Ben Winston is exhausted. The television producer, who moved from the UK to Los Angeles six years ago to start The Late Late Show with James Corden, is a week away from executive producing his first Grammy for television. “I literally slept two hours last night,” he says Rolling Stone via zoom.
On Sunday, March 7, the Recording Academy revealed a list of artists for the 63rd Grammy Awards on March 14, which includes Billie Eilish, BTS, Taylor Swift, Cardi B and Harry Styles. But while those names are on the schedule, Winston doesn’t know anything about the live TV that is etched into the stone – especially in pandemic times – so he has spent his days checking the plans two or three times, waking up at 4:30 am dry and restless eyes . He worked to put on a show “with his heart”, he says – one that “doesn’t feel isolated, quiet or alone”. He also had to take extra steps to ensure that the three-and-a-half-hour show, which will not take place at the Grammy’s usual home, the Staples Center, is safe for artists and participants. Despite all this, he seems extremely enthusiastic and alert.
Here’s what viewers next Sunday can expect from the biggest night in music, according to Winston: a multi-stage, public-free show that highlights the creative triumphs of the year, social justice movements, as well as the impact of Covid-19 in the arts. Winston suggests several “incredibly powerful” performances on the list, adding that the Grammys “are absolutely recognizing what happened” in the country last year.
Winston, who co-produced Bruno Mars’s well-received Apollo live show in 2018 for CBS, also wanted to highlight independent venues, which are the “lifeblood of this industry” and a launch pad for emerging musicians – so the Grammy will feature venues for guests of owners and employees of iconic American venues, including the Troubadour and Hotel Café of Los Angeles, the Apollo of NY and the Station Inn of Nashville. “I pass Troubadour on my way home from work every night,” says Winston. “It is a significant thing for me when I see it all closed. I always think, ‘When those boards fall, it will be over.’ That will be the signal. This will be the day when it will be like, ‘We got over this.’ ”Winston realized from his conversations with locals that many of them put on their last shows on March 14, 2020, which means that the Grammy will mark the one-year anniversary of the shutdown.
The employees will come to the camera to “tell us a little bit about their location” and present some of the awards. “So, you have, like, a bartender in a beautiful, independent place – and she’s giving these megastars the Album of the Year,” he explains. Your goal is to thank the people who work tirelessly to keep these trampling sites afloat and have recently lost their jobs. “These places are made up of the bartender and the security guard, the manager, the ticket clerk and the cleaning lady at the end of the night.” He hopes to remind people of the importance of supporting local events again when it is safe to do so.
The Grammy was originally scheduled for January 31, but organizers announced a move to March shortly after the new year. Winston says he felt that American morale was at a low point in January – between the political uprising, an impeachment trial and Covid-19’s runaway in Los Angeles – and “it didn’t feel right” to present the show in the middle of . The Recording Academy and CBS, which exclusively show the annual program, supported their decision to postpone. “Now I can do everything I wanted in my best scenario for this year,” he says of Sunday’s program.
Sunday’s location is an undisclosed building in Los Angeles, but Winston says the new location is “huge”, “magical” and “the largest building I have ever been inside”. “I don’t want it to look like I’m criticizing Staples, because it’s the most amazing place,” he emphasizes, sharing that he is open to bringing the Grammys back to the arena in the future, if they ask. Although he believes that Staples is a safe place, he says he wanted to go further to make even the most skeptical participants feel undoubtedly safe.
A team of Covid security officers oversaw the production setup and artists will enter the stage from different directions to minimize contact. Each artist also has his own backstage area. The space “allowed us to build a whole world”, he says.
The show will involve five stages of the same size and format, four of them for presentations and one for presenters. The phases are organized in a circle, facing each other, and the team members will work in the middle of the set. “People are going to perform while the other three or four artists on their stage watch, applaud and have fun. As soon as the one ends, the next one goes, the next one goes, and the next one goes. Every 45 minutes, you change these stages and bring four more megastars into the room, “says Winston, who was partly inspired by the” Grammys part, Abbey Road part session “organized by British programs that he watched as a child, including Jools Holland and TFI Friday.
It will be a “tailored musical night that I don’t know if we will ever be able to repeat,” says Winston. “It’s about taking a camera to a room and creating an incredible musical moment, filming it in a simple and elegant way.” The performances, which began to be planned in April 2020, will be a mix of live and pre-recorded – a fully live show would involve many team members moving the sets and risking close contact – but the whole thing was done for look completely live. (Winston challenges viewers to try to guess which sets have been pre-recorded; he designed them to be difficult to count.)
To help plan the immersive and extensive show, Winston brought in a team of collaborators, including executive co-producer Jesse Collins, who produced The Weeknd’s Super Bowl halftime show; executive co-producer Raj Kapoor, who took care of the creative direction of several artists in the past seven Grammys and produced residences in Las Vegas for the Backstreet Boys and Mariah Carey; producer Fatima Robinson, whose vast experience in creative direction and choreography earned her the Black Eyed Peas show at the 2011 break and Kendrick Lamar’s performance at the 2016 Grammy; producer Misty Buckley, who handled production design for Kacey Musgraves’ 2020 Christmas show; talent executive Patrick Menton of Dick Clark Productions; Corden’s collaborator, Josie Cliff; and Super Bowl break, Olympic ceremony, Oscar and Emmys director Hamish Hamilton, which Winston describes as a “legend” that he has admired since he was 14 years old. (David Wild, who has written for the Grammy since 2001 and became a producer in 2016, is the only person who has returned to his role.) Winston also points out that artists were heavily involved in creating their own performances.
Instead of panoramic cameras on empty seats and an awkwardly small stage, the production team decided to reinvent the visual format with the five-stage configuration. The limitations of the pandemic, along with the advantages of new faces emerging with new perspectives, helped them to avoid thinking in terms of what the Grammy had done before, he said.
For the most part, Covid-19 did not force many changes. This gave Winston a lot of anxiety.
“There has been a lot of uncertainty about what you can do,” he says. Changing international quarantine rules made him question whether certain artists could fly, while health guidelines continue to fluctuate: “Every time my computer or phone beeps, my first instinct is, ‘Oh, God, what went wrong?’ I don’t know if that was my mindset before. “
Although all artists are confirmed and currently free from Covid, “you never know, one of your girlfriends may have Covid and be quarantined, it’s all crazy,” says Winston. “There is an artist who, in the end, may not be able to come here due to the rules of the country he is currently in. There remains an immigration problem. ”
The show has no substitutes at hand if someone gives up – it will only cut performance.
Above all, Winston wants the 2021 Grammy to catch the eye of tough times. “I want people to be able to watch the 2021 Grammy in 2040 and say ‘Wow, what an amazing show that was’, and not say ‘Oh, that was Covid year, that’s why they had to do that,'” he says. “I think that’s what we could achieve if we get it right on Sunday.”