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Last week in New York, I sat with a few journalists to promote my album. All of them were kind and well-prepared, knowing the ins and outs of my story. They asked good questions, but I felt underwhelming answering them.

I heard myself ramble. I wondered if what I was saying was even coherent. I couldn’t get out of my head.

Walking to my hotel each night, I wondered: if I’m having trouble explaining who I am now, what have I left behind that actually explains me?

At the core of every artist is a hope that their output defines their existence. That the things they create will serve as windows into who they actually are as people.

I do believe that much of my identity can be found in my music. But in a fast and ever-changing world, I worry that the details are often missed, or perhaps forgotten entirely.

Three weeks away from my album release, I’m less worried about how it will perform and more nervous on whether it will be understood.

So, let me be clear.

BOYSTOWN is an album about queer experience. I’m increasingly protective over that distinction. This is a body of work meant to encapsulate what it means and what it felt like to be gay in America in the year 2026.

I’m not suggesting that queer people experience heartbreak more profoundly than others. What I am suggesting is that there is a particular complication to the way that we love and to the way that we break.

At the core of this album is an inherently queer question: does sustainable love exist for me? And I do I deserve it?

In gay culture, and perhaps more broadly in current American culture, there is what I would call a “next best thing” mentality. What’s around the corner? Is there something better out there?

I’ve seen a handful of relationships, including my own, end over a stranger walking into the room at the right (or wrong) time. We have lost our appetite for sacrifice as it relates to commitment. If it’s not perfect, than it’s wrong. It needs to be changed, there is something better over the horizon. I hate it.

Loyalty is a constant theme on this album.

Then there’s the particular kind of loneliness I felt sleeping next to my ex. That feeling amplified when he asked to open up our relationship. Not entirely open, but enough to frustrate every one of my senses.

In retrospect, I think his desire for a less traditional relationship actually had very little to do with me, but derived more from the way in which he came into his sexuality. I felt like an innocent bystander, caught up in his mess.

A particular complication.

I wanted BOYSTOWN to be a dirty record, meaning completely unfiltered. It pairs different emotions to different sonic templates, genres, and feels; it’s a true pop record in that regard.

I talk about jealously and resentment. I underline the strange negotiations we make with ourselves, sometimes conscious, sometimes not, to keep relationships going. There are moments on the album where I am bitchy, then suddenly I am soft again.

The character contradicts himself constantly, for I myself am a walking contradiction. I tell my friends I’m taking this time to focus on myself, fully knowing that I’d give anything to fall in love again.

There is no resolve at the end of the album, nor will you find any clarity.

The end of BOYSTOWN feels like a stammering drunk at the bar, hoping you’ll want to join him for one last drink at the place across the street.

He’s yearning. If he can find just one more hit, he will be okay.

I just need one more and then I will be okay.

Maybe that’s what I couldn’t figure out how to say in the interviews.

We think we have control over how we will be interpreted, artists especially, but everything is individually subjective. In that sense, why not submit to the chaos of freedom? This album feels like the first time I have done that.

I’m not sure how you understand me, where you place me in your mind, or what you will think about this album. And I might never be the best at explaining myself or the music that I write.

I’m not interested anymore in being remembered correctly. Rather, I am focused on leaving behind enough evidence so that I can’t be remembered too simply.

No there’s not more I could do

To show you that 100 times over you’ll be mine

And there’s no closing time for my baby

Up all night driving me crazy

But I still I’d do

Just about anything for you

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I’m not saying I regret them. I’m not saying that I don’t either.

I have no clear understanding on how I feel about my romantic past. Being single again makes me feel… unsure. As time passes, it’s become harder to look in the mirror without seeing a source of blame.

This year has been a lot of self-analysis. I’ve been my own shrink in many ways, hunting for patterns, shared occurrences across the relationships, habits, repetitions, repeated mistakes.

One thing I noticed early on was that each serious relationship I’ve been in started with an even more serious crush. A period of time in which I actively chased and allowed my emotions to swing across spectrums.

Never innocent crushes, no. I’m talking more, “let me uproot my life for this,”

And a few times I did just that.

That’s an immediate problem.

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I’ve never been the type of person who enjoys casual dating, or really even casual sex. I partake, sure, but I get bored so quickly. I’m interested in dirt and roots, not so much topsoil.

When I’m actually into someone, it’s because I’m passionate about them. Who they are as a person. How they talk, how they process, how they fuck. Seeing a potential future with someone is my type of romanticism. I love wanting someone. And I fight hard for the things I am passionate about.

In my last relationship, I was ready to jump in fairly quickly. We had been talking for a month or so, I was ready to call him my boyfriend. He wasn’t. He wanted to move slower, and that killed me on the inside.

Small slights of hand like skipping out on a text, or changing plans last minute would send me into a spiral. Those first few months, I remember feeling consistently unwanted, like he could replace me at any given moment. And a few nights I had contemplated whether he had already.

