Addison Rae slides into a booth at Bob’s Big Boy in Burbank and orders — what else? — black coffee and a chocolate milkshake.
The singer, actor and social media personality has been on a David Lynch kick of late; this, of course, is where the late filmmaker famously came every afternoon for years to sustain himself with that order while he wrote.
“I went into a meeting the other day and mentioned that I’d watched ‘Wild at Heart’ the night before,” says Rae, who’s 25. She’s wearing tight jeans, heels and a baggy Harvard hoodie and twirls the sweatshirt’s drawstrings in her fingers as she speaks. “They were so astounded. I was like, ‘Is this not just one of the things you should know if you’re in this business?’”
In June, Rae released her debut album, “Addison,” which she recorded in Sweden with the producers Elvira Anderfjärd and Luka Kloser. Crisp but languid, sensual yet slightly sinister, the LP sounds like Britney Spears doing Lana Del Rey (or maybe vice versa) — a smart and stylish set of aqueous electro-pop jams that keep taking slightly weirder turns than you’d expect.
“Addison” earned rave reviews and has racked up hundreds of millions of streams; the single “Diet Pepsi” alone is at more than half a billion on Spotify. For Rae, who grew up dreaming of moving to Los Angeles from her hometown of Lafayette, La., the album’s success registered as another step in a showbiz journey that began with DIY dance videos she posted as a teenager on TikTok (where today she counts more than 88 million followers).
Yet it’s also made her a darling among tastemakers who might not have caught her in the smiley 2021 Netflix teen comedy “He’s All That.” In February, Rae will compete at the 68th Grammy Awards for the coveted best new artist prize — a category in which her competition includes Alex Warren, a fellow alum of the once-dominant TikTok collective Hype House.
A lot of the reaction to your album — the energy has basically been: Hold up, this is pretty good. I’ll take a win where I get it [laughs]. I’ve actually gotten really comfortable in this space of everyone thinking that everything I do will be mediocre and me doing something better than that and them being surprised. I do think that will change, though.
What do you think is behind the low expectations? Certainly, part of it is because you’re a woman and that’s the world we live in. Boring.
Then there’s the TikTok of it all. You’ve said you started dancing on TikTok as a kind of end run around the gatekeepers of show business. What’s it been like to earn those gatekeepers’ praise? As confident as I am about my process and my artistic view, it’s very flattering. For a while, I started to convince myself that I didn’t care. And I actually think that was a great way to make the album. People were very skeptical — even people that are choosing to embrace me now. Which is nice. I’m glad they’ve changed their mind.
You clearly made the right album. Have you thought about what the wrong album would’ve been? The label definitely wasn’t keen on “Diet Pepsi” being the first song. They were like, “We don’t think this is what people are expecting from you.”
Did you have a sense of what they thought people were expecting? I think there was an idea of what my music should sound like.
Which was? Bad? Bad or soulless or maybe just a little more shallow, I guess. And by the way, I love shallow music. When I put out my first single, “Obsessed” [in 2021], it was very much based on what I thought I wanted to be as an artist. And over time that changed. Thank God for the critics — without them, I maybe would’ve kept doing music like “Obsessed” and not pushed myself to try things that people didn’t expect.
Although you’ve said you’re awaiting your “Stars Are Blind” moment for “Obsessed.” Of course. “Obsessed” is a fun pop song, and I think it will get its love.
Your friend Rosalía told Rolling Stone about you: “I love how she brings the 2000s American pop star back to these days.” Does that map onto what you feel it is you do? I don’t know — it’s kind of confusing. I think my music is very now as much as it’s a conglomeration of my life. I was a baby in the 2000s and grew up watching everything in the 2000s, so naturally that’s what I was raised on. My mom always had on MTV. But I think the 2000s was an era of pop that will never be replicated. It was all so new. It was an era of undeniable stardom — of pop being unafraid to be provocative and risky.
I think of that time as the moment when pop became fully aware of itself. Every pop star’s performance was a performance of pop stardom. I totally see that. I appreciate the people that say I’m thoughtful or strategic — that gives me a lot of credit, actually, because I don’t think that’s the case all the time. When you say you want to be a pop star, people reference someone like a Britney or a Gaga or a Rihanna — there’s an idea of what a pop star means. I don’t really care about being a pop star. I just want to be a star.
