Griff Talks Writing Vertigo Vol. 1 and the Special Shoutout from Her ‘Fairy Godmother’ Taylor Swift (Exclusive)

Griff has Taylor Swift to thank for his latest viral hit, “Vertigo” — and in more ways than one.

It took the singer (full name Sarah Faith Griffiths) a minute to realize that the cozy cottage in the English countryside she rented to collect her thoughts after a bout of “severe writer’s block” was the same place where Imogen Heap, the home’s owner, collaborated with Swift, 33, on in 1989is “Clean”. After finding a Polaroid photo of the songwriting pair — and a Grammy with Heap and the album title on it — inside the studio — Griffiths, 22, put the pieces together.

“I like to think they blessed the house that night with really good songwriting energy for me,” she tells PEOPLE — and they blessed the house. “Vertigo” gave Griffiths her first Top 100 single in the UK charts and provided the basis for what she calls “phase one” of her debut album.

Griff – “Vertigo”.

Warner Records

Vertigo Vol. 1which was released on Friday and featured two new songs, “19th Hour” and “Into the Walls,” is the “first chapter” of a larger project, she says, and it’s “fragile and heartbroken and isolated.”

“All these songs are me just trying to keep up with my emotions and figure out what I’m thinking,” she says of the three-song project. “I feel like I wrote them all from a place of feeling a little upside down and a little lost, which I think is a natural feeling when you’re a young woman entering adulthood.”

The sense of vertigo in particular – she got inspiration from the giant spiral staircase in Heap’s cabin – resonated with the British songwriter as she says: “Often when you’re heartbroken, it feels like you’re emotionally dizzy. ”

“I came up to this house and it had a huge spiral staircase in the middle, and I was just talking to my friend about how you get dizzy looking at it or being on it. And I think it’s funny sometimes that’s how inspiration comes — she is in the most mundane things you talk about.”

Griff drops ‘Veritgo Vol. 1’ including two new songs, “19th Hour” and “Into the Walls.”

Warner Records

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“19th Hour” is another way of describing the same kind of pain, Griffith says, calling the song “heartbreak at its most desperate.”

She sings, “When sorry started to lose its meaning / Like the color on your faded jeans / When ‘I love you’ starts to lose its power / You don’t say it until the 19th hour.”

Griffiths says the song explores the point in a relationship “when the words ‘I love you’ become completely meaningless, because there’s so much mess between the two of you, and it’s almost said as a last resort and as a band-aid that needs to stick the mess together to actually mean it, and something about it really hurts more.”

Last song on Vertigo Vol. 1, “Into the Walls,” can be pinpointed to a very specific period in Griffith’s life. It’s the first of three songs she’s written, and she says it reflects a time when she was “thrown out into the public eye” in time for the 2021 BRIT Awards, where she won her first major award and performed on national television for the first time.

“I was on Zoom calls planning my BRITs performance,” she says of the day she started writing the song, which she says is an interesting juxtaposition, given that the song is “about wanting to completely disappear and being jealous on the walls because they” calm and stable.”

On it, he sings: “Today I don’t speak, dip me in the walls / And I’ll just watch the world go, I’ll watch it go by / Let it go on.”

Griffiths, who dropped out of school after signing a record deal at 17, adds: “I think that song makes me the most fragile. It’s just this feeling of wanting to watch the world go by and feeling quite numb.”

“Vertigo,” out Aug. 31, was Griffiths’ first release of 2023, and it came after she spent four months as the opening act for Coldplay on tour in Europe.

She says it was a bit of a strange experience because there was no “tangible way of knowing how successful” the opening act was in terms of expanding her audience, but then, just a few weeks after finishing the band’s Music of the Spheres tour, and a few days after “Vertigo” was released, she scored the biggest nod of approval on the track — from Swift herself.

Griff performs at All Points East in London on August 28, 23.

Matthew Baker/Getty

“It’s still the craziest thing in the world,” Griffiths says of the attention she’s received from the “Anti-Hero” singer, who shouted out “Vertigo” on her Instagram Story in September.

Swift wrote on her Story, “Damn Griff, I love this one,” as she shared the single. To say it was a pinch-me moment for Griffiths – who says, “I’m such a Swiftie” – is an understatement.

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“Her coming out the other week and releasing ‘Vertigo’ is the craziest thing because it’s like – she never releases and she really doesn’t have to. So it’s really nice of her to be so generous in promoting it,” she says. “It’s really cool.”

After seeing the post, she recalls thinking, “What the hell?” and then, “How can I even thank her?”

“We don’t really have a constant point of contact,” Griffith says of his relationship with Swift. “She’s like a fairy godmother who shows up and makes things amazing for me and then I just live in it for the next period. It’s great.”

Griff attends the ELLE Style Awards in London in September 2023.

Dave Bennett/Getty

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The “Walk” singer, who earned nominations at the 2022 MTV VMAs and 2021 MTV EMAs, adds that she credits the Grammy winner with influencing her own songwriting, as well as many others.

“I think she’s obviously raised a whole new generation of artists and songwriters.”

Other successful female singers and songwriters that Griffiths cites as sources of inspiration include Sia and Julia Michaels, whom she admires for “being songwriters first”, which is what she always imagined she would be, rather than a pop star.

“I love performing, so I think there was a part of me that probably, deep down, loved parts of the artist’s life as it was, but I’m just in love with the songwriting process and I think that’s what really gave me confidence,” he says. she. “Even still, that process is the most sacred part for me.”

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Source: HIS Education