‘I wanted to say Harry Styles is hot’
 |
|
A new era … Rising Aussie music star, Troye Sivan
Source: News Corp Australia
HE has close to 3 million Twitter followers, 3.5 million subscribers to his YouTube channel and the pre-orders from his coming release went to No. 1 on the charts in 41 countries — but young Aussie singer Troye Sivan is still nervous about sharing his new music.
Indeed it’s partly because of his legions of dedicated fans around the world who hang on his every post and went completely bananas when he announced the electro-pop mini-album Wild, which was released on Friday, that he is apprehensive.
“I have been posting — whether it’s Twitter or YouTube or whatever — since 2007 so some of those fans have been with me for the last eight years and we have been talking on a daily basis,” he muses over a coffee in a cafe in his home town of Perth.
“I don’t go a day without doing a social post of some sort. They know me really well and I know a lot of them. They are funny and smart — they are like mates. That’s why I get so nervous and excited to share music. Some of them only found me yesterday, and that’s completely cool as well, but this is a real relationship and it feels like me saying to my mates ‘look what I have made — how cool is this?’.”
The multi-talented, 20-year-old, South African-born Sivan has an odd, and thoroughly modern kind of fame, built up through his social media presence. Spurred by an encounter with Guy Sebastian during a Perth telethon, he began posting performance videos in 2007 on the then fledgling YouTube website. After easing off from singing as his voice broke (the annoyingly talented and unfailingly polite Sivan was also dabbling in acting, and landed a role in X-Men Origins: Wolverine as a young Hugh Jackman on his very first try), he began posting confessional, straight-to-camera spoken videos, thinking out loud about whatever was on his mind, from the music he loved to the deeper issues facing the modern teenager.
Go-getter … Troye Sivan (left) playing a young Hugh Jackman in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, having landed a movie role on his first attempt.
Source: Supplied
His fans — mainly young and predominantly female — lapped up his enthusiasm, positive outlook and unflinching honesty, viewing his posts more than 200 million times and helping send his previous EP, TRYXE, to No. 5 on the US charts. But as Sivan observes, his is a very personal kind of fame — certain places he can walk around completely incognito, in others he is invariably mobbed.
“I can guarantee that no one in this cafe has heard of me,” he says. “If there was a 14-year-old girl in here, chances are that her and her friends have and have watched my videos for a while. That’s a weird dynamic — but personally I love it. It’s a perfect balance and I am really happy it’s all worked out.”
One of his most viewed vlogs was entitled Coming Out, in which he revealed to his followers that he was gay. He’d come out to his family a few years previously so, while it initially terrified him, it seemed the most natural thing in the world to share his true self on a medium that had helped him when he was wrestling with his own sexuality.
“I was at the point where I felt so at ease and accepted within myself that it was just about sharing that extra piece of information because I had turned to the internet so much when I was coming to terms with myself and now that I had this audience I had this very real sense of responsibility,” he says.
“And also I wanted to tweet about how hot Harry Styles was without people scratching their heads. It was quite a similar feeling to when I came out to my parents — I just started thinking about it way too much and it was just such a worry to me. It becomes crippling when you are thinking about it 24/7 and putting everything you say and everything you do through a filter. It started to make me feel like I was a fake and a phony and I didn’t want to do that.
“I also realised the opportunity to help someone like I was two years before I made that video. I think it’s the most important thing I have ever done and if that’s all I ever do then I will still be completely happy.”
He’s now a passionate advocate for gay issues and activism — Time magazine last year named him as one of the world’s 25 Most Influential Teenagers — and while he describes Australia’s current debate about same sex marriage “crazy” and “ridiculous” says he’s not stressed about it.
“It’s just one of those inevitable things but it’s getting embarrassing,” he says. “I was in the middle of America a couple of weeks ago in a town of 5000 people and gay marriage is legal there but not in Sydney. But it will change — it’s just a matter of time.
“A lot of interviewers ask me ‘are you worried about being an openly gay artist?’ I used to think ‘I want to come out but I’d never put another boy in my music video because that’s just too much’. Now it’s just SO not a big deal that I don’t even think about it any more.”
To prove his point, that’s exactly what he has done. The video for the title track of Wild is the first of a trilogy that tells the story of a pair of star-crossed lovers, who both happen to be male. While his experience of coming out was nothing but positive, he’s aware he is among the fortunate few — and that that needs to change.
“I am so used to Perth, Sydney, LA, New York — those are very accepting and loving and beautiful places,” he says. “My goal for these music videos is to reach the parent of an LGBTQ person in the middle of America or in Russia and show them how their reaction to their child coming out can completely define — or not define — their child’s life, depending on how they react.”
Both the six-track, “completely autobiographical” Wild, and the full album due later this year, are pure, unashamed pop inspired the likes of Lorde, Haim and Frank Ocean and featuring rising Australasian stars Tkay Maidza and Broods. Pop, says Sivan, is in a “really cool place right now”.
“The fact that Royals was a radio smash last year I think is a really cool thing,” he says.
“I understand the dirty word connotation behind it only because I think some people have taken advantage of the formulaic structure of pop music and therefore made something that is mindless with money in mind,” he says. “At the end of the day pop music is just music that appeals to a lot people — and it appeals to a lot of people for a reason and I don’t think there is any reason that it should be heartless or thoughtless.”
Ambitious … Troye Sivan is hoping his new mini-album Wild will bring him new fans.
Source: News Corp Australia
And as much as he wants to reward his loyal supporters, the ambitious Sivan is also wary of preaching to the converted and hopes Wild will earn him a new group of fans.
“I have ambitions to grow beyond what I currently have,” he says. “I know how to talk to the audience I currently have and I know how to make them happy. But that’s why I felt the need to get a record label and management team on board — to do the things that I don’t think I am capable of, which is reaching a much larger audience and getting a 25-year-old bloke to care about me and give the music a listen. I think they will like it. Or I hope they will.”
With the relief of the release now behind him, Sivan now has something else to be anxious about. The next weeks and months will be a globetrotting whirlwind of promoting the new songs, meeting the fans and performing live.
“I haven’t performed since I was 16 or something like that,” he says. “It’s such a different ball game now though — these are my songs and my vision come to life. I am really excited about it. I think it’s going to be a connection unlike any I have experienced before. I am definitely going to cry. If people sing back lyrics to me, I am done.”
Wild is out now.
