Roses haven’t always held the reputation of being a fleeting display of affection, doomed to wilt within days.
As Greek mythology would tell it, Aphrodite was running through the forest in search of Adonis when she found him bleeding out, succumbing to the wounds of a fatal attack. The goddess fell to the ground beside her great love, her tears becoming indistinguishable from his blood. As the combinations of Aphrodite’s love and Adonis’s pain landed on the forest floor, deep red rose bushes emerged in their place. It’s an elaborate romanticization of a modern cliché, but isn’t it lovely to believe that something so simple could mean so much more?
Conan Gray isn’t entirely convinced. “Roses are just the perfect, extremely surface level, shallow depiction of love,” the 23-year-old singer and songwriter says over Zoom from his Los Angeles home. “Like, okay, great, thanks for spending fifteen bucks on me at the grocery store.” His sarcasm has more of a comedic edge to it than a bitter one – he knows it’s a cynical viewpoint to hold and maybe he’s projecting just a tiny bit. Gray softens for a moment, adding: “But when you’re in love, it means everything because you’re like, ‘Wow, you thought of me?’” The thing is, Conan has never been in love – or, at least not the reciprocated kind that could be shown off with a grand bouquet of flowers.
That’s why, for him, roses can be a reminder of all of the love that withers away, wasted on the wrong people. On the cover of his sophomore full-length Superache, Conan is enveloped in the center of a heart-shaped cluster of roses, splitting it down the middle. Rather than symbolizing the joining of two hearts, like Aphrodite and Adonis, his garden is much lonelier. “I wanted to represent me on this bed of roses with all these things that I was trying to offer to this person,” Gray explains. “Then, ultimately, breaking my own heart because this person was never going to love me in the first place.”
PHOTOGRAPHY BY:
RAUL ROM
EDITION 17
august 2022
JANUARY 27, 2022
BY: WONGO OKON
He knows the feeling all too well. Since he first began writing songs at 12 years old, Conan has looked towards the artform as a means of chronicling the complex emotional facets of the modern coming-of-age experience – from heartbreak and unrequited love to jealousy and growing apart from the people and places he’s always considered home. His approach to songwriting is more investigative than it is therapeutic. For Superache, the singer wrote around 250 songs examining the defining moments of his life and the lasting impact he – both consciously and unconsciously – carries with him on a daily basis. He then condensed it to 12 songs based on which stuck with him and his friends the longest. It’s a few dozen more than the nearly 200 tracks he penned for his debut album Kid Krow, which arrived in March 2020 just as national shutdowns began to sever any meaningful sense of communal connection.
Kid Krow’s deepest emotions culminate on “Heather,” an unsparing ballad about the crushing realization that the person you love has their heart set on someone else. The song flares with the jealousy and frustration of not being enough for someone you don’t even have a label for. What do you call the person responsible for shattering your heart, all because you fell for them without ever dating in the first place? It’s a gray-area purgatory somewhere in between crush and situationship, but Conan lingered in this space with countless others who know exactly what it feels like to be the second choice – or the third or fourth, or not a choice at all. Since its release, “Heather” has amassed over a billion global streams across platforms and made its rounds as a viral TikTok hit used in over 300,000 videos.
More than 6.3 million people now follow the singer on that short-form app. There, he bonds with his audience on the platform over the shared experience of being all too familiar with the gut-wrenching feelings he communicates in his music – even if he has a tendency to mask the hurt with the kind of unhinged Gen Z humor that can only come from being raised on the internet. But, the internet is where his search for connection first began, though his trajectory was more similar to Troye Sivan than Justin Bieber. In 2014, just over a year after he launched a YouTube channel to share Tumblr-esque vlogs about his daily life as a teenager, Conan began uploading covers reimagining songs from the likes of Frank Ocean, Lorde, and Lana Del Rey. Soon, with his following growing steadily, he started sharing original songs he learned to produce himself through YouTube tutorials.
“I hope this song can help somebody with a similar issue,” Gray wrote in the description box when he uploaded his first original track “Antics,” an acoustic ballad about falling for the same traps over and over. Even as his singing videos racked up thousands of views, he continued sharing intimate sit-down vlogs discussing his innermost thoughts, from his favorite music and thrifting hauls to his life goals and the realization that he’s largely motivated by fear. There wasn’t much else for him to do in Georgetown, Texas, where he settled as a teenager after moving a dozen times. It was a tumultuous childhood marked by divorce, financial instability, and bullying, at times as a result of his Japanese-American identity in predominantly white schools.
