Grammys set to celebrate female musicians as Taylor Swift eyes a record-breaking win
A remarkable generation of hyperastute young female musicians, spanning pop to R&B, indie-rock and beyond, are set to be celebrated at Sunday night’s Grammy awards – though the biggest prizes could end up being swept by just one of them, Taylor Swift.
The top categories are unprecedentedly dominated by women, with only one male artist, Jon Batiste, up for record, album or song of the year. In a week where major research studies in both the US and UK acknowledged progress around representation in a historically male-dominated and often sexist music industry – while also finding numerous examples of misogyny – the Grammys are a sign that at female artists, at least, are being celebrated at the highest level.
Top of the nominations is the 34-year-old vocalist SZA with nine, following the release of her second studio album, SOS, which topped the US chart, as did its lead single Kill Bill, a deceptively sweet tune carrying a murderous revenge fantasy. Critics thralled to the album’s range – her core R&B sits alongside hip-hop, folk instrumentation, rowdy rock and more – and to her often self-lacerating examination of love’s complexity.
But the night’s big winner could be Taylor Swift. There’s a sense that industry admiration is behind her following a year in which she dominated pop culture with her album Midnights and the subsequent career-spanning Eras tour – analysts expect it to make at least $2bn in revenue, over twice as much as the previous highest-grossing tour, by Elton John. Swift is looking to become the first artist to win album of the year four times – she’s currently tied on three with Frank Sinatra, Stevie Wonder and Paul Simon – and her track Anti-Hero could earn her first wins in the record and song of the year categories.
R&B singer Victoria Monét has seven nominations in her breakthrough year as a solo artist, having previously been nominated as a songwriter for
Ariana Grande and Chloe x Halle – and her two-year-old daughter Hazel, delivering delighted giggles as a featured artist on the song Hollywood, becomes the awards’ youngest ever nominee. Other women with multiple nominations in the top categories are Lana Del Rey, Olivia Rodrigo, Miley Cyrus, Billie Eilish and Boygenius, each with their own particular flavour of heartache and existential angst. If Eilish wins record of the year – for a third time in five years – she would have the joint highest number of wins for an artist in that category, alongside Paul Simon and Bruno Mars.
Boygenius, the supergroup of indierockers Phoebe Bridgers (also up for best pop/duo group performance with SZA), Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus, are up for six awards. They co-produced their debut album with Catherine Marks who has three nominations herself – but she is the only female producer other than Boygenius, Swift, Eilish and Del Rey listed in the record and album categories, versus 22 men.
Marks said the group’s nominations were “kind of mindblowing”, and explained how she tried to create a “really tactile” sound for the album, entitled The Record, made at Rick Rubin’s Shangri-La studio in Malibu. “It was a beautiful, warm, rich room, which gives the drum tones a lot of power and depth – we used the room as the fourth identity of The Record,” she said.
Marks’s career began 20 years ago when she moved from Australia to
London. “I know of stories that are horrendous, but I was lucky with mentors,” she says of being a rare female producer at that time. “The misogyny I experienced was from other women in the industry, but back then there was a culture of women being pitted against other women, whether consciously or subconsciously. But we now live in a culture where women support other women.”
Despite men still dominating production for now – all five producers in the non-classical category are male – Marks is heartened by the number of women coming through: “Even in the past year so much has happened.” That diversity, she says, will particularly help young female artists who have otherwise been “working with old white men – understandably, their experiences are not shared. Communication could be difficult or they might not feel comfortable enough to express their ideas. So the environment is really important. But there are so many more [producers] to choose from now.”
To keep the momentum going, she called for government grants for interns in recording studios: “We need the next generation to come through, and we want that to be more diverse – not just gender, but economic, and racial. I hope other people’s road to success is a little more speedy than mine.” She has already got one prize so far this week: the Powerhouse prize at the Resonator awards, celebrating female producers and engineers. It is that ceremony’s debut year – another sign of a rapidly diversifying industry.
The Grammys ceremony, hosted by Trevor Noah at the Crypto.com arena in Los Angeles, will have performances from nominees including SZA, Rodrigo, Eilish and Travis Scott, though two returning legends will probably get the heartiest welcome.
Having quit touring and with no new music since 2007, it was once feared that Joni Mitchell’s career was over, especially after she suffered an aneurysm in 2015 that meant she had to learn to walk again. But as she recovered she began a regular series of private jam sessions at her home with luminaries such as Elton John, Paul McCartney and Harry Styles. In July 2022 she took the concept public with an unannounced set at the Newport folk festival, followed in June 2023 by a full return to live performance at the spectacular Gorge Amphitheater in Washington state. She is now performing at the Grammys for the first time, having won nine awards over the years – though a number of her classic albums such as Blue, Hejira and Ladies of the Canyon were overlooked entirely by the Academy.
Billy Joel is also set to perform, likely giving a first public performance of Turn the Lights Back On – only his second new solo single since 1993.
British artists did well at 2023’s awards, with Harry Styles getting album of the year and winning pop categories alongside Adele and Sam Smith, while Wet Leg and Ozzy Osbourne dominated the rock and alternative awards with two wins apiece. This year could be a step down, with Dua Lipa and Fred Again the only British nominees in the “big four” categories of record, song, album and best new artist, though Fred Again leads a strong showing from the UK’s dance and electronic community: Aphex Twin, the Chemical Brothers, James Blake, Romy and Calvin Harris are nominated alongside him in the genre categories.
British producer Mark Ronson has four nominations after he helmed the Barbie soundtrack, which produced a number of hit singles including Dance the Night – earning Lipa a song of the year nod – and I’m Just Ken, the ludicrously impassioned power ballad performed by Ryan Gosling.
With four nominations, Fred Again – AKA 30-year-old London-born producer Frederick Gibson – joins Ronson as the most successful Brit this year, underlining his increasing US fame. An impromptu headline DJ set at California’s Coachella festival last year, with Gibson alongside Skrillex and Four Tet, gobsmacked the crowd and went viral, showcasing his skill for high-intensity emotion and even poignancy amid the banging tempos.
Also in 2023 he showcased the quieter end of his craft in a collaborative album with early mentor Brian Eno, and has previously worked behind the scenes with various pop stars including Ed Sheeran, sharing in a song of the year Grammy nomination for Sheeran’s Bad Habits in 2022. This summer he steps up to solo headline status at US festival Bonnaroo and Reading & Leeds in the UK.
If Swift wins album of the year the focus will rightly be on her recordbreaking achievement, but it will mean her studio engineer Serban Ghenea will actually beat her for the highest number of wins in the category, with five. Ghenea, a Romanian who moved with his family to Canada as a child in 1976, has previously won for Swift’s 1989 and Folklore, plus Adele’s 25 and Bruno Mars’s 24K Magic, and has won 15 Grammys in other categories thanks to work dating back to Justin Timberlake’s 2002 debut album. His work on another album of the year nominee, Olivia Rodrigo’s Guts, gives him another chance to claim the all-time record.