Watch Elly Jackson of La Roux’s Journey to Electro-Pop Bliss
When Elly Jackson was young, she knew she wanted to be a musician but frustrated her parents by refusing to take guitar lessons. “I’m like, ‘It’s not that I don’t want to learn,'” she recalls explaining, “‘It’s that I’m incapable of learning in this way.'” Eventually, though, Jackson had a breakthrough, realizing, as she puts it, “I don’t have to do it like you’re saying I have to do it…. I can do it how I want to do it.”
In the newest episode of Rolling Stone‘s “Journeys” series, the singer tells us how she moved from this realization to the stage of L.A.’s Staples Center, where she won the 2011 Best Electronic/Dance Album Grammy for La Roux‘s self-titled debut. “You had to sit through like 50 awards,” she says of night. But when Kathy Griffin announced their victory, things got a little more exciting: “I nearly crapped my pants!”
From there, conversation turns toward La Roux‘s follow-up, July’s Trouble in Paradise, and Jackson speaks in new detail on her split from collaborator and producer Ben Langmaid. “The things that I didn’t like, he increasingly liked and wanted me to do as well – and was quite pushy,” she says. “We had an argument. . .And we haven’t spoken since.”