By keeping me at arm’s length, he made me want him even more. It was within that dynamic our relationship grew. We lasted for around 3 years. Hindsight is 20/20.

It’s natural for us as humans to yearn for others. And I’d add we often want things we perceive as being out of reach more compared to other viable options.

But the middle territory that I seem to find myself in, of yearning for someone to the point where I want them immediately, to the point where I am willing to shape my own life around theirs… where does that stem from?

There’s an R.G. Collingwood quote I reference often.

The only clue to what man can do is what man has done.

I’ve experienced deep betrayal in my life, a common story for every artist. I can point to a handful of principal figures who left during impressionable periods of my life. Full Irish exits, no goodbyes.

No matter how hard I try, it’s impossible to shake. I carry that fear of being abandoned with me, much more than I would like to admit. My own twisted daddy issues.

The truth is I anticipate that anyone who comes into my life is bound to leave at any given moment. And when they do, it is just as ugly, just as messy, and just as heartbreaking as it was the last time. Nothing and no one is permanent.

What man can do is what man has done…

I crush hard because I assume it’s already fleeting. Perhaps what keeps drawing me in isn’t the boy, but the possibility. The belief that this one might be different. That if I say the right thing, present myself the right way, prove myself somehow… he’ll choose to stay.

He will be the one I don’t say goodbye to.

But that’s not sustainable, and I know that. Ten years of falling just to break each time is proof enough.

My focus now is understanding and accepting paths. Not just in my romantic life, but across the board. Understanding that we all are destined to our own fate, and that people come in and out with varying purpose and intentions.

There’s a song on my album called GARÇONOVA, a play on the idea of a boy wonder. It carries one of my favorite lyrics from the album:

All those nights to find something wrong if it’s painted white

All those nights to find there’s no such thing as perfection

No matter how it appears, he isn’t perfect, and he never will be. But I still want him.

What’s the opposite of a hopeless romantic?

A hopeful one, I think.

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Be careful with the trigger

My body is a maze

An elegant figure for you

It’s all that I can do is overthink it

What is it to be masculine?

What is it to be feminine?

I don’t know

What is it to like the bloody touch of the thorns?

Oh I wonder if I could take it?

Is that hypocritical?

You’re crawling onto my land

Does that make you a criminal?

I kind …

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Past getting off, I’m most interested by the content I gravitate towards, and how what turns me on has changed over time.

You can really learn a lot about someone based on what they’re cranking it to.

My song JOCK PORN is about the ways in which porn has influenced my own identity and relationships.

Pornography, like many other things, holds its own unique value within queer culture.

For straight people, porn is often a way of discovering what they like.

For queer people, porn can become a way of discovering who they are.

There’s a difference there.

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My first understanding of my sexuality came through porn. After school, family computer, dial-up and all. I was ten, maybe eleven.

Those early experiences were equal parts shame equal parts curiosity.

Why do I keep coming back to this?

As I developed into adolescence and eventually came out, that arena of shame and curiosity suddenly turned into an amusement park.

By fifteen or sixteen I was watching everything, and I haven’t really stopped since.

Most of the time, it’s about climaxing and moving on. Other times though, it feels like porn isn’t about sex at all.

When we watch porn, we gain access into worlds or types of individuals that feel distant or perhaps taboo from our own. And whether we realize it or not, we project ourselves into what we masturbate to.

One of my favorite lines in JOCK PORN…

What is it to be masculine, what is it to be feminine, I don’t know.

How much of our sexuality is discovered versus how much of it is shaped by the role we saw ourselves playing? The character we most identify with, the fantasy we stepped into.

For example, I slept with a professor once when I was in college. The teacher/student dynamic had always been a fantasy of mine, a constant top search for me online.

And when I finally did it? The sex was fucking hot.

In the moment, it checked every box for me, but in the days following, I remember feeling detached from the experience. It was almost as if I had watched it rather than lived it.

Nowadays, I scroll past those types of videos.

For me personally, the saddest line of the song:

I ain’t a Marxist with my love, but if I take it, then maybe I am

I’m protective of my love. I don’t just give it out to anyone.

But for you? I would let you do anything to me.

The porn that sustained me through high-school years was always “first time” porn. Two friends circling around each other, testing boundaries, pretending not to notice until eventually they couldn’t ignore it anymore.

Looking back, it’s obvious why.

I was queer-baited a lot as a teenager, at least three to four separate times. Different straight friends, seeing what lines they could bend, what areas they could blur, leaving me suspended somewhere between possibility and rejection.

And in hindsight, I fueled those feelings of wonder and lust, of betrayal and confusion, by what I was watching and how adamantly I continued to watch.

Those experiences blended into my fantasies, and then those fantasies carried themselves out into my own relationships.

That’s the power behind it all, because I know if any of them called today, I would answer immediately.

And that’s fucking heartbreaking.

I’m not particularly interested in campaigns against pornography or suggestions that it’s ruining something within society. No, there are other more powerful factors doing that already.

What does interest me however, is the way in which these digital worlds blend into our most intimate spaces.

