It’s January 21, 2013. “Hello. My name is Conan, and I made this YouTube channel… a few days ago”, says a smiling 14 year old. 

Fast forward to 2022 and that same bashful boy that created art and wrote songs in his bedroom now has two certified platinum albums and over 21 million monthly listeners on Spotify. That boy is Conan Gray. “When I was a kid, I needed an outlet really badly. I drew and I painted and I played music. But the second I wrote my first song I was like ‘Oh’. Finally, I can say things the way I want to say things. It just made sense and it was so relieving”, he nods.

Conan Gray’s introspective and detailed observations on love and life made headlines with his debut album Kid Krow. Painfully self-aware, the coming-of-age soundtracks insouciantly poke at love and heartbreak with songs like “Crush Culture” and “Maniac”, while allowing listeners a brief glimpse into the artist’s inner thoughts. For Conan, putting pen to paper for his first album was a breeze. “I was like, ‘Hey I’m Conan and I’m a teenager and I have feelings and I got my heart broken one time when I was seventeen’”, he laughs.

For Superache, the 23 year old singer had to take a different approach, breaking down the nitty gritty of who he really was and stripping himself bare. “I very much bottle things up into nice boxes. With Superache it was like, I guess I have to open those boxes.” Although very much a natural progression from his debut album, Superache possesses a level of grounded maturity and insight that was missing from Kid Krow. But getting there was no easy feat. “I had to dig into my past, stuff I’ve spent my whole life trying to run from. It was scary and miserable.”

“Family Line” was one such track that the singer agonised over. “I wrote the first verse and chorus, put it down and then spent two years finishing it. I would write a line, then get really upset and not know what to say.” Conan grew up with separated parents, moving twelve times throughout childhood and three times in sixth grade alone. “Family Line is about a really hard topic that I very much am still going through. It’s a topic that’s definitely important to talk about. That’s why I think it was hard, because I didn’t want to mess it up.”

While he certainly could have spared himself the heartache and kept his thoughts contained in their neatly packaged boxes, Conan feels pressure – most of it from himself – to be as brutally honest as possible through his music. “I need to say things as they are and not sugarcoat things or else people are not going to be able to relate, or they’re going to feel alone.”

Despite the oversaturated nature of social media, Conan’s hard-hitting lyrics cut through the noise and appeal to anyone who has experienced heartbreak, unrequited love, or even just observed from the sidelines. “People Watching” encapsulates these emotions, with Conan, a self-proclaimed ‘observer of life’, singing with a wistfulness that is as hopeful and longing as it is desolate and isolating. Before the bridge, the drums kick in and the music swells as Conan croons, “I wanna feel all that love and emotion //Be that attached to the person I’m holding” Co-written with songwriting whizz Julia Michaels (she also wrote Dua Lipa’s “Pretty Please” and has written for Selena Gomez, Justin Bieber and Ed Sheeran), “People Watching” features Conan’s flair for dramatics while also underscoring his ability to reflect and observe from a distance, and to do so with poignant empathy.