by Erika Jayne
The next video was going to be for the song “Pretty Mess.” I had such a great time with Mikey on “Give You Everything” that I gave him even more control over this video. He codirected it with the photographer, Mike Ruiz, but now he was truly taking on the role of creative director as well as doing the choreography. With this video, Mikey and I were able to make the vision tighter and more our own. We wanted to focus more on the performance, fashions, and lifestyle. We wanted to build up that persona.
The point of these videos—or any videos really—is that I needed to make pictures for the people. If I’m going to say “pretty mess,” we need to show what that looks and feels like. Mikey and I always say, “You can only wear so many costumes.” The message I’m trying to convey is in these pictures, in the subtlety. It’s about defining myself visually as an artist and creating my signature. It’s about putting on the outside the things that only I have in the interior.
That is still one of my favorite videos, and you can see Mikey’s fingerprints all over it. The hair is bigger, the dancing is edgier, the costumes are skimpier, and I’m just pushing everything right to the edge. We even did our own homage to Busby Berkeley by filming me on a bed from above, surrounded by my backup dancers. I don’t think Busby ever would have put me in a sparkly onesie with garters, though.
That video also costars Johnny and Anthony, my two male dancers who pranced around in high heels and sported a very androgynous look. By now, everyone has seen boys dancing in high heels in music videos by Madonna and Lady Gaga, but Mikey likes to claim that we did it first. I’m not entirely sure it’s true, but we certainly were among the first.
Johnny and Anthony are both excellent dancers, and they became two of my closest friends. They’re both incredibly technical. We would rehearse just the three of us, and I would match their movements. They would lovingly correct me, and they encouraged me to step out and be comfortable with a totally different style of movement. They made me a much better dancer and performer. They’re both also absolutely insane lunatics with hearts of gold, which makes for a really fun time when we tour together.
Ever since the shoot for “Pretty Mess,” whenever we want to make a new video, Mikey and I do almost everything ourselves. We hire a producer and a director of photography to shoot it, but we’re in charge of all the other creative aspects of the shoot. I think that’s what is really powerful about the videos. Say what you want, but I do have some killer videos—and it comes down to the same two people driving the vision.
Eventually, it came time to retool my live show, which is how we ended up at that fateful LA Pride performance in which Mikey dragged me up from the ground just using his eyes from the side of the stage. (He still stands there now, dance-moming during every performance and giving me the thumbs-up when it’s going well.)
What Mikey brought to the show is what we call “the full fantasy.” It’s the mane of hair, edgy makeup, provocative costumes, backup dancers, props, lighting, and all the decadence you see on stage with Erika Jayne that you won’t see many other places. It’s also the little wink that we know this is all a bit wonderfully absurd. It’s meant to be a sensory overload, just knocking the audience over the head with our vision. It’s like a hurricane hitting the crowd all at once and hopefully sweeping them off of their feet.
One of Mikey’s skills is that he has a way of making even the smallest performance in the tiniest space seem important. He finds a way to do the most with what we have and makes the show a million times better than it should be, given a venue’s limitations—and almost every venue has its limitations.
After we released all the singles from the first album, I was thinking about recording some more music. In my opinion, if you’re sitting on your ass not thinking about the next project, you’re never going to grow, and you’re essentially dead.
That process of creating new music is interesting, because the real superstars are hard to get and very expensive. The marketplace is flooded with “producers” and “songwriters” who are basically bullshit. Finding good people to work with is really about making enough noise and getting well enough known that people will want to collaborate.
The hard part for me has always been finding people who know what I’m about. It’s not like I’m a pop act or a girl group, where they can write a cute song about chasing boys, partying all night long, or heartache. It’s different when you have a grown woman with life experience under her belt (or corset).
Also, I’m not an artist with a development deal at a major label. I don’t have some musical godfather who magically drops me in the lap of a multiplatinum Grammy-winning producer. I also don’t have the corporate financial backing. That is hard to beat sometimes.
Instead of doing things the old way, I develop relationships with people I like and who make music I like. It’s about listening to a lot of music and reaching out and asking if people want to work together. Sometimes I get a quick yes, and sometimes it’s an even quicker no. Sometimes I’ll hear: “I charge $1 million a song,” which is just a passive-aggressive way of saying no. It’s crazy when people quote these outrageous fees, as if anyone is worth that kind of dough these days, when only about five people make real money in this industry.
While Mikey and I collaborate on my look, costumes, videos, and performances, he’s never been involved in the production or writing of the music. Of course I will play him tracks and ask for his opinions about things, but when it comes to making the songs, that’s on me.
After Pretty Mess came and went, I started working with this music industry veteran to try to take the project to a larger audience. He had the pedigree, had worked with some really major people in the industry, and had written some huge hits. On paper, it all made sense.
Working with him, however, was a disaster. Almost like a born-again Christian, he always raised an eyebrow at my persona. I feel like he was in it for all the wrong reasons, which was to take the money rather than to further my project. He also wasn’t really looking for any input from me at all.
