How are you doing today?
I’m doing good. This is the second show in two days. Like, the more shows you do day after day, you get more and more tired and a little bit more delusional, so you have more fun while doing it. It’s like basically being high on stage because you’re tired and out of it, but it’s fun. It’s a good.
I wanna start at the very beginning. When and how did you get into writing songs and making music?
I’m very different than everybody that I know because I started writing songs during the pandemic, like 2021. Before that, I was studying aerospace engineering in school, so I was planning on being an engineer and I was doing a lot of math and science and started to intern at Space X and was really planning on doing that with my life. And when the pandemic happened, it gave me an opportunity to skip class. Prior to the pandemic, I started playing guitar pretty heavily and got really obsessed with it just as a hobby. The hobby kind of took over while I was skipping class. Then I started writing songs once I had stopped playing guitar cause I had some medical issues with my hands. And so I just started writing songs to stay making music in some way.
And who were your biggest inspirations when you were growing up and who are they now?
I think I grew up really listening to whatever my friends or my parents were listening to, which is kind of how every kid does it. I don’t think I was aware of music as a thing, as a business, as a world until the pandemic, probably. Once I picked up a guitar, I was like, what is music? How do people do this for a living? I feel like I was a late bloomer when it comes to my current taste. Now, my current taste is anywhere from Britney Spears to Arctic Monkeys to Death Cab for Cutie, to… Man, everybody. Shawn Mendes… Just kind of swings back and forth between alternative and singer-songwriter stuff and pop, super pop music.
I want to talk about your latest project „lover boy”. Can you tell me a bit about the background of the EP what were your main inspirations while making it and what is the message that you hope people who listen to it take away from it?
The main inspiration for it was I went into writing all of the songs… Okay, I guess the sound, why it sounds the way that it does is because I went into writing the songs wanting to really try to make pop music. My EP before that, „Choke on My Heart”, was a bit more alternative. They’re all pop songs, but the sound and the drums and the guitars and stuff are all a bit more aggressive and alternative. And whenever I’m doing too much alternative, then the pop girlie inside of me is like, you really love Britney Spears. Like, you really love that shit too. Am I allowed to curse? I should be.
Yeah, of course.
Fuck yeah. Okay. So I had just gotten off of doing that more alternative sounding project and wanted to really embrace the pop side of myself. That perfectly intersected with a relationship that I had gotten into. That was my first positive experience with, I guess, just love in general. All of my previous songs were like, I hate my ex. I’m either better than them or I’m saying that I’m better than them and secretly a lot worse than them and I’m not better off. It was all these negative feelings attached to relationships and I wanted to challenge myself to write positive love songs. Writing a good love song is so difficult because it can sound so bland or cheesy, or vanilla or anything. The first song that I wrote for the project was „good side”, which is the acoustic song on the project. It’s the most specific and small and intimate song on the project. I play it every night at these shows too, and I dedicate it to a fan in the crowd, usually.
Since then, you released your latest single, „sweat”. It’s a fun and sexy one. What did you enjoy the most about making this song?
„sweat” was a bit unorthodox. I came in wanting to write a song called „sweat”, but I didn’t know what it was going to be about. Typically, as of recently, that is how the songs start for me. I have a song and laugh at the idea that this would be a funny title for a song on a tracklist for a project. And then, as I’m thinking about it, I’m finding a way for me to personally relate to the title and a story, a personal story backwards. I came in wanting to write a song called „sweat”, and we made a fucking terrible song. It was so bland, so lame. But what we got out of it was the chorus. That’s all we got. Like, that was the only part that we ended up keeping. There was something special about that. But I was really frustrated with that because, like, there’s something cool here. I just don’t know what the song is about. Took me a second to access emotionally, which is funny. You need emotional access for a song essentially about sex. I was frustrated. I drove home and as soon as I walked through the front door of my apartment, the whole song, it felt like dropped like into my head. It was the first time I ever felt that way. I usually have to manhandle my songs in order to get them out. I had the producer send me just the instrumental with no vocal on it and I sat down on my couch and I wrote the first verse through the first chorus in about like 40 seconds. I had figured out what the song was about essentially right there. I don’t know why. So I went back the next day and finished writing it, and now it is what it is.
