FEATURE:
Second Spin
Sky Ferreira - Night Time, My Time
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BECAUSE new music is being teased…
PHOTO CREDIT: Sandy Kim
from Sky Ferreira, I thought that it was a good time to explore her amazing and acclaimed debut album, Night Time, My Time, of 2013. The Los Angeles-born artist released an album that was incredibly well-received. Having put out a couple of E.P.s before her debut, plenty of people knew about the brilliance of Ferreira. As an actor (she has done a lot more acting since her debut came out), I feel she puts more emotion and conviction into her songs that most. That shows on a very nuanced and powerful album. I am going to come to a couple of reviews. There was plenty of positivity, though I am not sure whether a lot of people listen to Night Time, My Time now. I do not hear many of the songs on the radio. It is an amazing album that deserves greater focus and play. If you have not heard it, then go and set aside some time to check it out. I know many are looking ahead to early next year when we will get long-awaited music from a modern-day Pop idol. As we can see from this article in 2013, there was expectation that Night Time, My Time, would be released sooner. Ferreira explained the delay:
“Since being discovered on Myspace just shy of her 15th birthday by Swedish production duo Bloodshy & Avant, the Los Angeles-born Ferreira has seen her profile steadily increase.
Still, label troubles ("I kind of got the short end of the stick," she said. "It keeps happening to me") and a perfectionist streak have resulted in her not yet releasing her long-anticipated debut album, I Will. Though, to tide over her fans—many of whom got behind her thanks to last fall's stunning Ghost EP—Ferreira plans to release a new EP this September. She said the new collection contains many songs she's been performing live in recent months.
"I could release the [full-length] album in September and just have it come out and nothing really properly set up," she admitted. Instead, Ferreira chose to wait until next year to release her full-length LP, largely because she had the last-minute opportunity to work with certain people that she "couldn't believe had the time to do it." She declined to tell us who, but seeing as she's already worked with the likes of Garbage's Shirley Manson and iconic songwriter Linda Perry, chances are the collaborators are significant. "It was an opportunity I could not miss."
Ferreira said her full-length album has "more electronic stuff" than in the past and is indicative of her ever-evolving musical style. "I feel like I'm in between [pop and indie]," she offered. "I'm in a very hazy place. But I think it's a good thing. It's bought me more time to try and discover myself”.
Maybe a slight tangent but, before getting to reviews for a 2013 gem, there is a 2019 Pitchfork interview, where Ferreira discusses the success of her debut and following it up. I was interesting learning more about her roots. She is someone who, at a young age, had a connection with Michael Jackson:
“Little Sky Tonia Ferreira hummed along to the radio before she could talk. Raised around Los Angeles, mostly Venice Beach, her young parents split when she was a baby. Her dad tended bar, sometimes with her in tow, and when his roommates got cable, she devoured MTV. “I always hung out with a lot of adults,” she says. “I was, like, one of those kids.”
Being one of those kids meant she didn’t know how to talk to the kids who knew how to talk with each other. She was bullied constantly. She also had trouble with numbers and spelling—she suspects she’s dyslexic, but never got tested—and for a while, was so unhappy, she stopped talking altogether. “I had really long hair, didn’t speak, and had dark circles around my eyes,” she says, describing herself as a child. “I looked kinda feral.”
As the story goes, Sky’s first-grade classmates didn’t know she could talk until she sang “Over the Rainbow” in school. “As long as I can remember, I’ve felt the most like myself when I was singing,” she says. (Roughly 18 years later, she covered the Wizard of Oz ballad at David Lynch’s Festival of Disruption, and the director still raves about her version, telling me, “It was incredible. So beautiful.”)
She lived with her grandmother, who worked as a hairdresser. One time when Sky was around 7, she sang for one of her grandmother’s clients. Impressed, the man suggested she join a gospel choir. The man was Michael Jackson. So she did. Jackson also gave a 9-year-old Sky some grown-up advice that’s shaped her approach to art and music ever since: “He was like, ‘Don’t focus on things that are just around you—you need to look back to the history of music.’ And that’s what I did.”
Yes, Sky went to the Neverland Ranch—“a lot.” She also went to Jackson’s other houses. No, she didn’t witness anything untoward. “It wasn’t just because I was a girl,” she tells me, a few days before the controversial HBO documentary Leaving Neverland aired. “I was around a lot of kids.”
Yes, she’s grown hesitant to talk about her grandmother’s larger-than-life client—for all the reasons you’d expect, along with a few you might not. Like, that it’s difficult for people to wrap their minds around the fact that the King of Pop could be a formative elder acquaintance in the casually anodyne way of, say, a dancing-school teacher or a little-league coach—someone whose small encouragements could be so big. “I was really quiet, but when someone sees something in you...” she says of Jackson, before abandoning the thought. “I had a connection to him, but I’m not, like, his family”.
There was plenty of love out there for Night Time, My Time. The aforementioned Pitchfork were eager to lend their thoughts to one of the most anticipated Pop debuts of the past decade:
“About 17 and a half minutes into her debut album, Sky Ferreira prods you to consider how strange it is that you’re listening to it at all. “I just want you to realize I blame myself,” she sings, “for my reputation.” The last word there is the slippery one: It’s difficult to pinpoint what exactly Ferreira’s reputation is at this point, or whom she might be shifting blame from. Maybe she has in mind her young parents, who put her upbringing in the hands of her grandmother. Or perhaps she’s talking to the A&R team at Capitol Records, who signed her at age 15 in the hopes that she’d become the next Britney. The label orchestrated some minor singles for her (“One” and "Obsession”), only to let her planned full-length sputter and die along with her recording budget.