Perhaps porn is less of an escape. Perhaps it is less of a window into what we want.

It could be an archive of what we never get over.

I’m truly unsure, but regardless,

I’m still watching.

JOCK PORN

And drinking by the pool

Hey, baby are you sipping something cool?

Take the weight off of my shoulders

Twist my pearls, show off my auburn curls

I prove to him that I know what I’m worth

“Hey, I want to talk to you”

Wait, yes?

Who? You

Me? Baby please

Whatever is a doll supposed to do

It’s so hot outside it’s burning don’t you thi…

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Half of being an artist is dopamine management, finding a sense balance between unending highs and lows. And even in the most intimate moments, like the writing process, there are intense spikes and crashes.

I finished writing my album last week and I feel pretty fucked about it. I feel like I’ve lost my shield.

The album is sequenced in three distinct acts.

I: rage.
II: reality.
III: detachment.

When my partner and I split at the top of the year, all my energy shifted toward making something. I didn’t box out what I was feeling, I just made sure I was at the piano whenever it got too heavy or too confusing.

Those first few weeks, it was manic.

I was getting myself ridiculously high, storming around the house, laughing, crying, singing, and screaming lyrics out. But then, suddenly, there were bones, and a heartbeat. An outline of something.

One of the most satisfying hits you can get as a creative is what I’d call the first gate.

This is when an idea turns into something tangible. It’s when you finally experience something of your own creation but outside of your own mind.

It’s the “holy shit, it’s happening,” moment.

“I came up with that,”

I held onto those first immediate bursts of energy and promised myself I wouldn’t let them fade. I couldn’t afford for that to happen.

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I called a close friend in Canada and asked if he would produce the album. I expressed that I wanted to move quickly, enough time to create a record, but not enough time to overanalyze or aggressively edit. I wanted an encapsulation of who I am right now, in this exact season of my life.

He jumped on board and I ventured north.

It’s been blurry the past few months flying over flatlands. Oklahoma, Canada, back to Oklahoma, back to Canada. Avoiding LA at all costs.

In the studio, I was emotional, but I let the adrenaline overpower the emotion. The looming deadline also created a sense of urgency that felt isolating in a positive way. I had no time to think about anyone or anything but the album.

Every trip back to Oklahoma from Canada, I expected some huge and dramatic drop-off in energy. I kept waiting for the crash but it never came. At home, I kept myself busy polishing lyrical concepts, sussing out melodies, recording vocals, and writing more.

It wasn’t until everything was off to mix, and I left the studio in Canada for the final time that my world felt upside down. I had woken up from the dream.

As long as I was making the album, I could frame everything as part of a story. I had a bird’s-eye view of what I was experiencing. But once the album was finished, I was vulnerable again. The story couldn’t protect me anymore from what had actually happened.

I couldn’t use it as a shield anymore.

In the studio, life was loud and exciting. At home, life is quiet and lonely.

That’s where I’m at now.

When I really let myself think about it, wandering around my house searching for him, for someone, I panic… immediately scanning for another hit of energy somewhere else. Something to distract me.

Planning the visuals for the album has helped fill that void. I’m shooting the cover and packaging in Oklahoma this week.

No way I was shooting that shit in LA. I don’t want to see our neighborhood anytime soon or the house. Where we used to walk the dog. None of that is going to serve me.

I’d rather stay high off the mania which has created this album, and the 25mg gummy bears that might as well be emotional support lithium at this point. Those fucking gummy bears deserve a shoutout in the liner notes.

When the mood gets dark, I’ve been forcing myself to say a phrase out loud.

“You’re right where you’re supposed to be,”

It helps. It reminds me that I’ve never really been in control of my destiny anyway. None of us are.

I’m right where I’m supposed to be…

Finding balance between pendulum swings.

In earnest, “what’s taking so long?”

I told him I felt like my career had been in a tailspin since that record. I used that exact word. It felt a little sad to say it out loud.

The music industry can be a ruthless place. To have a good career means to sustain it through the low moments. The moments when no one is calling. When the money isn’t adding up.

During my first chapter in music, I recognized how fleeting everything was. A constant sense that it could all disappear in a second if you weren’t careful. At the time, I attributed that feeling to my age and to my upbringing.

Now almost 30, not only is that feeling still present, but it’s much scarier than it was before.

Since 2022, I’ve seen two label deals fall apart right before my eyes. Deals I was excited about. I felt crushed by that.

Then my manager and I started to strain. We had worked together for ten years. I decided to clean house. I think we both needed it.

Walking into last year, I had a clean slate in front of me. I was eager and optimistic about what I could turn it into. Then my chest started hurting.

Collapsed lung, surgery, and two weeks in the hospital. After discharge I contracted pneumonia on both of my lungs. I spent a good week coughing up blood on my bathroom floor. I never thought I was going to die, but it also wasn’t out of the question.

Tailspin.