Is your priority at the Grammys to beat Alex Warren? I have no agenda going into this [laughs].
It’s an honor just to be nominated? It really is! I was shocked. The night before the nominations were announced, my managers were like, “Should we get together and watch it?” That puts so much pressure on it. I always wondered with these people that post videos of themselves reacting to nominations — what if it didn’t happen? Do they have confetti and just don’t blow it?
What’d you end up doing? I was like, Maybe we go to Tower Bar, and if it doesn’t happen we just get breakfast — try to treat the day normally. Then I was like, Maybe we don’t want to be there because if it does happen I want to be able to react the way I want to. So we just went to my managers’ office, and it was very chill. I’d looked at all the lists of predictions, and the only place that predicted I would get nominated was Pitchfork. So the odds were not looking great for me. Then they said my name — I was like [gasps]. That was all I could say.
Did you see the fake email that went around where you’re thanking the Recording Academy? Oh my God, I saw it. By the way, people believed that. Maybe I would have too — I’m really gullible. Nobody has any idea what’s real.
I had to admire the specificity of the fake, with the ChatGPT prompt and all. No, like, who did this?
Part of the Grammys discourse, especially with you and Alex, has been about the show opening itself to musicians who’ve taken nontraditional paths to success. Before you were nominated, did the Grammys seem like a world that was available to you? I didn’t think it was something that was not gonna happen because of that. People have come from Disney, which was not considered as highly artistic or credible as other paths.
Although it took Miley Cyrus until “Flowers” to win a Grammy. Which is insane. I think that gave me hope that it all evolves — that when something deserves attention and conversation, it’ll get it, no matter where it came from.
We seem to be living in an age of pop-girl rivalries. Do you agree, and if so does that bum you out? It doesn’t have to be a thing, but I get it — it’s entertaining. Historically, there’s always been this friendly or maybe unfriendly competition between people. I think it’s a very natural human thing to want to exceed a standard that someone else has laid out. I’m not really interested it for myself. I think it takes away from the reason I want to do any of this stuff.
Can you avoid it? Take Taylor Swift versus your friend Charli XCX as an example. I wonder whether you feel like you have to take a side. I guess we’ll have to see. But there’s so much more to all these things. There are people that do weird things, and I try to avoid those people.
What are the weird things? Well, you know, this can be behind the scenes as well — producers and drama in writing and ideas and back-end conversations. On my record with Luka and Elvira, we had worked with someone — or tried to include them in something — and then we didn’t really feel like it was necessary. No bad blood. Then all of a sudden, this person had gone and worked with someone else, and things were sounding similar. The timeline of it all was very confusing and interesting.
I’m not up on this story. I’ve never talked about it.
So even if I dig around — You wouldn’t know. I mean, I think there are people that maybe would know things. But I’m not interested in getting into the nitty-gritty of it all. It’s so irrelevant.
You’ve said you worked to get rid of your Southern accent. How’d do you do it? I have a really good English accent, so I think I’m just good at accents. People say they can still hear it on a certain word or phrase.
The interior monologue in your head — it’s with a Southern accent or without? It’s without.
This is just your voice now. I think so, yeah. It’s like I’m Method acting [laughs]. When I go home and I’m around my family — my grandma has a very thick Cajun accent — it comes out. I’m just not around anyone that has a Southern accent — I’ve been living here for almost six years now. When I’m drunk, sometimes it’ll come out.
When you moved to L.A., you wanted to sing, dance and act. Has your success in music reshaped your ambitions for acting? I feel like it’s all one and the same to me — I just want to perform, and wherever that finds its home is where I’m putting my energy. I wouldn’t say that every night on tour before I went onstage I was necessarily in the best mood of my life. Some nights, you’re crying before you go on, so you’re kind of acting in a way to put on this performance for people. I’m very ambitious in general. I love chasing big dreams, and if that comes in the form of an amazing script or a director that I really love and trust, I’m 10 toes deep.
Your interest in performance is still broad. I don’t think it’ll ever narrow down. I don’t know why it would. Someone like Barbra Streisand is someone I’ve always loved and looked up to. Judy Garland too. Even Marilyn Monroe. I mean, she was doing it all. I just think: Why would you not want to do it all?
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