If you had told the eight-year-old Sarah Faith Griffiths, she simply wouldn’t have believed you. Back in 2009, the musician known as Griff was one of millions of Swifties obsessed with Taylor Swift’s album Fearless. She remembers sitting at the piano in her family home, googling the chords to Love Story and attempting to play along. Fifteen years later, she has Swift’s number in her phone and she recently supported her at Wembley, where the world’s biggest pop star complimented her from the stage: “This girl is so creative on every single level. She is in complete control of everything that goes into her writing, her producing; she even makes her own outfits for stage. I love her so much.”
“I’m not sure it even feels real, to be honest,” says the 23-year-old, shaking her head. We speak just days before the gig, and she is fizzing with nerves and anticipation. “With Taylor, it’s funny; obviously she’s on another level. Meeting her at the Brits, any time she’s shouted out any of my songs ... ” She trails off, shaking her head. “I just feel very grateful that she’s sharing her stage with me. So yeah, it’s terrifying, but also I feel like I’m amongst my own community, in a way. With Coldplay or with Ed, I really didn’t know what kind of crowds I was going to walk out to. But with this, it’s like, ‘I know Swifties – because I am one.’
Of course, the Hertfordshire-born pop musician is no stranger to big nights. As she mentioned, she has previously supported Coldplay and Ed Sheeran, as well as Dua Lipa; then there was the Rising Star award at the Brit awards in 2021, which was promptly followed by the release of her debut mixtape One Foot in Front of the Other. After a stuttering start to her career due to Covid (she signed to Warner in 2019), the Brit award undeniably changed things, she says on a Zoom call from her London base.
“I remember every time I’d see my friends in that period, they’d be like ‘You’re everywhere!’ and I’d be like ‘Ummm ... sorry’,” she says, laughing. “Awards like that are amazing, but it’s hard because as a creative you don’t ever want to put them on a pedestal; that’s not why you do it. But weirdly, it [also] legitimises everything, or maybe makes you realise that all the work you put in was worth something. The Brits was insane, but I never envisaged that much commercial attention for what I did – I always thought I made quite left-of-field pop.”
There is certainly a quirky undercurrent to Griff’s pop music that is perhaps the result of several different factors. Growing up as an Evangelical Christian of mixed heritage – her paternal grandparents are Jamaican and her mother is Chinese – she says that her relationship with pop culture was “kind of weird” due to her religious household. “There wasn’t that much secular music in the house,” she says. “[But we had] my dad’s mixtapes of what he loved – which was R&B and soul music, Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson, Whitney, Aaliyah and Bill Withers, stuff like that. I think that was definitely a big foundation for me. Soul and R&B is hidden in pop music everywhere, I think.”
The fact that she taught herself to produce her own tracks as a teenager, guided by YouTube tutorials on a laptop borrowed from her brother, also played a part. It was more prominent on her mixtape, perhaps, but traces of her “bedroom producer” background are audible on Vertigo, which undoubtedly kicks things up a notch. Yet there were times during the writing process where she admits that she lost perspective; the pressure of being a next big thing was undeniably present.
“I think when I started making it I was really waiting for the approval of my team, or my A&R person, or someone else, and that really drove me insane,” she says. “It got to a point where I thought a lot of these songs weren’t good enough; I’d scrapped Astronaut because I thought it wasn’t good enough, and Into the Walls, 19th Hour ... There was a turning point where I actually had to go ‘No, I need to do this for myself and figure out what songs I love, and finish those’.”
Luckily she had another musical guru to help her with Astronaut when she was at an impasse with the song. Chris Martin made some suggestions for the track when she was in a “lost place” with it, and she remembers being incredibly nervous at the thought of sharing studio time with the Coldplay frontman.
“There was a moment where I started playing him a song and my whole body language was so recoiled,” she says, wincing. “He stopped it and was like, ‘Are you okay?! This is all amazing, just relax!’ He was just so encouraging about the music, and I think that really, really helped – because it means something when it comes from someone like Chris, someone who obviously knows what they’re talking about. So his encouragement meant everything at that point.”
Themes of loneliness, isolation and love abound on the sleek, ambitious Vertigo, which was written during gaps away from touring. She would rent a house on Airbnb, spend a few days on her own getting her thoughts and ideas together, and then send her location to her production collaborators, who included Lostboy and SIBA, to join her. Unlike many modern pop stars, she wanted to keep her circle tight in terms of collaborators.
“I’d done the sessions [in] LA, worked with loads of people – and I just got really frazzled by it,” she says. ‘It got really toxic for a while and I just thought ‘I need to remove myself’. Even in terms of collaborations, there’s not a whole load of producers on this album – and the ones who are on it are basically my brothers.”
Things have been happening pretty quickly for Griff, but it feels like this is only the beginning of a long and fruitful career. She is enjoying the moment, she says, but at the same time she’s not necessarily looking to follow in the footsteps of her stadium-playing chums.
“It’s hard not to be a part of these things and not get super-inspired by them,” she says. “But first and foremost, I’m a songwriter. I want my songs to fall on the ears of the masses, but a stadium isn’t the ultimate goal for me. The ultimate goal is just to write songs that feel timeless, and that they feel like they’ll live beyond my years. If that exists in the form of touring stadiums, that’s amazing. But if not, that’s also cool.”
Vertigo is released on July 12th
