![]() It would be one of the biggest albums by a new artist that year. Released in late March 2020, just as the pandemic was forcing people inside, Kid Krow debuted at number five on the Billboard 200 chart. Within months, he was off on his first tour, and for the next year, he worked on writing and recording his debut album. He dropped out of school soon after and never looked back, releasing his first EP, Sunset Season, in November of that year. Gray was wrapping up his first year of college in 2018 when he was offered a contract and began working with producer Dan Nigro. The song, which now has over 20 million views, eventually got the attention of Republic Records. His senior year of high school, Gray put out a song called “Idle Town,” a slow, tender reflection on the small town he was leaving for UCLA. And for those who had already left, his songs were a gut punch of nostalgia sung over a dreamy pop production. For listeners who felt stuck in suburbia, his music offered an escape, proof that one day they’d get out of their small towns too. He looked at the popular kids, the cheerleaders and football players, and filled in the details about their idyllic families and lives in his lyrics, sometimes romanticizing them, other times poking at the facade. “I was the fly on the wall, the observer of life. He had a small, tight-knit group of friends he’s still close with today, but he often spent time alone, people-watching. “I don’t even know why I did it or how I knew how to do it,” he says.īeing a newcomer and one of the few mixed-race kids-his father is of Irish American heritage, his mother is Japanese-in Georgetown’s sleepy retirement community made Gray a natural outsider. His mother had bought him a bright blue acoustic guitar, and while he didn’t show much interest at first, he came around to it after stumbling upon a video of Adele singing “Daydreamer.” After that, music just started pouring out of him. He turned to writing music as a way to cope, and he completed his first songs when he was twelve. As he summed it up in a video from 2016, it was a childhood marked by “debt, foreclosure, angry rich people, angry poor people, eviction, running from the cops, child protective services, and a lot of yelling.” The years that followed were spent folding stepparents and stepsiblings into his life, making and losing friends, and adjusting to each of his parents’ efforts to provide a stable life. Gray and his older sister often moved back and forth between their respective homes. His parents divorced when he was three years old, and they settled separately in Central Texas. There were stints in Arizona, then Hiroshima, Japan, to take care of his sick grandfather. His account is dedicated almost entirely to music and lyric videos now, but for several years, it was a live journal of his life, with entries titled “Me at 17 For My Future Self,” “Being Mixed Race,” “18 Mistakes I Learned From by 18,” and “Getting Into My Dream School” (UCLA, in case you were wondering).īorn in Southern California, he spent the first years of his childhood in constant motion. ![]() Gray began posting vlogs, covers, and his first original songs to YouTube when he was a freshman at Georgetown High School. Writing music was the most normal way for me to express it.” I had a lot to get off my chest at twelve years old. “I think people are generally pretty dismissive of having big emotions, especially as a kid. ![]() It’s a few hours until the show at the Moody Theater, and he’s dressed casually in a pair of washed, dark blue jeans and a white muscle tank that he’s adorned with a silver bolo tie. He’s in Austin, thirty miles south from where he grew up in Georgetown, for the second stop on his 2022 world tour. “Writing music is horribly painful,” Gray tells me. It encourages you to scream, to cry, to dance the sorrow out. His music isn’t there to console you or coax you out of your heartbreak. As you get older, it’s easy to look back and feel embarrassed by the messiness and melodrama of your youth, but Gray isn’t about that. In his songs he’s (metaphorically) bleeding from a backstab, he’s going to wreck someone’s car, and he’s wishing his crush’s girlfriend were dead. The 23-year-old singer-songwriter has built an impressive fan base-4.6 million subscribers on YouTube, where in 2013 he started posting videos of himself performing in his bedroom-thanks to confessional lyrics that read like diary entries.
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