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Over the holidays I felt beat down and rather lost. My boyfriend and I broke up a few days before Christmas and the whole of 2025 felt like one cruel and nasty joke.

I told myself it was time to lock in and get back on track. So I turned to the one thing I know I am good at.

I sat at my piano and I wrote. All alone at my house in Oklahoma, I drank coffee, I got high, and I wrote.

I decided I needed to breakaway from releasing standalone singles. It wasn’t working for me or my fans. I wasn’t grabbing anyone’s attention nor was I gaining any momentum from it.

I needed to world build and create something that could be lived in and experienced. The breakup provided an endless amount of source material.

But again, having material hasn’t been my issue the past four years. It’s been the infrastructure, the mechanisms behind getting the music funded and ready for release. That’s where my struggle has been.

I’ve always had an image issue in the industry. I’ve never been a cool act or a tastemaker. I’ve always been the, “oh yeah I know him,” type but never the one that was desired.

And as it stands now, no one wants to sign Greyson Chance. And that’s certainly not from a lack of trying. I’ve been hitting the rolodex hard to no avail.

Am I embarrassed to admit that after 16 years of working my ass off in this business I can’t land a deal right now? Or even find a manager? Of course I am.

But that’s reality, that’s life. This is my story, no one else’s. This is where I’m at.

In January of this year, I made a promise to myself that I would set a deadline for the album’s submission. June 15, paving the way for a fall release. By that date, if the album is not in the system, please someone take me behind the barn.

I then promised that I would fund it myself if I had to. And as the weeks roll on, it’s becoming more likely that I’m heading in that direction.

I looked at a bank account the other day, a savings account that I’ve had tucked away since I turned 18 and got access to my kid money. I’ve rarely touched it, only for emergencies and cash flow disasters over the years.

How would I feel if it was gone? Completely zeroed out?

The first feeling is fear. No more safety net. No more chances to reinvent myself, at least on my dime. Having seen my career ebb and flow over the years, I am terrified at the idea of not having an exit plan.

Then there’s shame. How did I let it get to this point? I know my younger self would be proud of my perseverance and the man I’ve become, but I also know deep down that he would be surprised of where the chips fell. It wasn’t supposed to end up like this, things were meant to be different. That feeling in particular… is hard to wrestle with.

Then the last feeling, the shameless one. I don’t give a fuck.

I am here to be an artist. I am here to spill my guts out into songs. That is my god-given purpose in this life. I would be a fool to turn my back on it.

As I’ve been working in the studio the past few weeks, and gearing up for the June 15th deadline, I feel alive in a way I haven’t in a long time. Most importantly, I’m having fun in the studio again, something that hasn’t always been the case for me.

Maybe it’s the adrenaline of knowing what I am gambling on this album? I personally think it is more so the joy I am feeling in how honest the music is. This is easily my most unfiltered album to date.

If the money never comes back to me, I will at least know that I made something I deeply cared about. That I made it on my terms, and with my money, money that I worked very hard for my entire life.

I will take pride in the fact that I created a queer piece of art, one that will outlive me. As a kid raised in a conservative family from Oklahoma, that’s important.

I will be proud of my resilience as an artist, and as a human being.

I’m writing this on a plane flying to Canada where I’m going to be locked up in the studio all week. Right before boarding, I got upgraded to first class. The gate agent told me he was a fan of portraits.

New seat? 1A.

Jokes on them, I don’t belong here. I’m about to be a broke bitch!

Oh garçonova

Up the coast?

Where they wait in line?

But you don’t like anyone to hold you

All those nights, to find

Something wrong if it’s painted white

All those nights, to find

There’s no such thing as perfection

And it’s emasculating

And it’s intimidating

And it’s intoxicating

To be in love with you man

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Speaking into silence, and you’ve bottled up your cold

Take me to a foreign place, one without a turn

I’m thinking about the future as we hold the lakeshore

And I don’t want to go home

I don’t want to go

And I don’t want to go home

I don’t want to go

Said you had your soulmate, how’s that looking now?

Collared up…

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Originally, there were 14 tracks on portraits. Twelve songs, two spoken word interludes. It was the night before the label was set to submit portraits into the system. I’d been working on the album nonstop for the past six months. In a sublet room in Oklahoma City, where my only furniture was a mattress on the floor, I plugged in a pair of Skullcandy earbuds I had bought at 7-Eleven into my computer. I had a rule since I was a kid that I would only approve a master after listening to it on cheap headphones or bad speakers. I don’t know who taught me that. It’s a very good rule. I clicked play on track one. Tonally and levels-wise, everything sounded great, but I had one issue: I wanted to take two songs off of the album. I called my manager. He was surprised at first, then agitated, then eventually resigned. I told him I was absolutely sure. He said he would call the label and relay the news ASAP. I didn’t second guess the decision then, nor did I second guess it when the album came out. I think there’s a strange clarity that appears in the final stages of creating something, especially a body of work like an album. You go through all the suffering and you’re just about to reach nirvana when suddenly something you had never noticed before sticks out. You can either let it go, or you can change it. By the time I went to bed that night, portraits was two songs shorter and to me, it was finally finished.

