Hollywood came calling for Destiny Claymore even if she didn’t believe the call was real. A few years ago, a casting agent who had seen a photo of Claymore performing with her old hip-hop duo Dark Matter on the Warped Tour phoned her hoping she would audition for a movie starring Ryan Reynolds.
“I was like, ‘OK, this is a prank call,’” Claymore said. “I thought, ‘Everyone is playing with Destiny, I get it, hilarious.’”
But the caller didn’t give up. The agent was on the hunt for a pretty specific look, a look Claymore had.
“They said, ‘The character we had in mind looks exactly like you, a Black girl with a mohawk, and we didn’t know that person actually existed,’” she said.
As one half of Dark Matter, Claymore, who lived most of her life in Brockton, had a budding career. The duo spent a few weeks on the Warped Tour in 2018 singing, rapping and breakdancing and seemed ready to break into the mainstream. But shortly after the tour, the pair split up. Claymore found herself without an active performance project when Hollywood recruited her.
She filled much of 2019 building an acting resume — the Ryan Reynolds movie, the Shawn Levy-directed “Free Guy,” comes out in 2021 (delayed a year by COVID-19) and her Quibi series “The Expecting” dropped earlier this year. She closes 2020 with a return to music and her solo debut EP, “Pretty,” which came out last week.
“Music crept back in,” she said. “I started to write (the song) ‘Everybody Else,’ featuring Red Shaydez, when I felt like I had worked really hard (making “Free Guy”) and I wanted to brag a little bit. I slid some double entendres in there about playing on Warped Tour and mentioned ‘stranger things have happened’ because the director is from ‘Stranger Things.’ When I met up with Shawn Levy I said, ‘I wrote this song for you and just want you to hear it.’ He listened to it and told me, ‘Never stop doing music.’”
Following her reinvention motif, “Everybody Else” revises Dark Matter’s booming hip-hop with bits of indie charm and a chill, catchy vibe. Clearly r&b, the tune also nods to electro, Top 40 and quiet storm soul (before local rap star Red Shaydez rolls in with an epic verse). While “Pretty” unfolds over just six songs, the EP represents a huge step forward for Claymore (jumping her career ahead in quick bursts is another recent motif for the singer/actor).
“When I was working in Dark Matter, I was writing a lot of stuff like this but not putting it out because it didn’t fit our dynamic,” she said. “Because I wasn’t originally planning to put something solo out, I think a lot more of myself came out in these songs as I wrote them. It’s a lot more personal.”
“And a lot more dance-y,” she added with a laugh. “A lot of my old influences came out, Destiny’s Child, Alicia Keys, Mary J. Blige.”
This new side of Claymore will be something we’ll hear more of — when she’s not auditioning for blockbusters or innovative series.
“I actually wrote like 72 songs on my laptop (over the past few years),” she said. “But with studios closing because of COVID and then reopening and then closing, I got out what I could. Now I hope more songs will come out on a separate project soon and I won’t stop writing.”
To hear music from Destiny Claymore, go to destinyclaymore.com.
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Singer/songwriter charting her Destiny in Hollywood & beyond - Boston Herald
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