Strange Grimes Interview Moments That Had Us Scratching Our Heads

You may know her as the mother of three of Elon Musk's children, but Grimes cemented herself in Hollywood long before her relationship with the tech billionaire. Grimes — born Claire Elise Boucher — has been changing the music scene with her experimental beats and dreamy, fairylike voice for over a decade. Her discography dates back to an initial EP in 2007. A few years later in 2010, the musician released two full-length albums: "Geidi Primes" and "Halfaxa." She particularly rose to prominence with her 2012 album, "Visions," which featured objectively two of her biggest singles, "Genesis" and "Oblivion" (both have over 300 million streams on Spotify).  

Her hypnotically whimsical sound is often described as elusive, but once you hear Grimes speak about her music, it all starts to come together. Along with her perfectly bizarre explanations for her tunes, the artist tends to drop some of the most mind-boggling lore about herself in her interviews — often leaving the interviewer at a loss for words. If we made a full-length list of every strange Grimes moment, this story would never end. Instead, here's a quick look into the mind of Grimes and some of her near-unbelievable confessions.

Grimes — who single-handedly engineers all of her songs — uses music as an expression of her life, unsurprisingly. In 2020, she told The New York Times that her song "Delete Forever" is about the personal effects of the opioid crisis, dealing with the loss of many friends who died of drug overdoses. As someone who is almost strictly electric in her sound, Grimes used samples of an acoustic guitar for a more vulnerable feel. Though most of the song's instruments were pre-recorded, Grimes said that at least two sounds were from real instruments: the violin and the banjo. "I had just always dreamed of making music with a banjo," she told NYT journalist Joe Coscarelli. However, her love of the instrument was, as she puts it, "cut short tragically." 

Grimes explained that, in her years before "Visions," she had hopes of making a country album, which prompted her to buy a $126 banjo. "As I was bringing the banjo home ... this guy f**king followed me off the bus and followed me into the stairwell of my apartment building," Grimes recalled. "I was like, 'Wait, is this guy gonna, like, attack me right now?' So I just turned around and I just started screaming and beating him with the banjo, and I destroyed the banjo, but he left." While Coscarelli shook his head in disbelief, Grimes seemed tickled by the account and how it left her interviewer speechless.

Fashion designer Stella McCartney and Grimes are comparable to day and night — or more like day and the aurora borealis at night. Their incredible chemistry was highlighted in a 2016 interview with Teen Vogue, after they worked on a perfume launch together. The legendary fashion designer was seemingly unfazed by Grimes' tales of the industry, including one where she explained how she got Janelle Monáe to work with her. "I sent her a painting because I was a fan," Grimes recalled. She later revealed, "It was like a decapitated head, like, spitting out colors." 

Apparently, McCartney couldn't get enough of Grimes because, in 2019, the Canadian native — who is stunning even without makeup — became the face of the designer's Adidas by Stella McCartney campaign. To promote their collaboration, Grimes posted an in-depth description of her wellness routine on Instagram, bewildering her followers with the fantastical, mostly impossible steps.

"My training is a 360 approach," she began her caption (via Paper Magazine). "I first maintain a healthy cellular routine where I maximize the function of my mitochondria with supplements such as NAD+, Acetyl L-Carnitine, Magnesium, etc ... From that point I spend 2-4 hours in my deprivation tank, this allows me to 'astro-glide' to other dimensions — past, present, and future." Grimes further explained how she spends around one to two hours sword fighting and pencils in 20-ish minutes of unbridled screaming. Not to mention, she has "also eliminated all blue light from my vision through an experimental surgery that removes the top film of my eyeball and replaces it with an orange ultra-flex polymer that my friend and I made in the lab this past winter as a means to cure seasonal depression." ... yeah.

Like the rest of her unhinged wellness routine, Grimes' cooking habits are very original. Concocting meals like "butter toast," where she submerges a single piece of toast in a plate full of melted butter, the artist admitted in a 2020 interview with Harper's Bazaar that her diet is not as colorful and variety-filled as it should be. "I basically hate everything besides carbs and fat," said Grimes, who was pregnant at the time and noted that she was forcing herself to eat fruit. "I actually dislike vegetables, pointedly, but they're important to eat." 

According to Grimes, she has particular trouble with maintaining a healthy diet while on tour. The vegan singer confessed that for nearly two years, she would only eat pasta. "I had this thing where I was like, 'The only reliable food is spaghetti,'" said Grimes, adding, "Then I was just so sick and my hair actually stopped growing." In between a few chuckles, Grimes continued: "I went to the doctor and the doctor was like, 'You actually are malnourished from not eating vegetables or meat and just eating spaghetti for two years.'" 

People in the comments couldn't believe her eating habits. One person brought up another tidbit from the interview and said, "The fact that no one [is talking] about the fact that she said her normal routine is sleep at 6AM and waking up at noon shows up how chaotic this interview is."

Grimes will always serve us a side of weird in all her interviews, but her chat with celebrity journalist and internet sensation Nardwuar the Human Serviette sent her typical quirky stories into the stratosphere. In 2012, Grimes gave 11 minutes of chaos while speaking to Nardwuar in a video on his YouTube channel, where she explained how she loves firing rifles, how her grandparents live in fear of the next apocalypse, and how her dog "died a really horrific death" from "an anal infection." 

The most remembered part of the interview, which has now become a cherished internet meme, is when Grimes described her relationship with Matthew E. Duffy, who was a member of her previous noise band, Liturgi. "Duffy is my muse and he also runs the cult that I'm in — I'm a member of, I am the high priestess, and it's just a realist cult that is completely centered around bureaucracy, so you can never ... do anything because you're constantly doing paperwork," she explained. Going back to Duffy: "He dances for me a lot. I don't know, he's just crazy." 

Nardwuar posted the interview clip in 2024 on TikTok, where it went viral. People began dubbing the audio with their own taglines, including one from singer Paris Paloma that says, "When anyone asks me about any of my friends because I obsessively love all of them." A day after Nardwuar's video exploded into popularity, Grimes posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, saying, "I cannot believe Duffy is going viral on [TikTok]. Amazing." When someone asked in the comments if she was still the high priestess of the cult, Grimes replied: "Idk, I haven't been doing any paperwork as of late. Hopefully I'm not excommunicated."

If you were to write a Bible on Grimes and her beliefs, her 2022 interview with Lex Fridman would have to be the primary source. Featured on an episode of "The Lex Fridman Podcast," Fridman and Grimes wholeheartedly discuss the human condition for two straight hours — all of which is outlined in YouTube labels like "Consciousness," "Mortality," and "Meaning of Life," to name a few. Her perspective on most of the topics she chatted about with Fridman is idiosyncratic — uniquely Grimes, but equally endearing and insightful. 

While talking about her vision of the future, Grimes discussed what she believes is a salient chapter in human evolution: today's technology and what it's doing to us. "We are becoming cyborgs," she said as a wild introduction to that thought. "Our brains are fundamentally changed. Everyone who grew up with electronics, we are fundamentally different from previous Homo sapiens. I call us 'Homo techno.' I think we have evolved into Homo techno, which is essentially a new species."

Her profound explanation of the evolutionary difference between — what she later described as — her brain and "a medieval brain" left commenters begging for more. "I need like an [sic] 10 hours long interview with grimes that i could listen to all day," one person wrote. "Listening to Grimes talk is like the best version of talking to someone smart at a festival late at night when everyone is ... thinking 'happy' or 'unconventional' thoughts," said another.