(2): Juul Pods

I love smoking. I started when I was 15. When I was writing portraits, I was still on both cigarettes and whatever form of e-nicotine I could get my hands on. Juuls had just started to enter the zeitgeist. I was dating a boy at the time who had one. I fell in love with him first, then with his Juul. One weekday afternoon we went to see a movie at the old Arclight on Sunset. Suspiria, the Luca Guadagnino film with Tilda Swinton. Him and I were both artists with let’s say, unique working hours. The theater was nearly empty. We passed the Juul back and forth between us, not even bothering to hide the smoke. This was still the good time, before they banned the flavored pods. He watched the movie, and I watched him. Mint. I was gut-wrenched when he ended things months later, and since portraits was about a prior relationship, only a trace of him made it onto the album. A small salute buried inside timekeeper. I can’t smoke anymore. It’s been over two years since I stopped. I miss it everyday.

(3): Snowshrooms

I was heading into a busy start to the year. The album’s first single, shut up, was set for release in February, and we were scheduled to shoot the music video the first week of January. For New Year’s, my friends and I rented a house in rural New Mexico outside of Santa Fe. A perfect winter adventure, and a perfect excuse for a mushroom trip. We cooked a big dinner that night, poured champagne, and all took a hero’s dose for dessert. I can’t remember if it was my first time taking mushrooms, but it was certainly one of my most vivid experiences. A massive snowstorm rolled in as the night went on. The house felt very classic New Mexico, stucco walls, colorful artwork everywhere, windows in every direction. I knew the mushrooms had fully kicked in when the snow-covered desert plants outside started moving as if they were floating underwater, like something inside a fish tank. We lit pillar candles throughout the entire house. The place started to feel like a church. At one point I was lying upstairs in a loft with my friends Chelsea and Michaela, listening to How To Draw / Petrichor by The 1975. The wind was howling outside and the snow kept falling. The moment felt crystallized in time, and I remember feeling strangely protected by the music as it played.

(4): Parrots Bar, Chicago, Illinois

It was late 2018. Broderick was living in Andersonville, just north of Chicago’s city center. He called the neighborhood, “posh boystown.” I had flown in so we could shoot the artwork for portraits. No one can capture a photograph like Broderick. One afternoon, we made our way down to Lakeview and stopped off at a dive bar called Parrots. We played a few games of pool and had a couple drinks. It was the middle of the afternoon and the place was nearly empty, aside from a few loyal regulars at the bar top. There was a large window beside one of the pool tables that flooded the room with light. Broderick positioned me in front of it and started shooting. I knew I was backlit, maybe that’s why I felt free in that moment. Whatever was inside the lens, I trusted it completely. Those photos from Parrots ended up being some of my favorite from the cycle. I can’t remember if we shot the actual album cover before or after that day. Between winter jackets and Parliament Silvers, portraits found its visual identity.

(5): Queer Love

We cast three couples for the shut up music video: one straight couple and two queer couples. I was part of one of the queer pairings, but it was important to me that the other couple represented the non-binary community. When I arrived on set that day, I was nervous to meet the actors. I didn’t want them to feel as if their identity was being manipulated or capitalized on in any way. When a PA brought me to them, they were both incredibly warm and sweet. We talked about the song, what I was hoping to capture in the video, and how much it meant to me that they were there that day. Then I got pulled away for my own scenes. Later in the day when it was time to film theirs, it was clear that something had clicked between them since the morning. Their chemistry together was undeniable. When they kissed on camera, it was passionate, it was real. After yelling cut, they pulled themselves apart from each other and laughed as if they had known each other for years. I had goosebumps runnings down my arms from behind the monitor. My director Bobby and I knew that we had the shot. I wonder if they kept in touch after that day.

(6): Warner Brothers Lot

My mom and I walked out under the same green awning we had walked under nine years earlier. Artist Entrance. If you’re driving south on Olive you can catch a glimpse of it above the studio walls. Later that night I told her I would never go back there again. I was done appearing on the show. The statement wasn’t emotional or dramatic. It was calm, deliberate. By that point, the heavy emotions had already come earlier in the day. My mom listened quietly and then encouraged me to be firm about that boundary. Years later they called and asked if I would appear for the final season. I politely declined.

(7): 100 Shows

I had a little green room trick during the Portraits tour. At the end of the night, when I finally had the room to myself, I’d take an empty Evian bottle and replace the water with vodka. I had a rule about how much I would pour. If the logo was vertical, I never went past the letter “V.” If it was horizontal, I never went north of “Evian.” Justification much? I’d hide the bottle in my backpack until I got back to the hotel room. It’s not like anyone would have stopped me, but I knew if my tour manager ever found out, it would make its way back to the rest of the team. That hit of vodka at the end of the night was how I got to sleep on most stops of that tour. Some nights I’d down it quickly. Other nights I’d sip it slowly while scrolling through my phone. I played over 100 shows in 2019. It’s hard to remember much from that year. I don’t remember feeling particularly happy, and I don’t remember feeling especially lonely either. What I remember are details from the shows, and the logic that ran through my head every night: Drink this. Go to sleep. Make lobby call. Get to the next show.

