C PRINZ, CREATIVE DIRECTOR: Doe and I have a history. We did our first music video called “Crazy” together, and it was her launch with TDE. So she called me on Christmas Eve [2024] and was like, “We’re doing the Grammys and we need a concept now.” She really had a clear vision. She wanted to incorporate the swamp, obviously, [that’s] her whole brand. I threw together some mood boards, and we ended up having a couple of different concepts. One was an actual, real swamp. But we were both so captivated with this other idea, this Doechii doll factory, swamp-Broadway play. We wanted to throw things that were contradictory to each other together, and see what would happen. What does a swamp look like on Broadway?
Doechii came to me with the idea of having all the dancers look exactly the same as her. Same makeup, same hair, same shoes, same nails, same everything. One of the other dancers embodies her, and we gave her a prop mic and we wanted to do this whole “Where’s Waldo? Where’s Doechii” thing. The simple story is that there is only one real Doechii. It’s like there’s only one real Slim Shady: You wanna try to be like me, you can’t, but you also can see yourself in me at the same time. At the end, she ends the show alone in that spotlight.
We started this at the top of the new year, our rehearsal process. With everything that’s going on in this country, the fires, politics, we wanted to make the space feel warm and build a family because we knew we were going to make something that required a lot of dedication and energy and time. I don’t even remember exactly how many rehearsals it was, but we rehearsed this for 4 weeks [daily]. The dancers gave body, mind and soul for this one.
We definitely had an internal dress rehearsal to test [how everything would work with the Thom Browne clothes]. You know, it’s beautifully tailored garments. We had to add fabric here and there to give the dancers a bit more stretch because what they’re doing is incredibly demanding. Even Doechii, you know, wide-out in the splits, flipping, kicking, going into a backbend. The wardrobe change moment took an entire rehearsal. [The clothes] had to be pulled off in one second in one rip with no mistakes, so if that gets clunky, it’s like, oh, nightmare. The wardrobe team and the stylist, Sam Woolf, were workshopping different sizes of velcro, buttons, “do we need to rip from the front or the back?” What angle? What intensity can we rip at that doesn’t knock Doechii over? There was a lot of technical consideration. The first time we tried it with our choreographer, she fell over [laughs].
There’s a lift, there’s moving floors, wardrobe changes, an airboat, there’s her swamp culture, these clones, and this concept of there’s only one real Doechii — it’s such a complex show. It made me very emotional and proud to put something like that out in the world. I want to give a big shout out to my creative producer, Eli Raskin. He let me call him all day and all night.