CKAY is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
Writer: Larisha PauL
@larishapaul
Photographer: RAUL ROMO
@RAULROMO
Stylist: KATIE QIAN
@KATIEQIAN
GROOMING: HANNAH CARLETON
@HANNAHCARLETONARTISTRY
DesignED BY: DAISY JAMES
@DJAMESDESIGN
“My life mission growing up was just to get out of Texas,” Conan says, recalling the mantra he would repeat to himself throughout high school: “I just need to get out. I need to be safe. I need to go to college and get a good job.” When his senior year rolled around, he was ready to move on to whatever awaited on the other side of the door he was closing. To say goodbye, he wrote an original song titled “Idle Town” in tribute to Georgetown and the group of close friends who got him through his hardest times there. A week after he uploaded the song to his growing audience of over 100,000 subscribers in March 2017, he found himself living with those same friends after being kicked out of his home.
“I’m not the kind of person who has a ton of friends, I just have a few that I really, really love and I very much value as family to me,” he admits. “My friends are everything. They’re my entire life. I will go to the ends of the earth to see them for one day.” They’re the ones who have picked him up when he was down and showed up for him in the way family is supposed to. Now, Conan has welcomed a new slate of close bonds into his life, including a match-made-in-heaven friendship with Olivia Rodrigo, but he couldn’t have known he would find such wholesome love when he left Texas. It was hard to leave his high school crew behind – they were his home – but if he stayed, he would have been stuck there.
New beginnings can be as terrifying as they are exciting, but Conan was already making headway towards his biggest goal – being okay – in a way he had never expected. “Writing music was always just a weird sidequest in my life that I just did for fun,” he explains. Sure, he had been singing nonstop since he was a child, but Gray had enough experience with the precariousness of life – having money and losing it, settling down and being uprooted just as quickly – to know that becoming a pop star wasn’t likely part of the plan. But in the chaos of finishing high school and fielding familial drama, “Idle Town” had gone viral.
Before success at the Grammys, before three straight albums in the top 20 of the Billboard 200 (his second album, Good Thing, peaked at No. 3 in 2018), and before performing “The Christmas Song” with Michael Bublé on NBC this past December, Bridges didn’t think the nature of his music could thrive in the industry. Inspired by turn-of-the-millennium R&B, he started singing casually in jam sessions with friends at Tarrant County College (TCC) in Fort Worth. His time at TCC didn’t last though, as he had to leave school to help support his mother and took up a job as a dishwasher, a narrative that marked his ascent in the Coming Home days.
But he was playing guitar in his downtime, writing songs and feeling a desire to let his voice be heard. This led him to become a regular at open mic sessions in and around Fort Worth. At one of these sessions, Austin Jenkins — of Austin psych-rock staples White Denim — approached Bridges after his set, digging what he heard, and offered to record the songs. Together, they yielded a batch of tracks that they put up on SoundCloud.
“That’s kinda what sparked everything,” Bridges, who was soon signed to Columbia Records, says. “My whole plan was just to keep working on guitar and keep writing songs. I was gonna hop in a van and road trip and maybe find open mics if nothing else.”
But he wasn’t making R&B yet.
“That was around the time in my life where I had a spiritual awakening, where I tossed away all my secular CDs and music,” Bridges says. ”And I walked the path of righteousness so to speak. I was super Christian and I was inspired at that time thinking that current gospel music was a little corny. So I kinda set out to write modern gospel music.”
Coincidentally, it was playing gospel music at Houston’s St. John’s United Methodist Church — yes, the same church Beyoncé and Solange attended as kids — where Speer and Johnson forged their friendship in the mid-aughts. They played in the church band for a decade. Rehearsals were on Tuesday night and they’d go straight from the St. John’s United to Rudyard’s Pub, around the corner from The Flat, a vibrant worldly music lounge in the Hyde Park neighborhood.
“That’s where I met Laura Lee, when she started crashing those hangs,” Johnson says. “And the rest is history as they say.”
“Didn’t I go there with y’all last time?” Bridges asks as Johnson finishes telling the story.
“Yeah!” both Speer and Lee recall before Speer shares a memory.
“The gal who was taking care of us at Rudyard’s was like ‘Wow, you look a lot like Leon Bridges!’ And you were like ‘Yeah, I get that a lot,” Speer adds.
Bridges is soft-spoken and unassuming, he wears shades on our video call, but is beyond forthcoming and makes an effort to be as thoughtful as possible in everything he says. If his demeanor matches anyone from Khruangbin the most, it’s with the collected Johnson, who admitted he had to adjust his style of playing and performing when he began taking the stage with the band.
