“It’s Art And I Can Do Whatever I Want”: Grady Fortier Takes Us Into the Music and Madness of Life As An Artist

20 year-old Grady Fortier, a Manhattanville University resident who hails from Washington, is a filmmaker, photographer, actor, and dancer, but most notably he is a musician. Creating a short film to accompany one of his songs in a project called “The Bends”, Grady is also releasing an album entitled The Troubadour’s Digest. His songs are notably long and winding, evoking, as Grady states, Joni Mitchell and James Taylor, with their winding Western sounds and beautiful guitar-plucking, grass-blowing-in-the-breeze instrumentals. I sat down to chat with him about his music, his creative process, and the life of art outside of the artist.

What typically comes first when making music, the visuals or the lyrics?

When I’m making music it’s different every single time. And it’s honestly kind of sad, but I usually have no memory of how I wrote the song, like, where the lyrics came from, if I wrote the instrumental first and then wrote the lyrics, or if I came up with a few words and then wrote the whole song. I almost always just, like, black out, and the next day I have this song. And I have some voice memos and a few video recordings of the writing process, but other than that I have no real memory of it ever happening: which is kind of creepy, honestly. But from the videos I have of me doing it, it’s different every single time. I either will have a phrase, like “I want to go to the mall with you” [laughs] that’s a bad example, but, like, I’ll have that phrase, and it’ll either be in my notes app or in a text that I sent to myself, or it’ll be in my notebook, and it’ll sit there for months, and then finally I’m writing a new song that it works for and I’ll put it in. Or I’ll put a few chords together and make a pretty instrumental, and then I’ll come up with a melody, and then a song appears. Or I’ll just write the whole song in my head, I can hear the chords inside, and then later I’ll take the lyrics that I wrote and put it to instrumental. So, it’s different every time, and I love that process. I really like that it’s so unexpected, I feel like it makes it more exciting for me, like there’s no possible way I could ever get bored with it because it’s so different every time.

How do you believe different genres of art can influence one another?

Well, I feel like nowadays, because of social media, and because of cancel culture or how fast people are getting famous, and then how fast people are disappearing from the face of the earth and then never being heard from again, genre really is what says who you are as a person. Because of stereotypes or whatever. Like, if you listen to Taylor Swift, you must only listen to corny, breakup, pop music. Or if you listen to country music you must be conservative and you must have voted for Trump. Or if you listen to rap you must also love Kanye. It’s like, I don’t know. It wasn’t always like that, but I feel like nowadays people get into some very heated conversations about genres of music and what genre is the best or what genre of music is valid. I have always tried to branch out and listen to all kinds of music. I love old country music, I love some good old fashioned Carrey Underwood (I know she’s kind of controversial right now but anyways) I love James Taylor, I love Joni Mitchell, I love Taylor Swift, I love Phoebe Bridgers, I love Doechii right now. I think it’s just one of those kinds of things where, like, I just try to separate myself from the stereotypes that some people put on other people for what genre of music they like. I think that it’s… I think that genres of music are so cool, and it’s supposed to just be fun. Like, music genres are so cool. It’s so cool that we can create so many different sounding songs. That we can create so much different… I don’t know, I don’t know! It’s so cool that there’s so much music out there! And it’s so cool that everyone likes different music, but because of social media it’s become hard.

How do you balance art being for you and art being for everyone and anyone else who might consume it?

This is actually a rough question, and one I’ve been dealing with for so many years. I have been performing in so many different ways since I was born. I have always, always, always been the center of attention in my family because it’s like ‘Here’s Grady and he’s gonna perform for us, and he’s gonna do something entertaining!’ Which is amazing and I’m very honored to be that person, but I have definitely let it get to me. I have watched as, like, I know what works for people, I know what will keep people engaged and I know what will make people like me, and I have almost let that take over, and I kind of don’t even know who I am as a person? Because I’m always worried about keeping people interested in me because if they’re not then what am I here for? Because I’ve been doing this for so many years and it’s pretty hard. I would love to say that I am only making music because I love it, but I don’t really know if that’s true. It’s just that it’s all I’ve ever known since I was very young. I have always been dancing and singing and making people laugh, and it just always felt right. And I love making people laugh, I love that people would tell me that they liked what I was doing, I loved that I inspired people, I loved that people would tell me that they look up to me. Like, that kind of validation was everything to me, and it probably always will be, because it’s so ingrained into me. And I do love what I do, I love making music, I love making films, I love all these things. But I don’t think I’ll ever know if it’s for myself or for other people. And I think that’s okay, because I really do enjoy it, I just would love to get to a point in my life where I’m not making art so that other people will consume it and then enjoy it, I just want to make it because I like it. If nobody listens, I want that to be enough. But unfortunately, at 20 years old, I’m still very young, and that’s not enough. Because that’s all I know and the validation is very important to me and it’s rough out here, not gonna lie. It’s definitely something that I want to be able to conquer and I haven’t yet, so yeah.

