How To Troye Sivan Broke Free – Rolling Stone



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"Can I ride with high heels?" Troye Sivan asks, looking at a scooter suspiciously. The high heels in question lift his big black Helmut Lang boots about two inches off the ground – "I'm not sure that they're men or women" – and the scooter is the new popular motorized genre that you're unlocking with a smartphone app. Sivan gets on board, starts and gets up. Another question comes to him in the mind: "How do you stop?"

We are in mid-June and Sivan, a 23-year-old pop phenomenon, is looking for a good coffee in the west of Los Angeles. he is currently calling the house. He has an excellent new album on the way, Bloom ; a new single, "Dance to This", with Ariana Grande, which was premiered this morning; and a photo shoot this afternoon. This morning, after waking up around 7 am at the hillside home that he shares with his boyfriend – a model and photographer named Jacob Bixenman – he hit his pool for a swim. He did not bring his phone insistently. "I try not to use it during the first hour of the day," he says. "My parents said to me," Do not approach your phone. Use your pool more. "

Many of us claim varying degrees of dependence on technology, but Sivan would not be what it is today without it." Born in Johannesburg and High in the Australian coastal city of Perth, he gained prominence as a young Youtube star, starting with the song, then by charismatic monologues ranging from comic to diarist. he was gay, at age 14, social media proved to be essential to shaping his identity – although anonymous at first: "I was going on YouTube, I was browsing privately and I was watching an outgoing video after the next dragged into the queer forums under a pseudonym, later lied about his age and joined Grindr. ("I met a guy over there, and it was not, like, a hookup – it was a date, "he notes.) Later, after going out with his parents and siblings and sisters, he received a fake identity card. and met older guys in bars – a "period of self-discovery" and occasionally "uncomfortable situations" that he sings on Bloom's first opus "Seventeen". But that was the virtual realm where he grew up in his skin as a young gay man; In 2013, he released his own video "coming out", which has nearly 8 million views. "I'm so grateful that I've had the Internet," he says.

Sivan has blue eyes, dyed blond hair and a small nose ring. In conversation, he is ruminant; On a scooter, he is suspicious of mercenaries. As we approach a steep descent, he slows down to let me lead: "You go first." At bottom, we drive in an intersection and, halfway, our engines stall unexpectedly. "Is yours dead too?" Sivan's request. We drag them clumsily to the sidewalk, before the light changes: it turns out that we are too far from the reach of Sivan's management team, which has unlocked the scooters using their phones.

He tells me about Bloom while we walk the rest of the way. This is the sequel of his first album Top 10, 2015 Blue Neighborhood . "I was not really sure what I was doing on that one, and it was sort of song by song," he says. "It was a record of passage into adulthood, while Bloom was written after completing a tour, during the search period of a house, to be really happy in my relationship and understand a lot about me. I went out a lot, heard music that I had never heard, went to queer spaces where you feel completely free to do what you want; where, for the first time, you do not feel like a minority. The result is a set of 10 songs that oscillates between ultra-fast electronic tracks and acoustic ballads like "The Good Side". Frank Ocean is one of the influences cited by Sivan; Just like the replacements, Francis and the lights, Kate Bush and Cocteau Twins. He chose the digital clapper sound on a Bloom song because, in his classic Madonna evocation, he struck it as sounding appealing "gay."

Soon Sivan will be leaving on a theater tour, so he is I was attending dance classes to be more comfortable on stage: "We spent all the first class idling for two hours." He is right to be optimistic. When we arrive at a café, Sivan orders an iced latte and receives a text from Grande, sharing good news about the performance of their new song on iTunes. Sivan shows me his phone and his beams: "She sent me a text," Top 10, ho. "

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