feeling beforehand” because she didn’t look through the CDs herself. “The CDs were showing me BPMs of around 370, so I couldn’t even manually mix by ear, and the front monitors were turned off, so it was literally sonic chaos on my end.” She was also unaware of her screaming and “squealing” into the microphone.
She draws three insights from the performance
She gained three important insights from the experience. First: “If you want it done right, do it yourself.” It is also important to persist in things, “even when people are feeling bad.” As a final point, she said that in the future it would probably be better to “pretend everything is fine” and engage the audience “instead of spending an entire show slumped over the desk trying to fix software when you should entertain”.
The singer, who has three children from an on-off relationship with Tesla founder Elon Musk (52), promised to organize “all the files personally” for the upcoming performance this weekend. “I won’t let something like this happen again. I’ve spent months making music and visuals for this show and I’m admittedly not in the best mood. But yeah – next week will be flawless, everything will be through my Hands run.” She ends her statement with the words: “Please forgive me!”