Music’s biggest night is an all-day event.
The 68th Annual Grammy Awards highlighted a year of musical projects across 95 categories this Sunday. Although the award ceremony only announced nine winners, the preshow ceremony, live from the Peacock Theater, awarded the artists from the other 86 categories. Ranging from the production process to live performances, with categories such as “Best Engineered Album” and “Best Rock Performance,” the Grammys highlighted all aspects of music-making.
The Daily Bruin’s Ana Camila Burquez spoke with multiple of this year’s Recording Academy winners about their creative process.
These interviews have been edited for length and clarity.
Best Dance/Electronic Album
Daily Bruin: What specifically from the rave and club environment do you want your listeners to take from the album?
FKA Twigs: I think a feeling of togetherness, a feeling of community, a feeling of culture and mass healing in a way that can be dirty and grimy and unseen. I’ve been raised by the streets of London and I think that there is so much to be said for spaces that feel safe and beautiful and raw. Just getting together with people in real life and enjoying music in a more traditional sense, not through the phone or not through an app or not always through a 15-second snippet. Enjoying a techno or a dance song that’s 10 minutes long and doesn’t give you any release or any drop until seven minutes in – it’s gratifying to wait, and it’s gratifying to enjoy music in the places that it’s intended to.
[Related: Grammys 2026: 68th Grammy Awards serves as message of unity, sees Bad Bunny win big]
Best Music Film
DB: How did you go about balancing points about John Williams’ life and the actual work he did and its impact?
Laurent Bouzereau (“Music By John Williams” video director and video producer): When one talks to someone like John, who understands everything through music, I used a lot of musical terms. So it was approaching things, but through music. I would not ask him a question about his life as much as I would ask him a question about the music around the time of his life that I was interested in exploring. It was kind of a dance, which is appropriate, right? And as much as at first, he didn’t want to really do this – as I said, he’s very modest – as we grew together with the story, he opened up more and more.
Best Rap Song
DB: What specific elements of the production, or the song in general, are you the most proud of, and where do you go next from this recognition by the academy?
Sean Momberger (producer and co-writer of “tv off”): We sampled a song from a soundtrack composed by John Barry, and we also sampled a funk artist named Monk Higgins, which we also sampled for “Not Like Us.” I’m really big into sampling, just loving the art of hip hop, and hopefully I’ll keep it going in the future.
Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical
DB: After receiving this recognition from the Recording Academy, do you expect your process when approaching new projects to be different? If so, how?
Joseph Lorges (“That Wasn’t A Dream” engineer): I feel like what we’re going for when we’re working in the studio, I don’t think it’ll be influenced by that so much. We’re really just kind of trying to follow our intuition and search for all of these things that we’ve never heard before. Obviously, it’s a great honor and very exciting to see that people are receiving that and be recognized for that. But we’re just using these records as a really great excuse to explore the studio and kind of see how far we can push all the stuff that we do in there.
[Related: Grammys 2026: Daily Bruin writers predict 68th Grammy Awards winners]
Best Rock Performance
DB: What specifically from “Changes” got uncovered by singing it live, rather than played as a recording in the studio?
Adam Wakeman: I think there’s something about every time you play a song, it’s slightly different live, and when you’ve only played it a couple of times before the actual performance in front of 40,000 people, something happens. I’ve not played with Frank before; we played the song twice, and then we played it on stage. There was a certain magic that happened, particularly with that song on that day, at that moment, that just, I don’t know if that’s ever going to be topped for me personally.
Frank Bello: Same here. I’ve been in the band Anthrax for over 40 years now, and it’s very strange that moment, and we call it a moment, because we were one. We were all one with the audience, the passion. We wanted to thank Ozzy and Black Sabbath for showing us the way, and that’s what this is all about. This is for Ozzy and Black Sabbath. It’s the highlight of my career, 40 years in, and I couldn’t be more excited, because we’re showing the world that rock and metal are still alive and well.
Best Folk Album. Best American Roots Song
DB: The folk genre tends to be extremely vulnerable and authentic. When people listen to your project, what do you expect them to get from who you are as a person and an artist?
Aoife O’Donovan (of I’m With Her): One of the reasons why we’re so especially proud to have won the folk album award is that this album is exactly as you said, very vulnerable, and it’s very much us. It’s us, it’s our songs. We wrote this album over many years. And over those years, we were all undergoing pretty significant life events, and the world was changing faster than we could keep up with. This album is all about paying respect to those who came before you and really coming back to your roots in a certain way. It’s a very vulnerable album, and we hope that people listening to it can see themselves in the songs.
Comments are closed.