Love me, love me, cut me open ‘til I bleed

And in the darkest nights, the feeling ain’t right and I need you

I need your sharp disguise to come and dream with me all night

All night, all night

You are the only one that cuts like a razorblade

Skin tingling, eyes dilated, make me insane

You are the only one …

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Don’t hide behind that innocence

Put on your six inch black stilettos

Turn off those lights and we’ll be taken off

To new dimensions, suspicions, your body so hot

Put on your glitter, hairspray, working what you got

We’re dancing so close, so slow, your body too hot

Put on your glitter, hairspray, working what you got

Toni…

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There was one silver lining though.

If Interscope wanted out, they had to cough up the remaining advance payments still owed to me per our contract. Three hefty payments to be exact.

When everything was finalized, it felt like a twisted dream. To be told I was no longer wanted, while also receiving the biggest check I had ever seen in my life?

Talk about a clusterfuck.

But what rocked me the most wasn’t the money. It was the silence.

After three years of relentless touring, promotion, radio visits, meet & greets, early call times, and late nights, my calendar was suddenly empty. No flights. No holds. No deadlines. Nothing.

I wasn’t used to downtime and I didn’t like it. I felt an urge to get back to work immediately.

But as my parents and I took meetings with new label and managements teams around LA, it became clear that this was going to be a different chapter.

No one quite knew what to do with me.

I was fifteen. Closeted. My voice was changing. My brand was clunky at best, washed up at worst. If the tables were turned, I’m not sure I would’ve known what to do with me either.

That summer, my sister was starting her freshman year at a small liberal arts school in Colorado. My parents planned a road trip to move her in.

Twelve hours there. Twelve hours back.

I would have killed to have anything else to do that week, but my calendar was empty. I went from being an international pop star to being the runt of the litter again, the baby brother with no say, no leverage, no influence.

So there I was, teenage emotions peaking, forehead pressed to the glass, legs sprawled across the backseat of the family minivan, trying to be as invisible as possible. I disappeared into my headphones.

Twelve hours there. Twelve hours back.

Shit.

Lucky for me, 2013 was a great year for music.

I started with Random Access Memories by Daft Punk.

That album transfixed me on every level. To this day, I still feel like a student whenever I listen to it. One can study it endlessly.

Then came Reflektor by Arcade Fire and The Electric Lady by Janelle Monáe. Both bold. Both maximal. Both flirting with funk, disco, soul, rock.

All three albums were concept records. All three were fully realized worlds.

It became clear to me that these artists weren’t just making albums, they were building universes. And I was living in each one of them as we barreled down the highway.

If it wasn’t the music, then maybe it was the pink desert sky swallowing our car, but something in my brain shifted on that drive.

If I wanted to turn things around in my career, it wasn’t going to happen by just making an album. I had to create something bigger.

If Daft Punk, Arcade Fire, and Janelle Monáe could do it, why couldn’t I? Hell, I was a student of the ultimate world builder herself. My fifteen-year-old Little Monster mind was confident.

I’m going to make an experimental pop funk album.

It’s hard not to laugh now.

Here comes a fifteen-year-old kid whose only real success came from piano ballads, freshly dropped by his label, announcing that he’s going to make a left-field funk concept album à la Janelle Monáe.

Respectfully? That’s a pass for me.

But it didn’t matter. I was headstrong. I was ambitious.

Weeks following the trip, my vision didn’t weaken, but rather it sharpened. I didn’t have the songs yet, but I had the drive, and most important? I had the money to back it up.

After Colorado, we reached out to a Dutch producer I had worked with previously to see if he had any American trips coming up. Lucky for me, he was headed to Nashville in a few weeks.

Gordon Groothedde was an A-list producer in Holland, but to me, he was one of the first producers who treated me as an equal in the studio.

Gordon didn’t talk down to me as a kid; he didn’t treat me as a product, or something to mold.

Instead, he reminded me that his job was to serve my vision, not the other way around. I wasn’t particularly used to that type of treatment in the studio. And it meant everything to me.

Through Gordon, I developed a sturdy backbone.

On the first Nashville trip, we landed two demos: an uptempo track called Insomnia and a moodier piano ballad titled Benjamin Franklin.

From the beginning, the world I wanted to build was thematic, specific, and if I’m being honest, rather weird. Even while I was still using “her” pronouns, the early demos hummed with queer metaphor and a deep sense of otherness. In a punchy pop song called Razorblades, the lyric circles around dark metaphors addressing self-harm.

After years of chasing “audience-friendly”, suddenly I was aiming way left of center.

I started calling the project Planet X. Pop music, yes, but pop music set in a faraway, unfamiliar, and unique place. That’s where I was headed.

