Grammys backstage report: Which star 'thought I was going to fall on my nude butt'?
EW.com had its eyes and ears open backstage and on the red carpet of the 52nd annual Grammy Awards Sunday in L.A. (Check out our full list of 2010 Grammy winners.) While everyone buzzed about Lady Gaga, it was ultimately country and Taylor Swift that took the night. (John Legend even sorta predicted it to us.) Come along.
• Taylor Swift, carrying her four Grammys in her arms, says she has some big choices to make. “All four of them?” Swift said when asked where she will put her Grammys, including Album of the Year. “I imagine I have four options.”
• AC/DC won their first ever Grammy in Best Hard Rock, but couldn’t beat the mighty (but comparatively neophyte) Green Day in Best Rock. Asked if he had mixed feelings about beating AC/DC, Billie Joe Armstrong said in the press room, “I love AC/DC. If it wasn’t for Angus I wouldn’t be playing guitar. But no, I don’t feel bad.”
• Kathy Griffin took to Twitter after the show to say Stephen Colbert “stole my motherf—ing Grammy” for Spoken Word Album, and was visibly dismayed when she didn’t win. Griffin said on the carpet before the show she was surprised to be nominated: “I can’t believe it, I am stunned, like a dog that has been punched in the face.” Griffin’s upcoming sixth season of My Life on the D List will feature Liza Minnelli, Cher, and Kristen Chenoweth, she says. The paparazzi-friendly comedian greeted a gaggle of tabloid reporters on the red carpet with open arms. “These are my peeps!” Griffin exclaimed.
• John Legend, who presented Album of the Year to Taylor Swift, said before the show that 2010 was all about ladies: “I think it’s a close tie between the three ladies: Beyonce, Gaga, and Taylor Swift. Usually they say pick the older acts, but there is no one older act in the Album of the Year this year. Maybe it’s good to bet on country.” The R&B hitmaker has his fourth album coming this summer, with the Roots. “I’m still going to be the same John Legend,” he says.
• Best New Artist nominee the Ting Tings are knee-deep into their new album thanks to cold German winters. “We’re in Berlin recording our new record, about seven tracks in,” Jules DeMartino says. “It’s pretty there. It’s minus 20 degrees in Berlin, so we don’t go out much. We sit there and write.”
• T-Pain joked with a reporter in the press room wearing a red stocking cap that he looked like Jason Mewes. “Where is Silent Bob?” T-Pain said, to muted laughter. In fact, T-Pain was all about surprises: he divulged that Slash ignored him, and that he was dying to work with Carrie Underwood. “The next on my list, and I will not work with anybody until I do get her, is Carrie Underwood,” T-Pain said. “I swear to God, everybody else can suck it until I get to Carrie Underwood.”
• Pink, who performed onstage in a trapeze-like contraption of silk scarves (she is an old acrobatic pro), said she almost fell. “I thought I was going to fall on my nude butt, but I worked it out,” Pink said after the show, adding of her talent: “People are like, ‘Why is she here?’ I am like, This is why, bitches.”
• Miley Cyrus tells EW to expect one more kid-friendly pop record from her later this year – and then it will be a different Miley. “That’s for my next record,” Cyrus said on the red carpet. “I have to do one more record that is poppy and fun, then I want to take a couple years and work on this next one. That will be kind of exactly who I am. I just don’t know exaclty who that is yet, so I am going to wait until I know.”
• Don’t look for Keith Urban to duet with wife Nicole Kidman. “We tend to stick to the viral YouTubes of the world,” Urban says of singing with Kidman. “I love singing with her around the house. I don’t think we are going to put the show on the road anytime soon.”
• Miranda Lambert, nominated for Best Female Country Vocal Performance for “Dead Flowers,” said of the nomination: “It’s a song that I felt like for a minute for a minute it didn’t get the shot it deserved, but the Grammys thought it did. So that made me feel really good.”
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