“In church, the whole thing is to be of service to the music,“ Johnson says. “Not to be seen, not to call attention to yourself or this fly kick pattern… Conceptually, that kind of playing that we were doing in church still comes out on stage though. Because who you are comes out through your musical instrument. Whether it be your drums, bass, guitar, or, in Leon’s case, his voice.”
For Lee, a spirited, wordly Bohemian who grew up in a Catholic Mexican-American family herself, she, Johnson, and Speer ate at Rudyard’s every Tuesday for three years before she ever picked up a bass guitar. Lee and Speer connected over their mutual love for global music obscurities and they all formed a musical relationship, but not in practice at first. Then one day, Lee picked up Speer’s bass.
“He was very happy,” Lee says. “Mark is very encouraging to people he sees a musical spark in and he saw an interest in me to play it, so he gave me little breadcrumbs along my path to help me find my own way.”
“It very much felt like he was a mentor to me, but also like a brother or an uncle, or a dad but also a brother,” Gray says. “He’s usually the first person that tells me that I’m being too cautious when it comes to my life. He’s known me for so long that it becomes very obvious that a lot of the reasons why I haven’t lived my life a ton in my adulthood was because I was just so afraid of getting hurt again.” Conan was so used to being holed up in his bedroom, writing hundreds of songs about how the world was out to get him, that he hadn’t recognized it as a defense mechanism. When he hunkered down to create Superache, a moment of clarity knocked him over the head: he hadn’t been building his life on his own terms.
“I think in quarantine, all you really got to do – all we all had time to do – was just sit around and think,” Conan says. “All of a sudden I sort of realized, oh sometimes you aren't the victim in a situation. Sometimes you mess up. Sometimes people don't want to date you and it's not personal – they just don't like you. Sometimes things just don't work out, it's not that deep.” Throughout Superache, he shatters his own illusion on songs like “Movies” and “Astronomy” by removing the rose-colored glasses. Elsewhere, on “Best Friend,” he adapts the realization that “the platonic relationships in my life mean just as much, if not more, than the romantic relationships that I've had in my life” into anthemic quasi-love songs. For clarification's sake, and with a pointed sigh, he quickly adds: “Not that I've ever actually dated anyone. I wish, but not yet.” This sentiment rests at the core of “People Watching,” the album’s grand pop event about watching everyone around you falling in love and waiting for your turn to arrive.
While making Superache, Gray came to the realization that the common denominator across these songs – songs about love that didn’t last, songs about people that went away, songs about hopeful moments that didn’t blossom into anything more – was actually himself. “I think with Kid Krow, and when I was a teenager, a lot of my fear manifested in anger and angst,” he says. “As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that’s just because I’m terrified. I’m terrified of what they’re going to do to me. I think a lot of that anger turned into a realization that I’m someone who…” Conan trails off, searching for the perfect encapsulation. A few seconds later, he finds himself inadvertently quoting “Memories,” the harrowing Superache ballad where thoughts of a haunted past keep him from moving forward: “I’m traumatized, for lack of better words.”
Now, Gray is embracing the discomfort he previously shut out. He even moved to New York for a few months last year – a big leap for someone who claims to “hate being perceived.” He describes the brief stint in the city as being good for his personal life, but reveals that it was “deeply overwhelming” from a writing standpoint. “There was so much going on all the time that even though I was hanging out with people and learning new things, meeting all these different kinds of lives that are all existing all at once – I only wrote one song the entire time,” he says. For reference, back in Los Angeles, the singer churned out a set of lyrics daily. Fighting his discomfort, Gray went along with it, but after a while he needed to snap back to reality. “I have to finish my album,” he remembers thinking, slightly panicked. “I can’t just live in New York and giggle for the rest of my life.”
Looking ahead, Conan wants to dive headfirst into one of the most dramatic experiences possible: true love. “Maybe on my third album, I’ll have something about falling in love,” he ponders, asking: “That would be great, wouldn’t it?” He deserves the grand, romanticized love story – his own garden of roses that actually represents something true and real. Still, he finds himself projecting a different vision onto the storybook pages: “I want someone to come into my life and just destroy my heart – stomp on it, make it disappear.” Why would he possibly want to capture what he’s been searching for so long, only to have it completely blow up in his face? Well, he says, “I’m bored.”
And in fact, the entire supergroup almost never came to fruition as Bridges says some people at the label were opposed to the project altogether. “I really thought that was wild,” he says.