The sci-fi influence came naturally from the Daft Punk and Janelle Monáe records, but around this same time I was also discovering Ridley Scott and Stanley Kubrick for the first time.

I was gobsmacked by Alien. I watched it three nights in a row. It’s still my favorite movie.

Sigourney Weaver sprinting down the hallway. Sirens screaming, light flashing. The camera tracking her, refusing to look away. Every piece dialed in with painstaking precision.

And with 2001: A Space Odyssey, watching it felt less like watching a movie, but more like being placed inside a meditation.

I think that’s when it clicked for me: great creators don’t just show you things, they place you somewhere.

And that distinction became my obsession.

Where am I placing the audience?

As Gordon and I kept collecting songs, I wrote video treatments, studied directors, and burned through my parents’ ink cartridges printing reference photos of Bowie and Prince in the ’80s.

I taped them to the walls. I dreamed up custom outfits.

I didn’t know where to find a platform disco boot in Oklahoma, so I tried to build one out of Styrofoam and an old pair of Doc Martens. It was a disaster, but I was having fun.

I wasn’t second-guessing, nor was I self-editing. I was throwing paint at the wall. And Gordon stayed with me through all of it.

He believed in me and the project perhaps more than I even did. A most faithful teammate, he even flew out to Oklahoma for a writing trip.

I still smile thinking about driving him around the countryside in my first car, a dark blue ‘66 Mustang. I was terrified he’d open the glovebox and find the cigarettes I had stolen from my sister the night before. Fortunately, he didn’t.

We blasted Purple Rain as we tore through the sunset.

After about ten months, the album had finally taken a true shape, and Gordon suggested one last trip to track live musicians across the record.

I had never been to Holland.

“Can we do it there?” I asked.

Gordon had seen my world. Now I wanted to see his.

Those two weeks in Holland remain some of the happiest of my adolescence. For the first time, I felt formed.

In the studio, surrounded by Gordon and world-class musicians, I proved to myself that I wasn’t a novice anymore. Teenager or not, I now knew what I wanted.

I had bloomed.

We went track by track. Strings. Horns. Pianos. Even Adele’s drummer tracked for us.

Everything I had imagined in the back of our minivan was suddenly real. To think that this had all started with a Daft Punk album and a distant vision? Unbelievable.

I left Holland floating. The future fell right at my fingertips. This new chapter was going to be better than the first, I was sure of it.

A few days after I got home, my Dad asked me into his office. He wanted to go over some numbers. I didn’t think much of it.

At that point, I had assumed all the backend money from Interscope was still well intact. It hadn’t occurred to me on how I was covering my expenses, or really how much I was spending.

The first number he showed me was how much was remaining. The second was what I had spent on the Holland trip, plus an estimate of the production payments that I was sooner or later going to owe to Gordon. The last number covered the estimate for mixing and mastering.

I felt sick.

Until that moment, I had never really considered the financial risk of making Planet X. If I did, or if my parents had ever brought it up, I likely shrugged it off and switched the topic back to the music. I only thought about the album.

By my Dad’s math, I could afford to finish the album. But releasing it? Marketing it? Touring it?

I would be putting all of my chips on the table. I would be spending everything.

Unless a label stepped in, the path to releasing the album in the way I envisioned was going to be near impossible.

If I wanted Planet X to exist, I was going to have to sell it.

Back to being a product.

So we pitched. And then we pitched some more. Over and over again. Major labels, indies, small distribution outlets, everyone.

As the songs played, I watched confused faces, polite nods, awkward smiles. No one got it. No one saw the vision.

It was perhaps too weird, too mature for my age, too… out there.

Back in Oklahoma, I burned CDs for my friends and wrote Planet X across them in big cursive letters. We listened in our cars as we drove through the backroads.

Those CDs are the only physical copies of the album that ever existed.

When it became clear the album was never going to see daylight, I slowly stopped talking to Gordon. We texted less and less. Him and I had worked so far, spent so much time, dreamt so big, and I couldn’t carry it across the finish line.

I felt a deep shame, like I had let my best friend down.

Then there was the internet and my fans.

I had teased the album for over a year, now I had nothing to show for it. I didn’t know how to explain that it wasn’t coming, so I didn’t.

I stopped mentioning it, as I hoped and prayed that everyone, myself included, would forget. And eventually, we did.

Planet X never came out, but it lives within everything that I do. For a long time I looked back on the chapter sadly because of how it ended. Now I understand it differently.

Creating Planet X with Gordon was tuition.

It taught me how to build, how to chase a feeling, and how to embrace my imagination. It rewired the way that I view albums, and frankly, music in general.

The money I spent was to explore, to become fluent in my own taste, to strengthen my pen as a songwriter, and to strengthen my spine as an artist. Most artists don’t have that privilege at fifteen, if ever. I’m lucky that I did.

Every moment is a teacher.

Over a decade later, this piece, and the two demos I’ve released on this page, are an expression of gratitude.