What do you hope people get out of engaging with your art?

Um, I hope that people will not just hear my story and listen to it and think, like ‘I’m listening to Grady’s story about his life.’ I hope that people will be able to apply their own experiences and the things that they’ve seen and the things that they’ve heard, and be able to listen to my music and connect to it and feel emotional about it, and picture their own experiences and memories. Because that’s what I love when I’m listening to music. When I’m listening to Joni Mitchell or James Taylor, I love being able to picture in my mind all the things that I’ve done and all the things that I’ve had happen in my life and their lyrics are describing that. Like, Joni Mitchell has this one song called “Cactus Tree” and she has this one line that she repeats in the song, “She’s so busy being free.” And she’s obviously singing about a woman being loved by so many men but only wanting to be free, and I’m not a woman, but it’s still a song where I can totally see myself in her shoes and I can totally see myself as that person, just wanting to be free. So I hope that that’s what people get from my art. I hope they’re not like ‘I’ve never been to Madison Square, how can I relate to that?’ I hope that it’s just vague enough that people can go ‘Oh my god, I totally see myself in this song.’

How do you go about figuring out the tools through which you will create a certain piece?

This is kind of a complicated question because I feel like I have never created art with, like, the mindset of ‘I can’t do this because I don’t know how to do this, this, this, and this. Therefore I’ll just never try it.’ It’s like, if I don’t know how to play the saxophone, but I think a song would sound good with a saxophone, I’ll teach myself how to play the saxophone. Like I’m never going to not try. And for all my music, I have no idea what those notes are. It’s all just played by ear. I have no idea about music theory or any of that shit. And I’m not going to not make something because I don’t have the “right”, more expensive equipment. I’m going to make do with my cheap equipment and, you know, tweak it for hours until it sounds good. I’m never going to write about certain concepts or ideas because it’s what’s relevant right now, or it’s what’s trending and it’s what’s going to get my name out there. I’m never going to make that 2-minute-long “song of the summer”. Because that’s just not what I enjoy making. Like, I’ve had people say to me ‘Is anyone going to listen to your music, Grady? All of your songs are seven minutes long.’ And I’m like, ‘I don’t know, I felt like it needed to be 7 minutes long. Maybe if you listened to the whole song you’d see why.’ Like I just feel like there’s so much freedom in making art that I’m never going to limit myself to the things that I “should be doing” or the things that, you know, the internet is accepting right now. So I don’t really know, I just do it and figure it out. I’ll put so many all-nighters just editing and mixing until I think it sounds good enough. And if it doesn’t sound good enough, who cares? I’m an amateur artist, I just started! I have less than 2,000 followers. I’m not letting anyone down, even though it can feel that way. It’s never that deep, it’s art. I don’t know, I think I rambled too long. I don’t know!

Do you have specific films or music from your childhood that you feel made an impact on you or may have led to your interest in creating art yourself?

So actually yes! When I was 3 or 4 my mom came home with the MTV Katy Perry Live Unplugged CD. And there was video too, so we put it into our little box TV and I could see Katy Perry performing it. And I listened to it and watched it nonstop. I knew every single word to “You’re So Gay” and “Waking Up in Vegas”, which are pretty vulgar songs for a 4 year old, but I loved it. I listened to it and sang it every single day, there are so many videos of me singing it; it was everything to me. Her pink dress and the flower in her hair and her perfectly black, curly hair. I was obsessed with her. Her porcelain skin! She was everything to me, and her music is amazing! The drums and the saxophones and the trumpets, I was like ‘This album is everything’. I listened to it every day and it really did shape who I am. I loved her cover of “Hackensack”, her cover of “Brick by Brick”. Like, it was a live album that had really, really upbeat, fun songs, and then really, really sad songs, and it just, like, perfectly encapsulated what art is. It’s just feeling things and putting them out there. Whether it’s sad or it’s going to make people jump up and down. I just was obsessed with it, and I think it, like, really gave me an ear for it. Like, I knew what sounded good, I was able to match pitch with her, and it just really gave me those skills. I knew what music was and what it needed to sound like from a very young age. I was just obsessed with it and it taught me so, so much about music and I will always thank Katy Perry for that. I don’t love her new stuff but that’s okay. And then as far as films go, like we watched The Wizard of Oz every day. I was obsessed with the colors, I was obsessed with the songs in that movie, I was obsessed with the scarecrow, he was so hot. I loved Dorothy’s dress, the color palette, like… I think that these movies that I watched at a very young age forced me to understand what looks good and what sounds good, what colors go well with what colors. I just had an eye for it at a very young age and I think it’s because of these movies and the music I used to listen to, because, like oh my god, I must have watched The Wizard of Oz every day, and I must have listened to that Katy Perry album every day. It was just a part of me, it was in my blood, and I just learned so much. How to keep tempo, how to dance, how to sing, how to match pitch. I’m really excited for everyone to hear my new album and I hope everyone likes it! Just kidding, it’s art and I can do whatever I want.