It’s also possible she’s addressing the horde of fashion-world supporters who helped her become a raccoon-eyed ingenue better known for looking cool on Terry Richardson’s Tumblr and modeling Hedi Slimane’s Saint Laurent pieces than making music. More plausible still, her followers at large for being seduced by the socialite component while failing to invest in her musical aspirations. And what of her boyfriend, Zachary Cole Smith of bedroom-rock band DIIV, the guy carrying a bunch of heroin when the two were arrested together in upstate New York this fall? At barely 21, Ferreira’s had a musical career burdened—and bolstered—by so many warring external forces and unconventional zig-zagging that the sheer existence of her debut album is a minor miracle.
So it’s both a relief and a bit of a shock that Night Time*, My Time* is not only here, but that it’s one of the most pleasingly conventional and cohesive pieces of pop-rock to come along this year. Particularly given last year’s uneven Ghost EP, which rode the success of “Everything Is Embarrassing” and used big-name collaborators to dabble in a sometimes-confusing assortment of styles—Shirley Manson-stamped grunge, singer-songwritery folk, electro-pop. Night Time*, My Time* finds Ferreira navigating her tastes more gracefully, bridging the gaps between 80s pop sparkle and full-bodied 90s grunge in a streamlined way. Her primary collaborator this time is producer Ariel Rechtshaid (Solange, Haim, Charli XCX, Vampire Weekend, Usher), a guy known for adding both big-league pop polish to smaller acts and fine-tuning to bigger ones.
Night Time, My Time resists the self-serious instinct to position Ferreira as an artist artist— which might have been an especially powerful temptation considering she's a young woman in the music industry who’s spoken about coming into her own sense of agency. She examines emotional neglect (“Nobody Asked Me (If I Was Okay)”) and self-loathing, but also sings clever songs about lifestyle posturing—“Stabbin’ pens in my hand/ But I’m never workin’, just spending/ A giant comedy with museums and shopping with Kristine,” she sings on “Kristine”, a giddily odd track with ska undertones. She’s does her glummest Chan Marshall impersonation (“Night Time, My Time”), but she also refers to the men in her life as simply boys and isn’t afraid to address them in a purposefully grade-school tone: “Boys, they’re a dime a dozen,” she mutters. “Boys, they just make me mad.” Night Time, My Time isn’t the reactionarily somber anti-pop drag it could have been—instead, it’s a smart Kelly Kapowski hair-whip and loud bubblegum-crack of a record that lends itself to compulsive listening”.
Prior to winding it up, I want to use AllMusic’s review for Night Time, My Time. I go to them a lot, as they seem to have insight and a special connection with a lot of albums. At the very least, they can definitely get to the core of an album:
“When Sky Ferreira's debut album, Night Time, My Time, finally arrived in October 2013 after a slew of EPs and delayed release dates, it confirmed her status as pop music's dark horse. Financed by Ferreira with money she earned from modeling gigs, it's a truly independent album from an outspoken artist; the scornful hooks on "Ain't Your Right" feel like they're aimed at everyone who got between her and her dream. While Night Time, My Time's most outrageous touches -- the equally alluring and disturbing nude album cover shot by controversial film director Gaspar Noé, the Suicide-goes-Top 40 track "Omanko," named after the Japanese slang for a woman's genitals -- are designed to raise eyebrows, the most shocking thing about the album might be how consistently good it is. Working with producers Justin Raisen and Ariel Rechtshaid, Ferreira balances her pop and indie leanings in surprising, creative, and always catchy ways. On the opening track "Boys" alone, she combines shades of girl group romanticism, grunge disillusionment, and synth pop cool into a sound that's resolutely hers.
Just how much range she shows on Night Time, My Time is impressive. "24 Hours" and "I Blame Myself" are built on classic pop structures (even if Ferreira sings about "the hounds of hell" on the latter track); later, she flirts with new wave on "Love in Stereo" and makes the mix of hard-hitting beats and big guitars on "I Will" sound perfectly natural. She blends seemingly contradictory emotions just as effortlessly on songs such as "Nobody Asked Me (If I Was OK)" and "You're Not the One," where she sounds pissed-off, world-weary, and ecstatic at the same time. However, the album's biggest shock -- and one of its biggest successes -- comes at its end: Driven by simmering strings and industrial drums, the album's hallucinatory title track shows that Ferreira can match Cat Power or Charlotte Gainsbourg when it comes to dead-of-the-night drama. Night Time, My Time is a stunning introduction to an artist who excels at blurring and breaking boundaries to be true to herself and her music”.
A fantastic album that the world has been loving since its 2013 release, eyes are on Sky Ferreira ahead of the planned release of her second album next year. Night Time, My Time is a cracking album that definitely should be played and shared more. Let’s hope that there is renewed investment in Ferreira in the coming weeks. I really like the album. It introduced me to an amazing artist. Even when I play Night Time, My Time today, it gets under the skin and…
CUTS quite deep.