When Lee caught wind of the possibility that the label might kill the project, she was undeterred. This was a step in the legacy of the four of them and a project that could very well continue to grow into something amazing.
“I sent a very headstrong email to all of the people I knew at Columbia as a part of Leon’s team, with all of our label people copied,” Lee says. “And I just said 'You’d be doing the world a disservice, our fans, Leon’s fans. It’s beautiful music.’ I literally said ‘I am on my knees, please help me put this out. Whatever it takes.’ And eventually, it got pushed through. And I’m so glad. I think we won!”
“You go and do all the polished stuff, but some of my biggest songs are from Texas Sun,” Bridges adds. “It shows that this is the sound that people were definitely hungry for.”
“I’m glad you encouraged me to do that,” Bridges replies. “Because I would’ve never thought to do that in that song.”
There’s an inherent trust that’s palpable between Bridges and each member of the band when they speak to each other. It’s what empowered him to bring “Doris” to them, a tune written from Bridges’ father’s perspective, and the final moment he spent with his grandmother as she died. It’s the song that sounds the most like a David Axelrod production; celestial, otherworldly, and incredibly psychedelic.
“'Doris' is the band favorite,” Lee admits as everyone nods emphatically. “It deals with the supernatural and almost like the ghost of someone. It’s really special.”
“I appreciate Leon putting that into our hands, because it’s such a delicate piece of work,” Johnson adds. “We know what it’s about and again, it’s not about calling attention to yourself. It’s about the band. Let’s pay our respects to Doris within the song.”
“Doris” was actually meant to be on Texas Sun — yet another reminder that these two EP’s belong together and not apart — but the band says Bridges’ label didn’t think it was strong enough for the record. “We had a record’s worth of songs ready to go and Columbia was like, ‘No,’” Speer says.
AUGUST 31, 2022
BY: LARISHA PAUL
THE ART OF HEALING
As it turns out, Conan needed to spend that time with himself, anyway. Kid Krow has a certain distance to it, both in its content and in the way it was created. Sitting in his bedroom at home, where almost all of his music begins, Gray created a collection of songs reflecting the inner musings of a lovelorn high schooler yearning for a whirlwind romance just out of his reach. It would wind up defining his audience’s understanding of both him as a person and as an artist. “On Kid Krow, I told the story I was sticking to at the time, which was just a section of my life,” Conan explains. “Just the safe things that I was allowed to say – that I had a crush, and then, that didn’t work out.”
The melodramatic album cemented Gray as one of Gen Z’s leading artists with a knack for communicating a hyper-specific sense of relatability. “I do think young people always will have a tendency to think that they’re the first people to be experiencing what they’re experiencing,” he says, finding comfort in the cyclical nature of growing up. “Every single moment that you’re like, ‘I’m so special,’ it’s like, no you’re not. We’re all the same.” Like many of his generation’s rising stars, Conan learned the art of translating intense feelings into grandiose pop songs from emotive artists like Taylor Swift, Adele, and Lorde. Watching those musicians condense entire periods of their young adulthood into albums that functioned like time capsules convinced Conan that he could do the same by transforming his intimate journal entries into music.
young people always will have a tendency to think that they're the first people to be experiencing what they're experiencing
my friends are everything. they're my entire life,
i will go to the ends of the earth to see them for one day
When he stepped away from the computer displaying the rapidly increasing number of views and streams, Conan was still a regular, hyper-online college kid trudging through his freshman year at UCLA. His YouTube subscribers followed along as he vlogged his first week of classes and gave tours of his Pinterest-ready apartment filled with photos of his friends. But he couldn’t keep the double life going for long because, as he describes it, “the sidequest kind of became the main quest.” Soon enough, he would leave his dream school in the past. “Within a month, I dropped two of the classes because I was too busy,” Gray remembers. “I was going to the studio and then going to class and then flying to New York for meetings about the record deal. And then it was just too much – I’m only one person, sadly.”
