But how can it be a joke when you’re doing it day in and day out?
No, totally. It didn’t really work.
Didn’t work creatively? Commercially?
Creatively, fully. And commercially for them too. That’s cool, too, you know? I got the last Nicki [Minaj] feature that’s acceptable at this point. [Laughs]. I got to do a David Guetta collab and David Guetta’s a GOAT.
I did the full fantasy of what you dream about as a kid like when I signed to a label. So I’m grateful, and I’m grateful they let me out. It felt really pointless and not the same as this [album], which has a purpose to connect with people. This is a real try for me to let people know me, which is really rare because I love hiding behind a concept. I love escapist pop. The bridges on this album are a multidimensional view to the full picture [of me]. [It’s more] than me playing this character that’s super horny, or this person who kills people. This is combining all of those into a person.
I felt that throughout the entire record, especially on “Brutalist.” Can you share the thoughts and feelings that were going through your mind as you were writing it?
It’s the story of my dad and I driving around in Germany to get my hormone therapy when I was a kid. He used to show me buildings along the way and teach me about architecture. There was this particular brutalist post office that we were obsessed with. It was something we could bond over. We came back to the city every few months or so to get psychological assessments of how [the treatment is] going. I’m from a really small town so we used to have to drive to a big city, which in that case was Hamburg in Germany. [One day we noticed] they knocked [the post office] down and built an apartment building that was a classic modern apartment building. We were like, “Ugh, they ruined the city,” you know?
In recent years, there’s been so much talk about … honestly from the beginning of my transition when I talked about [my transition in the German media]. I was 12 talking about it, which I kind of regret because privacy was really blurred, [but] I was really unashamed of talking about it because I was a kid and I was like, “This is the way it is.” Now that I’m in America, there’s so much shame around sex, sexual education is such a taboo, and it’s such a weird climate right now especially about trans kids in particular. They’re the enemy right now. In this political climate I’m happy I can stand for [the idea that] trans kids can transition and then be a grown up and happy and make [those] choices. I made the right choices that I’m proud of to this day.
But [at the same time] I have people saying I ruined my body and I ruined my life. They don’t know me at all. They don’t know my history, that I went to so many psychologists and so many doctors and that it was a real thing that had an assessment and [they gave me] an answer [about] why I got to [get hormone treatment]. It saved my life and then there’s people who are like, “This saved your life, but you ruined everything,”
I felt like my dad and I were guilty [of that with the apartment]. There’s people living in this modern apartment building now probably like, “We love it here,” and we’re like, “Nah, it’s basic and y’all ruined it.” I thought it was interesting to compare the two. What does it mean if something’s ruined but other people love it and it’s subjective. People are saying that you fucked it all up. That relates so much, too, to [how I’m] getting away from the pop formula.