On Saturday Grimes lived what is probably the nightmare of every Coachella performer: debilitating equipment malfunctions in front of thousands of fans and possibly millions watching online. While things seemed fine for the first half of her set, things began breaking down during the second. She tried explaining the problems had to do with the programming of the tracks on her mixing desk, but her frustration was evident and she shouted and shrieked into the mic as things broke down several times. But by even the most charitable metric, it was a disaster.
Early Sunday, Grimes took to X (formerly Twitter) to apologize for the performance and her reaction, and promised better for her performance next Saturday at Coachella’s second weekend.
I want to apologize for the technical issues with the show tonight. I wanted to come back rly strong and usually I always handle every aspect of my show myself – to save time this was one of the first times I’ve outsourced essential things like rekordbox bpm’s and letting someone else organize the tracks on the sd card etc. I had a bad feeling beforehand not having run everything thru the cdjs myself and tho I flagged it I wasn’t insistent. the big lesson for me was a mix of
1 if u want it done right, do it yrself
2 be a c— even if ppl feel bad
3 probably pretend it’s fine and engage w the crowd rather than spend a whole show slumped over the desk trying to fix software when ur meant to be entertaining.
I will personally organize all the files next week. I will not let such a thing happen again.
I’ve spent months on this show, making music and visuals, and admittedly am not in the best mood atm
But, yeh – next week will be flawless, everything will run thru my hands
Some good lessons learned. Bless y’all. The cdjs were showing me bpms like 370 so I couldn’t even mix manually by ear and the front monitors were off so it was literally sonic chaos on my end trying to guess how stuff was sounding for u guys
Plz forgive me! Love, always
She added some commentary about her frustrated tone in a follow-up tweet:
I was not aware of the screaming and my friends just showed me I constantly scream and squeak into the mic a few days ago which ads another layer of psychological chaos hahahahha but I’ll at least get some verb and dist on there if i need to do that again.
