Con Con

BY MAGGIE LANGE PHOTOGRAPHS BY PEGGY SIROTA

The singer, actor, and YouTube star talks to us about being young and waiting for early retirement.

After your tour—Asia, Europe, North America—what are you most looking forward to? I feel like I’ve spent the last two years working on this Blue Neighbourhood album and tour, and I’m excited to take a couple months to clear my head and think and write. I’m excited to be bored again. I feel like I’m the most creative when I’m bored. I haven’t had time to be bored recently. I’m excited to chill out and not travel for a little while and hopefully start writing. I have some projects outside of music next year, some projects in the LGBTQ space, and some activism stuff. Maybe write some fiction or nonfiction. At the moment, I feel super-duper open to any sort of creative project.

You know yourself so well that you know boredom brings about a creative wellspring for you. When did you discover that? I think it’s always been that way for me. Ever since I was a little kid I got bored, so I learned to sing and I started singing lessons. And then anytime I was bored, I would start writing and start messing around on my computer, making beats. Then I got bored and started making YouTube videos; that changed my life in a big way. That got me signed. My go-to thing when I’m sitting around is to make something.

You sing a lot about being young. What do you think you’re going to sing about when you’re older? [Laughs] I’m not sure. I don’t know yet. To me, writing is a personal thing; I write super-personal, autobiographically. Ultimately, there will always be things in my life that I can write about. At the moment, I’m 21 and I’m experiencing a lot of stuff for the first time. Maybe when I’m older it will be about sitting in a rocking chair, drinking red wine. That’s the plan. I want to have kids and a hot husband. By the time I’m 35, I want to be in a rocking chair.

What do you think of when you listen to your album? I really love writing music. I know that there are better singers than I am, who are more good-looking than I am, better dancers, and all this stuff. There are people who are better at writing than I am, too. But the thing that no one can ever take away from you is [your] writing. If I’m just writing for myself, it’s the one thing I take a lot of pride in and something that I really enjoy, really deeply. [I thought I would] listen to my album and think, Oh, I would change that, I would change that. I listen to it and it’s a time capsule; I wrote super, super honestly. It captures my life as a 19-year-old.