Before moving to London for a spell at 19, Gray had dropped out of high school (a 'starting problem', he says) to attend night classes 'with a bunch of ex-convicts, because I didn't thrive in a public place. .” Around the same time, after years of performing in church bands, her musical life took an unexpected detour. Her bass guitar rendition of Michael Jackson's “Ease on Down the Road” went viral in gospel circles on Instagram, prompting offers for national gospel and jazz tours based on her videos alone. The glow soon faded. In retrospect, working for other artists felt too much like school. “They don't tell me what to do,” he says, tearing into a piece of focaccia. “When someone tells me what to wear, how to do my hair…eughk. I'm just like, Friend. No.”
After quitting her creative director gigs in her mid-twenties, Gray went into freefall. Construction 19 Teachers In London, he says, “I was homeless for the whole year, jumping on the couch. I literally had a miscarriage. It was fucked up.” The sense of judgment extended to her friendship group. “There was a lot of death around me, people being murdered or overdosed, people stealing from me. I was looking for something to fill the space.”
What she found was the city—fitness regimes, fake friends, status anxieties and pole-dancing lessons, broken up by impromptu flights to Tokyo. “I go into manic states when I travel, up and down, up and down, so much bullshit, insanity, drama.” Her instinct was to retreat. Instead, he decided, “I'll live a year out of this.”
From now on she would stay up late at the club and wake up early at the pole, “half-naked on social media, to see what she was like in this world.” In her heart, as she now remembers it, she felt no desire to impress an outside audience. But he felt a desire to feel that desire—to understand the strange longing for validation that he had studied in so many others. He sought the approval of outsiders, tried it on for size. He considered, as an anthropological concern, to be a bit sexy. She decided, she finally says, “to be a basic bitch.”
It almost stuck. “I was like, I'm going to be around basic bitches, I'm going to be a basic bitch, I'm going to be online, I'm going to be influenced as much as possible,” she recalls. Qwerty it exploits the hum of this lifestyle on a scale that borders on operatic: yearning soul melodies punctuated by anxious commercials, voice note recordings and phone alert pings, with sly melodic rivers linking the buzzing movements. He laid down much of the original material during a fortnight at Real World, Peter Gabriel's lakeside studio in England's West Country, when his 1975 Dirty Hit collaborators took a break from recording. A track list had been written, but she finished a collection of more conventional R&B songs – now set to form her next record – to make a sort of preemptive remix album.
