Here’s how Rex Orange County became Gen Z’s favourite balladeer

Mikael Wood, Tribune News Service

Rex Orange County performed alongside two of his musical heroes within the space of a few months last year.

First the young British singer surprised his audience in Los Angeles by bringing out Randy Newman for the live debut of their Spotify-sponsored remake of Newman's ‘You've Got a Friend in Me’. Then he played the main stage at Tyler, the Creator's annual Camp Flog Gnaw festival not long before Tyler himself, who'd given Rex his big break in 2017 when Tyler featured him on his album Flower Boy.

The contrasting moments — one involving a master of old-fashioned pop, the other hip-hop's reigning enfant terrible — went some way toward illustrating Rex's unique position as a heart-on-his-sleeve balladeer beloved by rowdy Gen Z rap fans.

Yet to judge by his disarming new album, 2018 may have been the worst year of Rex Orange County's life — "a year that nearly sent me off the edge," as he puts it in the record's opening track, ‘10/10’.

In each of the 10 songs on Pony, which entered the Billboard album chart last week at No.3, the 21-year-old from the tiny village of Grayshott in East Hampshire describes the disorientation brought on by becoming a public figure. He sings about old friends seeking to trade on his name; he laments the phoniness of many of the new people he's encountered. And over and over he looks back longingly to a time when music was his passion, not his meal ticket. "I miss the days when I was someone else," he croons in a high-ish voice tender enough to reveal every bruise, "I used to be so hungry / Right now my stomach's full as hell."

Seated on the patio of the Chateau Marmont, the singer — born Alex O'Connor; he got his stage name from a teacher who referred to him as "the OC" — sighed as he smoothed the moustache that keeps him from looking even more boyish than he does. "The whole experience, it just turned out differently than I expected," he said.

Rex Orange County during the Outside Lands Music Festival on Aug.10, 2018 in San Francisco, California. TNS.

Ironically, this record about the troubling reality of fame is poised to bring him only more. Rex's first effort for a major label (following two albums he released himself online), Pony is slicker than his older, scrappier stuff, with lush horn and string arrangements and slinky yet muscular bass playing by Pino Palladino, who's known for his work with John Mayer and D'Angelo.

Last month Rex performed ‘10/10’ on Jimmy Fallon's late-night show, and he's already sold out early 2020 dates at New York's Radio City Music Hall and LA's Shrine Auditorium. After the latter, he'll stick around town to play iHeartRadio's Alter Ego concert at the Forum on Jan.18 with Billie Eilish and the Black Keys — an indication of alternative radio's embrace of the catchy ‘10/10’, which can suggest a more soulful, offbeat Ed Sheeran.

He insists he's okay with that prospect. Making Pony was the "therapy" he needed to work through his complicated feelings about success, he said; now, having removed unnamed shady folks from his life — "Sometimes you've got to cut a b**** out," he sings — he's trying to focus on the positive aspects of pop stardom, not least having a sizeable audience for music born from a DIY impulse.

Indeed, the night before our talk, he played a hastily announced gig at the Roxy in West Hollywood, where several hundred fans hung on every word of his new tunes and sang along loudly with favourites like the jazzy ‘Sunflower’ and ‘Loving Is Easy’, one of many songs he's written about his girlfriend, Thea Morgan-Murrell, who contributes backup vocals on Pony.

"I can tell you all the bad things (about celebrity) — and I do on the album," he said at the Chateau as a server delivered a tray of fancy breakfast sandwiches. "But without that stuff, I couldn't have filled the Roxy with two days' notice." He shrugged. "And I definitely wouldn't be staying at this hotel."

What persuades you that he's truly made peace with his situation is the fact that Pony isn't a total downer. For all the anxieties he recounts — in person, he was reluctant to say more than he does in the songs — the album actually strikes a gently uplifting note thanks to Rex's handsome melodies and the buoyant grooves he devised with producer Ben Baptie; there's also the comfort he clearly takes in singing about Morgan-Murrell, as in Face to Face, in which he recalls how "she calmed me down that night I freaked out."

Pony closes with a long, deliberately paced number called ‘It's Not the Same Anymore’, and though it begins with Rex's nostalgia for a simpler era, what you realise by the end of the song, as Newman-style old-Hollywood strings rev up, is that he's also left behind the gloom that set in at some point last year.

"It's not the same anymore," he sings, before quietly adding: "It got better."