This person had had a successful career in the age of the big record business. But I felt he wasn’t familiar enough with the ways things were changing in the industry. The music was decent. It was very well-made pop. I never sang higher, and I never sang harder. But I wasn’t totally in control, and I didn’t like that. When I would suggest things, he’d respond with, “Yeah, but we’re doing it this way. Just wait and see what happens.”
That was always the wrong answer, because to me it meant that he had not paid any attention to how I got here, who I was, and what I was really trying to say. He had a very narrow view of what success looks like, which is just so far from who I am and from the project that I had created. I felt like it was taking me from something edgy and cool to something that was much more dull and conventional.
He was coming from what I call a “me too” place. You know the artists who hear the hottest new sound or the cool new producer and they say, “Oh, me too, me too,” even if that sound or that producer has absolutely nothing to do with the message they’re trying to convey? It’s more of a grab for attention and popularity than it is about creating something that is original to that artist. It almost always fails. No artist should ever be caught up in chasing every musical trend—they should be setting them.
For instance, we made a track called “Get It Tonight” with Flo Rida, who is a supersweet guy and a great artist. At the time, he was killing every chart imaginable, so it totally made sense to have him be the featured artist on my song. It’s a cute little track, but not exactly Erika Jayne’s sensibility. For the first time, I felt like I was trying to be too young. Not only did it feel like a stretch, it was also inauthentic.
It’s a great pop track, don’t get me wrong, but it doesn’t have any of my signature or personality. Any other artist could have sung it, and it would have been just the same. The sound was very much what was happening at the time and middle of the road, but nothing at all specific to Erika Jayne.
This time I made the video with a new team, and Mikey wasn’t involved. He and I were talking during this whole process, so Mikey knew what I was working on. There were no hard feelings, but I sure did miss him on set.
Looking at the video now, it just isn’t Erika Jayne, either. It looks like a commercial for some South American soft drink you’ve never heard of. Everything is bright colors and bubblegum sensibility. It’s like they sanded all of the grit off of Erika Jayne, but we weren’t left with a unique jewel—just something in the middle, nothing special and not cool at all.
Let me tell you something: there is a way to make anything cool. There is a way to change things, even if it’s subtly, so you could make a Cracker Barrel look like Studio 54. But what you can’t do is all of a sudden turn an artist into someone they’re not. That’s what these people were trying to do to me.
I didn’t promote the track at all. None of this is to blame Flo Rida, who was just a featured artist and did his job. I can’t imagine what the track would have been like without him. It was the team around me that wasn’t carrying their weight. The producer I was working with did some mediocre remixes that I didn’t have my hand in. That is why I don’t really talk about that record today. I never felt involved. It got to a place where I had to finish out this project, and I didn’t really like who these people were.
There is a whole album worth of material that I never released, because I wasn’t happy with it. It wasn’t going to do anything for the Erika Jayne project. That whole experience cost me dearly in multiple ways, and it taught me a lot.
Once I finally cut ties with the team, I called up Mikey and said, “Listen, I’m finally free of these fools, let’s get back to doing what we do.”
“I’ve been waiting, bitch,” he said.
Shortly after that I was introduced to Charles Koppelman, the former CEO of EMI music. Charles was working as a brand consultant for me and introduced me to producers like Scott Storch, Aaron Pearce, and Chris Rodriguez. That’s when I started making things I liked again. I worked a lot in Miami, where Scott produced “Crazy.” Chris helped me take “Painkillr,” which I had written as a poem a year before, and lay down the beats to make it into a song. It’s about how losing yourself in love can be a bit like losing yourself in drugs. Both can be numbing experiences, as destructive as they are intoxicating.
Aaron also introduced me to Justin Tranter, one of the greatest songwriters I’ve had the chance to work with (and certainly the funniest). Justin was the front man of the band Semi Precious Weapons and had just opened for Lady Gaga on her tour. We made about six tracks together, and I later got to work with Justin again when we wrote “How Many Fucks.”
The great thing about Justin is that he is really able to crawl into an artist’s brain and pull out all of the best thoughts and whip them into something absolutely brilliant. He’s written songs for Justin Bieber, Kelly Clarkson, Britney Spears, and all sorts of other top acts, and I’ve just loved watching his career explode. He was recently nominated for his first Grammy, and I couldn’t be happier for him! No one deserves success more than he does. You do get to meet some really great people along the way, and Justin and Aaron are two of them.
Steven Johnson was the one good thing I took away from my miserable experience with that producer. Steven produced the “Get It Tonight” video, and he’s just magnificent. I got him on board to produce the video for my song “Crazy” as well.
We wanted the video to look like a downtown LA warehouse party. Everyone from every different walk of life, socioeconomic group, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation all came out to have one giant banger. The set was just like the incredible party it was trying to depict, except we filmed it in the middle of August, and it was hot and sticky the whole time.
But it was so much fun, and the video looks amazing. It’s like a clash between biker gang culture, stripper culture, tattoo culture, and rave culture, with a hot guy wearing a gorilla mask thrown in for good measure. I was back to that gritty feel that I had been missing.
