Rex Orange County on Battling Lockdown Depression and Reuniting With Tyler, The Creator on ‘Who Cares?’

It’s a tireless cliché when artists treat new music as their “most personal hit ever,” as if anything they’d released up until then had been poor. useless or meaningless simply because it was created in the past. So it will be somewhat refreshing when Rex Orange County – the Briton behind some of Generation Z’s favorite adventure pop hits – says his new album is intended not to be personal.

“It’s been a bit of a relief to remove myself from it and a deep lyrical where I’m trying to paint a very concrete picture,” the 23-year-old said of his fourth album. Who cares?, out Friday. “I’m trying to get people to understand a little more.”

It’s a far cry from the way Rex, whose real name is Alex O’Connor, usually does things. His last album, 2019 Pony, is a bright blend of hip-hop, jazz, and bedroom pop that delves into his soul with lyrics that examine his complex feelings about new-found fame and friends. fake. But everything about the way he does it Who cares? is different. For starters, the album only exists because he had time to work on it after COVID forced him to postpone his international tour in support. Pony.

“Suddenly I just returned to my hometown with my parents. It was pretty weird, I thought I was going to have to go away for a year and mentally prepare for that,” he said of the quarantine at home in the UK.

Total Who cares? was carried out over a period of 12 days with extraordinary effectiveness in Amsterdam. Rex and his bass player, Joe MacLaren, stumbled there in September 2020 with the sole aim of getting out of the UK for a bit. While there, they decided to link up with Dutch musician Benny Sings, Rex’s good friend and occasional collaborator — two people who had previously hit gold with a sunny online performance.”Falling in love is easy” In 2017. In just two days, they created four songs together—“Open a Window”,“Keep It Up”,“The Shade”and“Worth It”—all of which appeared on Who cares?.

Realizing he’d stumbled upon a fascinating creative trend, Rex returned to Amsterdam in October and continued to maintain the magic, although he certainly didn’t force it, even though it sounded nasty. when making 11 songs in 12 days. Rex and MacLaren would arrive at Benny’s studio around 10 a.m., work on five or six songs at a time, leave before 7 p.m., go see a movie like Godfather or 2001: A Space Odysseyand then do it all again the next day.

“We tried not to think too much about it,” explains Rex of their nonchalant approach to the studio, extending to his songwriting. In an effort to maintain some privacy in his personal life, any more poignant autobiographical songs he wrote at the time were left uncut.

“The stuff that I’m writing really, really feels like, is really stuff that’s probably never going to be released. It still exists on my hard drive or on my laptop. It just probably won’t show up,” he said. “But [the album] for me is the kind I can write without being tied down and worrying about what people will think. I think that’s the main thing that will hold me back, and just fear it’s too relevant to my real life. So it just navigates that. I’m sure you can imagine, just putting yourself out there, with no choice, and then the backstory of, ‘I want some privacy.’

The result is an album that he cutely describes as “playful,” in that it’s more spontaneous and isn’t constrained by any kind of structure or label-mandated deadlines. He also had to release it in his own time, which meant putting it on the rear burner for a year and a half while he tried to put himself in a better headspace.

“Initially with the lockdown, I was like, ‘I don’t think I want to turn the music off.’ I heard a few songs about the pandemic and COVID and I said, ‘I can’t do that.’ I just said like, ‘I have to disappear for a brief minute,” Rex said when asked why he was waiting so long to be released. Who cares? “So part is because of that, and then part is that I’m not in a great place, to be honest. I just had low self-esteem and didn’t take care of myself. Without diving into it, I’m just really not in a great area. And I said, “Well, I definitely don’t think I’m strong enough to deal with this right now.”

Hearing that he wasn’t in great spirits at the time was not a shock to fans and followers, who noticed something was amiss; in October 2020, he cryptically tweeted, “if only i could disappear” and “sometimes I just wish I could sleep peacefully for months. Around the same time, he shared that he was no longer with his girlfriend of five years, musician Thea Morgan-Murrell.