Out of all of your songs, which one would you show to a person that doesn’t know you yet?
Mmm. Probably „hell of a good time”. I think that was the first time I’ve ever put those two sides of my brain, the alternative and the pop girl side, together. It has the spirit and the energy of rock and roll and alternative, but on top of it, it’s very Britney Spears „Toxic” era glossy pop vocal. Those two things together were the first time that my brain was like, „oh, I can do it all at once”. I didn’t realize I could. And now that’s just the bar for what I’m trying to do. „sweat” is another version of that. It’s literally the same chords and the same drum time. It’s the same everything. We wanted to just take that, the accidentally dancey feeling of „hell of a good time” and do it more intentionally with „sweat”.
Since you are on tour right now, let’s talk about concerts and touring a bit. What’s one thing that you just can’t leave at home when you’re traveling on tour?
Something I need on tour is noise canceling headphones. I need to block out the world. I become a recluse when I get into my hotel room. I don’t want to say vocal stuff because that’s so lame. What’s something that’s a little bit weirder? Let me look around. A leather jacket, for sure. Even in Europe, I wear a leather jacket and it’s freezing outside. I’m not built for this. I’m from California, too. I’m used to sunny weather, 24/7. I’m a total baby. A leather jacket, noise canceling headphones and… Hmm. Antibiotics. That’s a weird one. Antibiotics, in case you get sick. I have my doctor pre-prescribe me antiviral medication so I don’t have to go to a hospital here.
And do you have any rituals that you always do before stepping onstage? Like, how do you hype yourself up?
I definitely power pose. In high school, I took a communications class and said, power posing, just making your body big and kind of constrict your brain and having confidence. And I typically sing a song that isn’t mine that gets to me like, really? Burning up by the Jonas Brothers gets me going, like. So you’re going? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, the other one gets me knocked off.
Can you tell me about your craziest concert experience as a performer?
Oh, my gosh. Last night was a crazy concert experience. Munich, right? Yeah. In Munich. Yeah. That was maybe the one of the craziest ones. My New York shows are always really crazy. I have like a really core group of fans out there that go absolutely berserk. It’s hard to hear me singing over them in New York specifically, but last night was crazy. My my shoot came on on stage. I tripped and fell on a person. Oh, no, they they caught me very gracefully. We made a joke about it. Everybody laughed. It was totally okay. And yeah, my mic was cutting in and out. It was like all these technical difficulties. But I see I secretly love when things are going wrong. I like the high pressure situations. Okay. I feel like as a person in my life, I’ve developed a lot of tools to like get out of embarrassing thing or awkward moments. And I was just pulling out all the stops last night. It was like last night that was half music and half just standup comedy. And luckily I did not say a single thing on stage that didn’t get the whole room like roaring and laughter. So it went it went well, but it was a wildly memorable show.
And what’s next for you? Can we expect to hear new music from you anytime soon?
And then after this tour, I’ll do my first headline tour. Oh, so Sweat was the first single off of the next project. We’ll drop a few more songs and do the first headline in August.
And is there a message that you would like to share with your Hungarian fans? Because I know we’re in Austria right now, but you actually come from Hungary.
Literally every show we’ve played so far has continued to be my favorite show. I don’t European crowds in general and I would assume the same is the same in Hungary. Is there way less like in embarrassed about having fun like Americans go to shows and they’re really stiff and they want to be cool and stuff and it’s way less cool to try to be cool. And I love that everybody at all of these shows. One of the signs at the last show was like a girl holding a sign saying, If I had a dick, it would be hard. Like, That’s so fucking funny. And that was just one of there were outrageous signs and these last few shows. So I think that’s to my Hungarian fans.
