The coolest girl in the world

At 22 years old, Sky Ferreira has been everything from tabloid fodder to pop also-ran.

So what happens when a teen pop truant actually hits it big? In a Young STAR exclusive, music’s coolest misfit talks Madonna, karaoke, and the importance of making mistakes.

MANILA, Philippines - Sky Ferreira might skip the karaoke on the Manila leg of her Asian tour. There was enough of that in Japan a couple of days ago, where one jaunt had her celebrating Madonna’s birthday with a rendition of Burning Up—a deeper dig into the canon than obvious KTV fare like Borderline or Like a Virgin.

“Big Madonna fan. I love early Madonna and Truth or Dare and all of that stuff,” says Sky, the gravel in her voice a sign of having gotten ample sleep. After a hectic itinerary that’s taken her through Tokyo and Hong Kong, she’s finally snug in a suite at the Manila Peninsula. If she didn’t have to sit through her nth interview today, she’d likely keel over on the hotel bar couch she’s slouching on, ready to call it a day in a T-shirt, shorts, and boots caked with mud around the toes. Still, it’s just after lunch and there will be enough time to nap before she heads out to DJ a Levi’s party tonight, the Live in Levi’s launch she’s flown in for and another opportunity to whip out a bit of her idol’s music.

The salute to Madge is warranted. Almost two years have passed since the breakout single that would finally snag eyes and ears to a pop starlet the music media had hyped up for some time. After getting snapped up, experimented on, and left to dangle by a major label, Sky took to the Internet the same way she sought to attract the attention or producers seven years ago. “At the time, my label wasn’t really involved so I could just do whatever I wanted,” she says of releasing Everything is Embarrassing, its song and video a palpable tribute to Madonna’s early years: a casual late-‘80s beat and aloof, thickly lined eyes; a girl as untamed as the hair she’s mussing suggestively.  

“That was a fluke,” Sky says of the sudden interest the video stimulated, especially with what it took to make it. “I was thinking of Richard Avedon and doing something really simple and black and white because we had no money or whatever.” She recalls filming in Los Angeles with no budget, the outfit she happened to wear that day, “and just the song on an iPhone” to guide her. “I didn’t expect that to catch on. I was so used to nothing ever really becoming anything so I was like, whatever. And then it just happened. I was like, ‘Oh.’”

New York Magazine would name Everything is Embarrassing the best song of 2012. And when her much-delayed debut album “Night Time, My Time” was released last year, critics from The Guardian to Rolling Stone were quick to add it to their best-of lists. The ace reception was proof that Sky is best when Sky is limitless and not beholden to the decisions of label higher-ups.

An outlier after decades of pre-packaged teen pop princesses, Sky was the obvious queen of her deep, dark domain. Every twinge and tweak on the album was hers: every lyric that deals with disaffection and the dirty politics of relationships bathed in a mix of grunge and electro; the decision to collaborate with the likes of Shirley Manson, met through a mutual friend; and to appear sullen, tits hanging out, on her album cover. “I was always independent my whole life, that was the thing,” she says on moving out of her family’s Venice Beach home as a teen. “Someone didn’t tell me what to do ‘cause it just wasn’t gonna work out and even on a major label aspect, it didn’t work that way.” Even when the label attempted to shove her into a Mickey Mouse Club mold, she found ways to assert herself.

“I didn’t really know what I was doing but they were cool ideas,” she says. One being the decision to get actor Michael Madsen to be in her music video for Obsession, as close to a factory-made pop effort as she could muster. She’s voiced distaste for the outcome, where she would have included a scene where Maden, in gritty homage to his movie Reservoir Dogs, helps her mutilate her friend’s ear. “I wanted to add that part because they kept trying to make it into a whole other video. I still got to recreate [the film], but the kiddie version of it because they wouldn’t let me use blood or whatever.”

Finding ways to put her foot down since the start of her complicated relationship with Capitol Records, she has no regrets. From music video conceptualization to modeling—what she did to kill time before her record hit—she is at the fulcrum of every career move. “I like trying different things—it’s always different. I just don’t like someone trying to make me into someone else, or just looking pretty, which is boring,” she says, citing her foray into acting (she’s in gore guru Eli Roth’s upcoming The Green Inferno) and the collaboration she values in covers and campaigns she’s done for the likes of Hedi Slimane and Mario Testino, who fittingly shot her in her Madge best—“Like a Virgin” wedding dress and all—for V Magazine. 

That relentless autonomy can of course be expected from what’s most intrinsic to her: the music. “I mean, I’m definitely starting to get used to all this but I feel like now, I kind of just want to start a new album. I don’t really know what I have in mind. I’ll just do it. That’s the sort of mentality I think I should keep,” she says, audibly restless and sinking a little deeper in her seat. “I think the one thing I can say is that I’m honest about everything. Whether it’s a mistake or not, at least I did it, tried it, and wanted to do it.”  

For now, it’s about time, her time, to enjoy the rewards of her rebellion. “It’s really interesting to be in a completely different culture but have people know the songs. I never really thought about people knowing my songs. That’s always the crazy part,” she laughs, recalling the onrush of voices hollering her lyrics back to her at recent performances in Japan. And in future birthdays, you know that someone in some random karaoke joint somewhere will be paying tribute.

Photographed by BJ PASCUAL, Makeup by OMAR ERMITA, Hair by MARK FAMILARA ,Wardrobe edited by SAM POTENCIANO, Produced by RAYMOND ANG Special thanks to Levi’s Philippines, Martin Castaneda of Castro PR and the Manila Peninsula