“You could say I’m having a hard time, and without even needing to say what’s going on in my life, like… you can imagine from the start, coming to the internet, basically just I’m 17 years old and don’t really live in privacy — even though that’s my choice — it’s kind of a weird thing for me to be worried about,” he said. “You do this and it becomes a job, and it’s really just my love, my hobby, playing musical instruments, and then it becomes my whole life. Honestly, it’s been overwhelming over the past five, six years. ”

“It’s a bit deeper than the story of the time,” he added. “And I think there’s a time and place for that, but I’m living through it. At that point, I said, ‘I don’t need to make this public. That’s why this is getting difficult, so I won’t do it. ‘ So I turned off the internet, I didn’t really use my phone. I just need to take care of myself. ”

What the new album might lack in its idiomatic lyrics, it makes up for in Rex’s reliably superb musical ability; Together, he and Benny produced, arranged, and co-wrote every song on the album. A multi-instrumentalist since he was a child, Rex continues his penchant for combining classical and contemporary sounds on Who cares?the most amazing of “Worth It,” opens with a regal string orchestra before the drum beats and he starts to think: “It’s not worth it anymore / I feel lost mind / And I’m not sure / Why did things change / What else is worth it?” The uncomplicated analog is “Making Time,” which sounds like the Gen Z version of the Sinatra standard, which comes in under two speeds. minutes and includes only one lyrics. “’To take the time to see you, you make it all right, we’re safe inside, don’t wait. I’m okay, I’m okay.’ That’s it. the whole lyrics, the whole song. You look up the lyrics and it’s only four lines. I just love it,” Rex said.

Robyn Beck

For all its spaciousness, however, there are seemingly special moments on the album, such as “The Shade,” in which he sings about going to Amsterdam “just to give you some zeros.” time” – although he insists that one is “not directly linked” to whatever was happening in his life at that time. want to prove themselves and constantly ponder, “What if I don’t solve this problem and I like to call it giving up?” — the feeling he’s faced over the past few years as he’s grown from a faceless Soundcloud artist to an artist with 12 million monthly listeners on Spotify.

“I often have this is wanting to be like, ‘I’m going to quit. I’ll stop, damn it all,” Rex said. “But it’s like ‘I don’t really want to quit’; that’s the last thing I want to do, because when you care, you just wake up every day and want to do it. I wake up every day trying to get it right and if I get it wrong, it’s like beating myself up. “

Perhaps that’s why Tyler, the Creator, such a refreshingly rational voice was added to the album; he’s like an older, wiser sage in Rex’s life. The rapper lent a line from “Open a Window,” marking the long-awaited reunion of two friends after Rex appeared on Tyler’s. Flower boy cut “Bored“Back in 2017.

“That’s my guy. He’s definitely someone who doesn’t care much about what people think. He believes a lot in himself and is very true to himself, has a lot of faith in what he does,” Rex said of Tyler, who appeared in “Open a Window” with its lyrics encapsulating. everything that people love. him: “I’m Tyler, I mean it / I never bite my tongue, that’s better, I promise.”

“He killed it. That statement made me laugh a lot. I said, “That’s really him for a T,” said Rex. “And it’s funny because that song is about me, ‘Oh, I don’t want to be in this situation, I want to get out, get out any way I can.’ And he was like, ‘Oh my god, damn that.’ He used to give me advice, something like, ‘Go ahead, why are you waiting around? I never don’t say how I feel, I have to say how I feel. ‘”

It’s a ethos that Rex is still striving for, and it has entered the very concept and even the title of the album, a dual amalgamation of sorts. On the one hand, “Who cares?” can be read as a gentle, humble response to critics and haters. On the other hand, it’s a question Rex really wants an answer to – he cares deeply about his music and he wants to know if it resonates with anyone. He cares, but he doesn’t – one of the most common contradictions a person can feel.

“I’ve lived heavily on both sides of the phrase, with one side being like, ‘Throw it away, I don’t care, who cares?’ I definitely said that a lot, when I really cared,” he said. “And vice versa is the question mark – the question of who cares about me? I want to know. I wouldn’t put the music out if I didn’t want to know. “

When asked how he copes with all those feelings of struggle, he responds in a nonchalant and aspirational manner, evoking his hook Who cares? album opener, “Hold it up”:“ Keep it up and keep going / You just work for what you want / You don’t owe strangers anymore / Enough is enough, move on. ”

“I think I’ve come to the conclusion that I can’t – and really can’t, and will keep trying until I can’t – control what people think of me,” he said. “I can just do what I love to do, put myself out the way I choose and see how it goes. We don’t have much time on Earth, you know what I mean? ”