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“If I’m being completely open and honest about it … My husband … I think I just felt like - I haven’t talked about this at all, I’m sorry … I basically always knew I was going to leave him at some point and I felt really guilty about that because I don’t think he saw it coming. “One day I thought of this concept for ‘Walk on Water,’” she says of he track which would later be performed by Eminem, produced by Rick Rubin, and feature vocals by Beyoncé. It turned out to be a pivotal moment in her career, and would inspire a song she’d later call her proudest work to date.
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Last year, Grey divorced her husband and manager. 1 song in the woods and it was like, ‘Don’t tell me what to do.’” “People used to make me feel guilty about leaving, but then I wrote a No. “That was my first push into music again, and its success was a pure validation of that journey I had gone on in the woods,” she says. The track sat atop Billboard’s Hot 100 for seven weeks. Feeling liberated, she landed on a new name that she continues to use, Skylar Grey, which is a nod to Oregon’s dreary weather, and wrote what would become the Eminem and Rihanna smash “Love the Way You Lie,” after her publisher put her in touch with the song’s producer Alex da Kid. “In Los Angeles I was more obsessed with trying to be successful, which totally made me fail,” Grey says. As Grey spent more time working in obscurity, she gained a new perspective on her career.
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and hearing what everybody thought about what I should do and my career was getting draining and nobody was right,” she says.
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“I was finally free of everybody’s opinions. “I traded work for rent, because I didn’t have any money.” The anonymity had a bright side.
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I didn’t realize that.”Īfter a series of what she says were “stupid financial decisions,” and the failure of her 2006 debut solo record, Like Blood Like Honey, Grey left Los Angeles for a cabin in the Oregon woods and made money working at her mother’s friend’s art gallery, where customers had no idea about her past as a hitmaker. “But when you sign a record deal that’s when you start to work harder. A strong demo got her signed to Machine Shop Recordings, a vanity label run by Linkin Park guitarist Brad Delson and a breakthrough quickly followed in the form of a writing credit and contributing vocals for the Fort Minor hit “Where’d You Go.” “I thought when I signed a record deal I’d suddenly be successful and all I’d have to do is write and sing songs,” she says. At the time, she was recording and writing under her real name, Holly Brook. Grey’s career kicked off in 2005, when she was 18 years old. Making the most of it every day is where I came to mentally.” It made me want to focus on being more present and enjoying my life because you might only get one. Realizing that, really realizing it, made me want to enjoy the moment more because I might not wake up tomorrow. I was like, ‘Wow, life just flew by.’ It’s so short. When I turned 30 I started seeing the end. “I would just put so much pressure on myself. I used to be really self-conscious and go into sessions and think that I sucked or that I couldn’t deliver another hit and that it was a fluke that I had a hit,” she says. I’ve gotten to this place where I’m not giving a fuck what people think about me anymore. “As far as my success goes, it’s weird because it’s always been a reflection of how I’m doing personally. “My career is a constant evolution,” she says.
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Her recent résumé boasts a performance of “Walk on Water” with Eminem on Saturday Night Live, and assisting Macklemore on the rapper’s most recent chart-topper “Glorious,” an anthem she co-wrote that subsequently became NBC’s de facto promo theme for their broadcast of the Olympics. I’ll probably end up watching it from home.” The commercial serves as a nod to the company’s commitment to disaster relief and is only the latest coup for Grey. “ they came to us and were like, ‘We want to do a cover of “Stand by Me,”’ so I recorded a demo and they decided to pull the trigger. “ Interscope has a good relationship with Budweiser,” she says of the beer giant, which she lent a version of her Diddy collaboration “Coming Home” for a military-themed ad in 2014. For most artists, scoring a placement in a Super Bowl commercial would incur downright giddiness, but not the Wisconsin-born songwriter Holly Brook, who has for eight years now been working under the name Skylar Grey.
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