The young man who started on YouTube released his first album at the start of the pandemic and is now sporting his new work, ‘Superache’; listen to some songs
the first song that Conan Gray he wrote, call Those daysit was about a time he spent in a small Texas town called Rockdale (population: 5,505).
“The slogan was ‘an hour away’ and the main business was Walmart,” he recalled in a recent video interview.
He conjured up some wistful lyrics from his Los Angeles apartment, his long hair pulled back, squinting as if he wasn’t sure he got it right: “And I know you didn’t really like the way I mourned your name. / But I really hope you didn’t mind the way I was in those days. ” (“And I know you didn’t really like the way I yelled your name / but I hope you don’t mind my habits in those days.”)
Then he stopped to recognize the melodrama of the lyrics: Gray was 12 when he wrote them and 7 when he lived in Rockdale, and the idea that he had adopted such a wise perspective so quickly made one laugh.
“At the time, when I was seven,” he said with an exaggerated flourish.
That Gray, now 23, may have been so profound at such an early age isn’t too surprising. In recent years he has gained a large audience on social media platforms by speaking openly about his life and singing about the most tortuous emotions known to young people: that is, unrequited love and the particular anguish of admiring a potential lover from afar. (“Heather,” one of his most popular songs, is about the envy of a woman who’s dating her crush.) In this model, he’s no different from Generation Z songwriters who have used the internet to overcome traditional barriers to enter the music industry, discovering their hearts.
But with his sleek tone and boy band look, Gray stood out from the group with a thoughtful distance in his songwriting. Rather than just marrying her feelings about him, he has an instinct to see the bigger picture, as well as accepting the melancholy thrill that inevitably follows a broken heart. in a song called yoursfrom their new album, passed, her voice hits a painfully high note as she sings the strained tension of an unbalanced love story: “I want more / But I’m not yours / And I can’t change your mind / But you’re still mine.” (“I want more / But I’m not yours / And I can’t change your mind / But you’re still mine.”)
“Part of Conan’s success is how he connects so directly to this whole generation of kids who grew up on the Internet,” said Eddie Wintle, who, along with his partner Colette Patnaude, has been running Gray since 2016. as if the heaven was the limit in terms of what he can achieve. “
The intensity of their emotions is occasionally stifling and Gray said the new LP “wasn’t a fun album to make”.
“My first album was a lot easier because I was just introducing myself: ‘Hi, my name is Conan, I’m 19 and it broke my heart once,'” he said. “But then the second album was like, ‘Oh God, now I really have to tell people who I really am.'”
Born in Lemon Grove, California, to a white father and a Japanese mother who separated when he was 3, Gray had a peripatetic childhood; he spent his early years in Japan, then stopped off in several other small towns before finally landing in Georgetown, Texas.
His life there, as one of the only Asian-American elementary school students, was often “brutal”. Music offered a path for self expression. He has written Those days after seeing a video of Adele singing in her bedroom and wondering if she could write a song in her bedroom too. or Youtube it was another way. As a teenager, she began recording videos about her life with titles such as 50 facts about me !!! And School routinealong with the covers played on his guitar.
“I was just doing it because what else could you do when you live in a random town in the middle of Texas?” Gray said. “I was not aware that real people were watching these videos.”
While it managed to amass a few hundred thousand subscribers in its final year, things changed dramatically in 2017 when it launched idle city, a pop song about nostalgia for his provincial life, which he has come to appreciate. The accompanying video combined home footage of Gray and his friends with him with footage of him walking through the local retirement community, shot from “a tripod attached to the back of my mother’s Toyota.” It exploded online and the success that followed led to him abandoning his first year at UCLA and signing a deal with Republic Records.
“They saw what we saw,” Wintle said, “which is the belief that he could be a big star. And they were very open to making sure they weren’t trying to turn him into something he wasn’t.”
Kid Krow, Gray’s debut LP, was released in March 2020, just before the pandemic imposed a global shutdown. A scheduled tour was canceled and, like many others, Gray spent a lot of time alone indoors.
“It’s been two years of overthinking,” he said.
Superache was recorded piecemeal over a period of 18 months and songs were selected from around 250.
“It took a while to figure out what we were doing,” said Dan Nigro, who produced passed and worked on nearly all of Gray’s post-YouTube songs.
A breakthrough came in February 2021 when they completed the singles. astronomy And People watching.
“It felt like a new, more mature version of Conan Kid Krow“said Nigro, who also produced the debut album of Olivia Rodrigo, acid. “He gave us the confidence to think, ‘OK, we’ve got the start of something really special.'”
Gray has spoken openly about how to cope with feelings of self-awareness and insecurity as he makes his way into the music industry.
“Over the past few years, I’ve really grown to understand that I have to allow myself to make mistakes if I want to grow up and not be this stunted human being,” he said. “It took Dan and my friends to say, ‘Who cares?’ It is better to be sad than to feel nothing. “
Superache is a chronicle of this messy process. The title is meant to be a bit funny, tending to the feelings of grandeur that accompany the obsessive anguish of the heart.
“When it’s a genuine feeling, it can never be too dramatic because it’s just an accurate representation of what’s going on,” Gray said. “This is all I really want, for people to feel a little less insane in all the emotions they are experiencing right now.” / TRANSLATION LÍVIA BUELONI GONÇALVES
Source: Terra
Emily Jhon is a product and service reviewer at Gossipify, known for her honest evaluations and thorough analysis. With a background in marketing and consumer research, she offers valuable insights to readers. She has been writing for Gossipify for several years and has a degree in Marketing and Consumer Research from the University of Oxford.
