Charli XCX Covers VARIETY’s ‘Hitmakers’ Issue

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In a new cover story for VARIETY’s Hitmakers issue, Variety’s Hitmaker of the Year Charli XCX speaks with Executive Editor, Music Jem Aswad about the cultural phenomenon surrounding “Brat.” She also discusses working on the “Brat” remix album with Lorde and Ariana Grande, Grande’s words of encouragement before her double-duty appearance on “Saturday Night Live,” her future acting career, and more. 

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On the strategy behind “Brat”: “Usually when I’ve made a record, there is this transitional phase [after it’s recorded] where I’m thinking about how to present the music. But with this one, I actually did that first—I was thinking about marketing before I was making the music. I had the title first, which was such a brief and a super-useful writing tool. It put boundaries on the songwriting, because immediately if I was writing a song with [longtime collaborators] A.G. Cook or Cirkut, it would just immediately be like, ‘That’s not brat,’ and we would move on and do something that was brat.”

On what being “brat” means: “The whole idea of being a brat is interesting to me, because why are people brats? Why do people act out and be difficult and misbehave? I think it’s because sometimes you’re overcompensating for insecurity or feeling uncomfortable, and I think that’s where the two fit together.”

On “Brat and It’s Completely Different but Also Still Brat,” a remix album that overhauls every track on “Brat”: “I really wanted to flip out the songs, because that’s what really inspires me about dance music—how you can take one element from a song and completely morph it into something else.”

On the “Girl, So Confusing” remix with Lorde: Charli and Lorde publicly resolved some personal misunderstandings in the lyrics, literally “working it out on the remix.”

“For ‘Girl, So Confusing,’ the second I wrote it I was like, ‘I need Ella [Lorde] to be on a remix of this song.’ But I didn’t know how to approach it because obviously it’s a tricky situation. And when I finally did, she actually suggested, ‘Maybe I should do a verse.’ Within 24 or 48 hours she came back with that incredible verse, which made me really, really emotional.”

On the “Sympathy Is a Knife” remix with Ariana Grande: Grande “gravitated towards that song,” Charli says.

“She had a lot to say. We went back and forth on the lyrics, talking about all the knives that we both felt in this industry.”

On Grande’s words of encouragement before Charli’s double-duty appearance on “SNL”: “She’d obviously just done [‘SNL’] and killed it, so I was getting tips. She was just like, ‘You’re gonna be amazing, just relax, it’s so fun,’ but outside of her advice about contact lenses—which I ended up not going with on the night—I really heeded [Lorne Michaels’] advice, which was just to trust the process, go with the flow and not try and overly control things that would automatically get figured out along the way. I listened to that advice because, I mean, how can you not?”

On her future acting career: Charli’s upcoming acting credits include Benito Skinner’s upcoming Amazon comedy series “Overcompensating,” as well as three indie films: Gregg Araki’s “I Want Your Sex,” starring Olivia Wilde and Cooper Hoffman; Daniel Goldhaber’s remake of 1978’s “Faces of Death”; and Julia Jackman’s graphic-novel adaptation “100 Nights of Hero.” They’re all low-key appearances by design.

“Everything’s been relatively small, and I’m enjoying learning about being on a set and learning from great directors and actors. I hate it when musicians dive into a different field, head-first, without really researching or learning much of anything about it. So I did a lot of reading to educate myself over the past three or four years before I actually did anything.”

On whether she wants to reach major stardom: “I don’t really know. I’m kind of at this crossroads, I think, in my life now, where obviously my music has…yeah, reached this new level of success, I suppose. A lot has changed for me with this record, and I do experience things like people taking my photo when I don’t necessarily want them to, or feeling like people in the room are watching me. Sometimes I love that feeling and sometimes I don’t, so I don’t think there’s really a cut-and-dried answer.”

On her position as an outsider in pop music: “I think I’ve always been seen as a bit of an outsider. It was something my record label perhaps saw…as not a weakness, but something they didn’t quite know what to do with. And I think this manifesto—although it feels so funny to call it that—was making super clear that it was the kind of thing we needed to lean into. Like, why don’t we market music like fashion and cultivate this desire, where everybody wants to get the new drop? I suppose there is an exclusive kind of feeling to that, but once you’re inside, it’s very inclusive.”

[Photo Credit: Agata Serge for Variety Magazine]

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