Conan Gray was only a high school senior when his song ‘Idle Town’ blew up online. Living in a small town in Texas, he’d skipped class one day to record the track on Garageband with a microphone duct-taped to a broken lamp. “Millions of people were reaching out and it didn’t really make sense to me,” Gray reminisces now. “And I just kept living my life, going to class, hanging out with my friends. I think just the fact that I wrote ‘Idle Town’ in a moment where I really was just like any other kid with issues and living in a small town is what made it resonate with people. When I was faced with it going viral, it kind of opened my eyes to the fact that I could pursue a career because I always thought it was a little bit of a pipe dream until that happened.”

Born in the winter of 1998 in San Diego, California, Gray faced quite a bit growing up, from his parents separating to being bullied in school for being mixed-race. He moved around a lot the first few years of his life. His first two years were spent in Hiroshima, Japan where his paternal grandfather had become sick and needed assistance. A few years later, he settled in Georgetown, Texas where he spent the remainder of his teen years until he moved to college at UCLA.

“It was a massive adjustment,” he recalls. “I don’t think I’ll ever really be a city kid. I was so used to living in suburbia and not really having much to do and not really having this crazy world bustling around me all the time, but it took like a solid year and a half for me to feel like I was in a place that I knew was familiar. Also just moving away from all my friends, and going away to college, I think that every single person in their early 20s have to do deal with this. It’s just a period of life where everything kind of feels like your world is ending. And it kind of feels like everyone is out to get you.”

In 2013, Gray began posting videos on YouTube where he vlogged about his life in Texas and shared his music. It was around this time that he posted his song ‘Idle Town’ that really put him on the map and people’s radars. The track has amassed over forty million streams on Spotify to date. In 2018, Gray got signed to Republic Records and his whole life took a turn. He released his EP Sunset Season and then opened for Panic! at the Disco on their ‘Pray for the Wicked’ Tour. Currently, he’s working on his album from which he has already released several singles – The King, Checkmate, Comfort Crowd and Maniac.

“My album is very much just about my whole entire life,” Gray says. “I think my EP was about my senior year of high school and my album is about everything, including prior to high school, middle school, growing up, and things like that. I think it’s very chaotic and all over the place. It’s got a large range of things. Someone who likes folk is going to like the album, someone who likes straight pop is going to like the album, someone who likes grunge is going to like the album. It’s just about my entire life, all the ups and downs. I’ve had a less than ideal childhood so it’s kind of about what happened in the past, what’s happening now, and who I am now.”

Songwriting is a big part of Gray’s life and something he enjoys doing. He’s been writing his own songs since he was 12 years old and he’d like to continue to do this as his career develops. “I focus mostly on my life,” he says about his lyrics. “I’ve never been in love before so I’ve definitely written a lot of songs about not being in love. When it comes to drawing inspiration, I’ve written a lot of songs about my friends. I’ve written songs about people with full names in them, which should not come out. There’s a song on the album that’s named after the person I literally wrote it about. I just think that if something is genuine, people are able to relate to it. I think that drawing inspiration from my own mind is just the way that I kind of write and process my emotions. I would be writing songs, regardless of whether people were listening or not.”