It's half past midnight in West Hollywood, and Australian singer-songwriter Troye Sivan halts when he hears his friend Leland utter, "OH MY GOD!"
Sivan, thinking someone had died, glances at Leland's iPhone only to discover that Taylor Swift and her Midas touch gave his new EP WILD an all-caps stamp of approval.
Heart racing, Sivan sprints down the street, arriving at a friend's apartment, where he calls his mother using FaceTime to celebrate. He then calls his managers and everyone freaks out for 30 or so minutes before Sivan tries to unwind, to no avail, by watching I Am Cait.
"Insanity ensued," he told Mashable, describing the post-tweet moments, days later.
"I hardly slept that night — feels so amazing to be validated by someone who I look up to so much."
His euphoric response is what you'd expect from a fresh-faced musician, or most artists internally waiting for the often-elusive feedback from their megastar peers.
Sivan, before securing a record deal, launched his YouTube career eight years ago when he was 13 years old with a clip of himself singing Declan Galbraith's "Tell Me Why." He naturally looped in his millions of dedicated online followers, many of whom were already sharing in his excitement.
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Troye Sivan’s highly anticipated EP Wild is only hours away from its U.S. release when I meet with him on a balmy Thursday afternoon at a Beverly Hills coffee shop. With more than 3.5 million followers on YouTube, the singer’s latest effort had no trouble claiming the top spot on iTunes moments after it became available for preorder, but the success of his previous album, 2014’s TRXYE, set a high standard for the artist to surpass. Upon its debut, it was the number 1 album in 66 countries on iTunes and debuted at number 5 on the Billboard 200, and the music video for album’s lead single, “Happy Little Pill,” went on to rack up more than 17.5 million views.
These are statistics that might make any emerging artist antsy on the eve of a follow-up release, but the 20-year-old Australian-raised singer is quite at ease as he saunters into the shop, dressed in a plain maroon T-shirt and skinny jeans, with a satisfied smile splashed across his face. Moments after he joins me at a quiet corner table, he explains why competing with prior success is the furthest thing from his mind.
“Chart positions are very cool and awesome, but my biggest worry between the last EP and this one was that my music would change and grow, and I feel like that’s happened,” he says. “However, when I first set out to work on Wild, it was nerve-racking because I wasn’t sure what I was capable of — I’m still not sure — but as soon as I had that moment where I thought, That’s better than anything I’ve written before, the pressure got better and better because I felt at ease about writing something I was really proud of.”
He cocks his head thoughtfully to one side before adding, “I think the most important thing to me at this point in my career is being able to be honest in my songwriting — and these songs are about boys.” |