Then I decided to make a video for “Painkillr,” which Mikey and I produced and directed ourselves. The day we made that video was magical.
We did something somewhat unusual, which was staging the photo shoot right before we shot the video. If you ask anybody in their right fucking mind, they would say it’s almost impossible to do them both in one day and do them right. But that’s just a testament to how organized Mikey and I are.
I needed new press photos. Joe Labisi, who was the director of photography on “Crazy” and “Painkillr,” is also a still photographer. I asked him to do them before we shot the “Painkillr” video. I didn’t have the same hair, makeup, or costumes as I did in the video, so that added many more setups to an already ambitious day.
I went from the photo shoot to a setup in a bed, to a setup in a cage with two other dancers, to dancing on concrete. It was a hell of a workday at Siren Studios in Hollywood, but it was one of my favorite days ever. The reason why is because everyone on the team was doing them. Mikey and I told them the essence of what we wanted the shoot to be and supplied a folder full of images for references. Everyone—hair, makeup, wardrobe, lighting, photography—came back and said, “What do you think of this?” and every choice was perfect. Everyone brought their specific vision to the video, and they all melded into something phenomenal and singular.
It turned out exactly the way we wanted it to be: raw, in your face, aggressive, sexy, and all in black and white. For a song called “Painkillr,” this was exactly the treatment it needed. It was like stripping Erika Jayne down to the bare essentials and letting her be entirely uninhibited.
The first live show we did after that was in Dallas. It was the birth of the black-compression-catsuit moment of my career. For that performance it was just simple and one color, but then we started upping our game with rhinestones, jewels, and all the other glitz, glamour, and fun.
In Dallas we had four boys and two girls, new costumes, new songs, and it was just perfect. It was the end of summer, so it was a warm night. I left everything on the stage that night. I had the biggest smile on my face, because my team and I were back together.
After that, I did one song, “You Make Me Want to Dance,” cowritten by Ross Vallory of Journey and remixed by an Asian producer. I dragged Mikey and the glam squad to the Philippines to shoot the video. This is another one of Erika Jayne’s adventures. I’m always showing up and saying to the team, “Guys, we have an opportunity to make a video in Manila,” or, “Guys, we have an opportunity to go perform on an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf.”
The response I always get is, “What?” But then we find a way of pulling it off, and it’s always a fantastic experience.
We filmed the video in Manila in the middle of the summer on the hottest day of the year, which wasn’t the best idea. We were filming street scenes in which I’m backed up by the dance crew G Force, which is huge over there. But it was so hot that we had to film in the middle of the night so it would be cooler. Still, I thought I was going to pass out under all of my hair and makeup.
The part of town we were filming in was pretty rough, too. There were stray cats and rats everywhere, and we had to make sure they weren’t ruining any of our shots. But we got all the material we needed. The crew and I did a big production number in the streets, with me sitting on top of a tuk-tuk with erika jayne emblazoned on it in big yellow letters.
A few months later, after the single came out, I took four female dancers and Mikey through a sweep of Asia. We hit Seoul, Tokyo, Manila, and Singapore over the course of two weeks. It was my first time in Seoul and Singapore, so I had no idea what to expect.
We were supporting the single and had four great shows and a wonderful response. Our final performance in Singapore was at a club called 1-Altitude, which is the world’s highest outside bar. It was a warm night and we were all standing around a table celebrating our successful run and our return home the next day.
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br /> Mikey had a few shots, and he was showing the girls how they should have been doing the head roll during one of the numbers in the show. He started swirling his head around and around in a circle, and then he whacked his forehead on top of the Grey Goose bottle sitting on the table. It had one of those metal quick-pour nozzles on top, and that cut Mikey’s forehead. He hit that bottle so hard that he sheared the top right off of it.
I looked at him and said, “Are you okay? Do you need to go to the hospital?” His cut was bleeding a lot, like a wound to the face always will, so it looked pretty bad.
“No, I’m okay,” he told me.
“Well, then let’s keep going,” I said. That’s how we do things in my crew. Unless you have to be hospitalized, nothing is going to stop the party. Mikey didn’t need stitches but he did have a giant knot the next morning. He might have been feeling no pain the night before, but it caught up with him on the ride home.
I can’t begrudge Mikey for wanting to blow off some steam. There is pressure on me, but there is pressure on him, too. Sometimes I forget how much of the weight he shoulders for me. I’m out front, but he is the one who keeps the girls in line, deals with technical issues, and makes sure it all works the way it’s supposed to.
The minute I left behind that old-school producer and returned to my people, I started to get my momentum going. We went from “Painkillr” and “Crazy” right into “How Many Fucks” and eventually “XXPEN$IVE.” I knew that Erika Jayne had found her stride. I wasn’t looking back, I was running forward.
I always feel like the clock is ticking, especially in this profession. Everything has to be a run for the end zone. Erika Jayne didn’t arrive on the scene until many women are leaving the music business. I’m not only making up for lost time, but I’m doing it on borrowed time.