At that point, an 18-year-old Gray had inked a deal with Republic Records and found a musical soulmate in producer Dan Nigro, who helmed his 2018 debut EP Sunset Season and Kid Krow long before he was lauded for his work on Olivia Rodrigo’s groundbreaking debut Sour. Together, they pinpointed the singer’s signature sound that would refine and evolve over the nearly five years between Sunset Season and Superache: the cinematic kind of pop that belongs on coming-of-age film soundtracks. Before he had met Nigro, Gray had never even stepped foot in a formal recording studio. In that sense, they both had a lot to teach each other, but the lessons also extended far beyond music.
sometimes you aren't the victim in
a situation
Sometimes you mess up
Sometimes people don't want to date you and it's not personal – they just don't like you
Sometimes things just don't work out, it's not that deep
If Kid Krow was a time capsule of Conan’s teenage years, Superache is his early twenties packaged up with a pretty red bow. He’s only 23 for a few more months, and mentions during our conversation that he’s heard great things about 24, but he’s growing more and more appreciative of the way his perspective has shifted with hindsight as he’s gotten older. “I think so much of growing up is telling yourself how you’re supposed to act,” he says. “And I think there’s a certain sadness to not letting yourself feel everything as deeply as you need to feel it.” He doesn't regret not allowing himself the same grace to open up in the same way in the past. In fact, he speaks about his younger self with a tender protectiveness. “I think that everyone feels emotions just as deeply as you felt them at any time in your life,” he adds. “But it’s more a matter of: Will you let yourself?”
In the making of this album, Conan found himself ripping the same wounds open over and over again as he examined every facet of his life – including all of the times he lingered on the sidelines, keeping his feelings tucked tightly at his side instead of allowing them to erupt with every bit of melodramatic emotion that he was experiencing. But he sees it as the most natural progression that could have happened. “Superache to me is an album that’s intentionally allowing myself to be as dramatic as I am in my everyday life towards my relationships,” he says. “I think it’s fun to be dramatic. I mean, why not? There’s really no reason to not be absolutely crazy.”
i think it's fun to be dramatic. i mean, why not?
there's really no reason to not be absolutely crazy
It isn’t necessarily the heartbreak that tore him apart that sticks with him the most, but the emotional damage that expresses itself much more quietly. “I had a lot of time to think about the way that my childhood affected me and the way that it’s gonna keep affecting me,” Gray explains. His familial trauma has largely remained under lock and key in his journal, passed over in favor of transforming his more relatable entries into the anti-love songs that he’s come to be known for. But on the melancholic “Family Line” and “Summer Child,” he allows himself to tell more of the story.
Gray spent two years writing “Family Line,” retreating from the feat whenever his honesty began to scare him. The Superache deep cut squirms with discomfort as Conan follows the thread of his most damning traits – from his ability to lie to his fear of commitment and instability – directly back to his upbringing. “To me, my main objective was to let people know that they aren't alone in feeling like they can't move past their lives or the things that have happened to them, but also letting them know that that you can eventually,” he says. “It's going to take time and it's going to be painful, but it can happen.”
Still, Gray is reluctant to take stock in how far he’s come from the past, or even to properly celebrate his accomplishments. “I definitely feel like I do live in this very ‘impending doom’ state all the time,” he says. “Since I kind of always feel like I’ll never really let this settle into my bones, I always think, oh well, this might disappear so you have to work your very hardest all the time. That’s just, I think, a product of my life circumstances as a kid.” Those particular anxieties may take longer to shake.
“I think growing up poor really affects the way that you live your life,” Conan considers. “I still find myself saving little tiny glass bottles of soy sauce – just in case I need it one day. That always stays with you.” All of those experiences are still inside of him. Gray is always learning from the past versions of himself, describing all his prior ages like kids stacked on each other's shoulders in a trench coat – but with all their lessons comes all their pain. “It was not an enjoyable time making Superache at all,” he admits. “I’ve spent my whole life running from all the things that I talked about.”
maybe on my third album, i'll have something about falling in love...
that would be great, wouldn't it?
“My life mission growing up was just to get out of Texas,” Conan says, recalling the mantra he would repeat to himself throughout high school: “I just need to get out. I need to be safe. I need to go to college and get a good job.” When his senior year rolled around, he was ready to move on to whatever awaited on the other side of the door he was closing. To say goodbye, he wrote an original song titled “Idle Town” in tribute to Georgetown and the group of close friends who got him through his hardest times there. A week after he uploaded the song to his growing audience of over 100,000 subscribers in March 2017, he found himself living with those same friends after being kicked out of his home.
“I’m not the kind of person who has a ton of friends, I just have a few that I really, really love and I very much value as family to me,” he admits. “My friends are everything. They’re my entire life. I will go to the ends of the earth to see them for one day.” They’re the ones who have picked him up when he was down and showed up for him in the way family is supposed to. Now, Conan has welcomed a new slate of close bonds into his life, including a match-made-in-heaven friendship with Olivia Rodrigo, but he couldn’t have known he would find such wholesome love when he left Texas. It was hard to leave his high school crew behind – they were his home – but if he stayed, he would have been stuck there.
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