This is for the ones who waited for an album they never got.

This is for Gordon and I.

This is for you.

I wanted Planet X to be a far and unrecognizable place. And that it most certainly is.

I took the longest way I could home

I left the party, all on my own

Yeah I had no one to turn to

But I still wonder

If you’re there in the city, fighting the cold

East side apartment, designer clothes

You look so pretty, everyone knows you

But they don’t know what you’re feeling

Like how I did when

We were just kids we weren’t …

Read more

Mine was written for me. A piano ballad called Waiting Outside the Lines, released in 2010 about five months after my video went viral.

In the beginning, I loved the song. I loved what it represented, an anthem about putting yourself first, about pushing forward. At the first shows, I was struck when I saw how inspiring the sentiment could be to my young audience.

But naturally when you sing something night after night, year after year, the magic starts to wane.

Over time it became an autopilot song. I knew it like the back of my hand. I knew where to reach, where to swell, which emotions to perform. But most of the time, there was no active thought behind it.

Simply put, the song played itself.

This past summer, I decided to rerecord it. Fans had been asking for a new version for years and I was in the middle of promoting a tour. It made for good promo. Why not?

I approached the whole thing with very little sentimentality. I wasn’t trying to look back. I wrote out a new arrangement, found the right producer, and went into the studio ready to work.

It wasn’t until I stepped up to the microphone and sang out the opening line, that something shifted.

You’ll never enjoy your life, living inside the box…

I stopped and stared at the lyrics.

You’re so afraid of taking chances, how you gonna reach the top…

“Is that what I’ve been singing all these years?” I thought. I kept reading.

The message of the song came into focus in a way it never had the past 15 years. The metaphors were richer, the writing sharper. It was better than I remembered. More powerful.

Standing there in the booth, I felt overwhelmed. The words seemed too good for me. A strange feeling to have when it’s your song.

Had I ever really known what I was saying? All those years, all the performances… did I ever really hear it?

I closed my eyes and saw Aaron’s smile. I heard his voice in the echo of the live room. Did I understand it then?

I’m sure I didn’t, because Waiting Outside the Lines was never my song to begin with.

Read more

I’ve got nowhere to go

Cabs lined out in the street

Angels left in the snow

You always knew how to talk me down, but now

I’m all on my own

So I, take off the edge

Drink the well again

Troublemaker, I’m a bad idea

But I’m a loyal one

Keep my eyes on the door

It’s always you that I’m waiting for

I didn’t come from much

You were the bell of t…

Read more

I was fourteen, sitting in the passenger seat of my manager’s Rolls Royce. We were parked outside of a restaurant in Malibu. Any other time, and simply being in that car would have thrilled me. Hell, it was basically a $250,000 spaceship.

On that particular day though, it might as well have been a cage. I felt trapped.

When I got out of the car, my manager, Troy, handed me his phone.

“Watch this,” he said coolly.

It was a grainy clip of Michael Jordan missing a slam dunk. I didn’t understand.

Troy took his phone back and looked at me.

“That’s what you just did.”

I didn’t know it then, but those words would never leave me. Like a bad kitchen burn, they stuck, lingering long after the moment passed. It wasn’t what he said that hurt. It was the fact that he was right.

I had missed the slam dunk.

I wanted to disappear.

Read more

I get this question often, and considering everything I went through at such a young age, I understand why it’s interesting. The viral video, first record deal at twelve, signed to Ellen… that’s certainly unique, especially for a kid. If it weren’t my own life, I’m sure I’d wonder the same thing.

Would you do it all over again?

Nine times out of ten I answer in a convincing lie. It’s easier that way. Maybe it’s the early media training, or maybe I just don’t want to bring the mood down. The truthful answer is complicated.

The truthful answer is painful. But then it’s uplifting too.

It’s also sad, funny, tragic, joyful, embarrassing, depressing, revealing, nostalgic, and shocking all at the same time.

The truth is longwinded, and it’s disastrously nuanced.

Fifteen years ago, I was thrust unexpectedly into a career as a recording artist, and since then I’ve lived every possible life in this industry.

I’ve been a success, I’ve been a failure, I’ve been signed, and I’ve been dropped.

Though a lot of my journey has played out in the public, so much of it has remained private, tucked away in stories, battle scars, and mementos of the past. Either by choice or lack of courage, I’ve kept a lot of what I’ve been through close to my chest. I’m finally at a place where I want to be more open. I feel an urgent need to.

This is my attempt to open the vault.

Through Between Records, I’ll be sharing stories I’ve never told, memories that have shaped me, and pieces of my life that never made it out into the open. I’ll also be sharing unreleased demos, sketches of songs, and musical artifacts from both past and present.

This page is my way of finally letting some light in.

Whether you’ve been with me since 2010 or have no idea who I am, my hope is that this space feels honest, sometimes flawed, and sometimes beautiful.

A mirror of my story itself.

If you had a choice, would you do it all over again?

I think so. But can I change a few parts?