Brendan Maclean Is Your New Favorite Pop Star

Arts

May 7

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Sydney-based singer/songwriter Brendan Maclean was called “a king of pop in the making” by the Guardian UK and “a modern day Mick Jagger” by Baz Luhrmann, who cast him in The Great Gatsby. His music sounds like the best parts of Jake Shears, Robyn, and Rufus Wainwright with a hint of LCD Soundsystem. So why are Americans just waking up to this Australian talent?

Two words: Independent and queer. WUSSY accompanied Brendan on his first U.S. headlining tour and here’s what we learned.

Brendan Maclean picks up a black shoelace and wraps it around his leg to create an impromptu fashion accessory for the photo shoot. It shouldn’t work. But somehow it does, the crisscrossed lines around his calf echoing his oversized jacket’s dark fringe. Later, he grabs a discarded bandana, deftly folding it upon itself to obscure the corporate logo then posing in the mirror until he finds the right way to wear it.

This knack for transforming the ordinary into something extraordinary serves the 31-year-old Australian even better as a songwriter. He builds songs with pieces of life, astute snippets of conversation, and words he collects like a “little crow making a nest.” They’re scribbled on scraps of paper, left on voicemail, and saved on his camera roll until they find life in song.

The seed for Brendan’s 2014 single “Stupid,” for example, was planted during a conversation about an ex boyfriend. The song gained ground after it was featured on Buzzfeed and the podcast Welcome to Night Vale, but it is the honesty and relatability of the lyrics (“If you weren’t so stupid, I could have loved you”) that keep it going five years later as a favorite for TikTok users.

Everything in Brendan’s world is about evolution though — “you can’t go backwards” he says more than once — so even that light-hearted ukulele bop, beloved by Spotify streamers and teenage TikTok lip-syncers, has matured into an earnest, sincere version of itself at recent U.S. shows.

And the Boyfriends

Nowhere is Brendan’s evolution more evident than on his new album, And the Boyfriends, which debuted at #2 on the Australian iTunes charts in March. Rather than recording an expected album of danceable, electro-pop singles, he released a cohesive collection of emotional, deeply personal tracks that showcase new heights of songwriting, confidence, and maturity.

His 2016 breakthrough record and fourth EP, funbang1, gave him some of his most popular singles (“Hugs Not Drugs (or Both),” “Tectonic,” “Free to Love,”) but Brendan wanted more for And the Boyfriends.

“funbang1 admittedly had a Muscle Mary audience where I could go do one song at the local gay bar every weekend if I wanted to and live off of that,” he says. “It was fine, but I don’t think that’s why I started writing music. I felt so alone when I was singing the queer pub stuff in my home country and it not really seeming to resonate with people around me. Sometimes I need to sit and remember that I’m a singer/songwriter, not just a singer. With the new album, there was an immediate shift in the audience. The music has made the audience more diverse, and that’s refreshing.”

Brendan describes the songwriting on the album as “probably the best I’ve ever done,” but it didn’t come easily. After some time away from the pen, he felt stuck. “I had to put the training wheels back on. Go back to step one,” he recalls. “I hadn’t done the basics. I hadn’t even asked myself if I had anything to say, and that was the worst thing as a songwriter.”

Fortunately, his close friend, collaborator, and album producer Sarah Belkner had some training wheels handy. She pushed him to start with just five minutes of writing. “Do you remember that you used to love songwriting?” she asked. He did. Soon, the five-minute bursts turned into two-hour sessions at Belkner’s electric piano, and after three months, an album began to emerge.

“We are two artists who love albums,” says Brendan. “I’ve always had the desire to make an album because away from the gay man’s music that I’ve tweeted out a lot — the Carly Rae and Beyonce and Charli XCX songs or whatever it is that day — my youth was more built on this hidden love of Pearl Jam or PJ Harvey albums. I loved albums and the stories that they told. It’s all I wanted to do, and when we noticed that we had four songs that were connected, we were like, ‘Oh, I see what’s happening here.’”

Triple Fool

What was happening was the start of something big. Just five months after the album dropped, he stands in front of a sold-out crowd of former and current lovers and friends, fans, and members of the media at Club Cumming — Alan Cumming’s buzzy hotspot in NYC’s East Village.

Wearing his go-to harness, underwear, a turbulent web of eyeliner around his left eye, and a brimmed hat tipped at an angle reminiscent of “Mountains”-era Prince, Brendan appears at ease with his newfound American success. (This sold-out show is only his second U.S. headlining slot.)

He sits at the piano for a dazzling rendition of Leonard Cohen’s “Chelsea Hotel,” charms the crowd with charismatic banter, and pauses for two songs by his friend Rod Thomas (aka Bright Light Bright Light). But when Brendan is performing his own original material — with lyrics tied so closely and literally to his personal experiences that they feel autobiographical — it’s easy to wonder how hard it is to relive those moments again and again.

“When the person that a song is about is in the audience, it’s difficult,” he says. “There’s a poem, John Donne’s “Triple Fool,” that I think is cool. It’s basically, I’m a fool once for it happening, I’m a fool twice for writing it down, and I’m a fool three times for performing it and re-living the sadness. I’m a triple fool. That’s what those songs can feel like. But they’re empowering as well. Really empowering to sing.”

When It’s Real

Music has always been a source of empowerment for Brendan, who grew up in a conservative Sydney suburb where he was constantly bullied and beaten for being gay. He hid away with the piano to escape his tormentors.

That childhood trauma seeped into his lyrics. “I think I bought into the idea that I wasn’t going to do well in Australia,” he says. “Years of people going, ‘You’re a fucking faggot. You suck. You’re gonna fail at this.’ I got really spooked and definitely focused on the negative. Everything I did was sort of embedded with it. If my songs are about me, it’s shit-kicking on me, which is a very Australian thing, I guess, but also something you do to yourself when a part of you has been convinced that you suck. A very literal lyric of that is from the song ‘Winner’: ‘I’ll never make it.’ There’s a little bit of me that’s like, that’s not a joke.”

Even now, instruments and music serve as a talisman for him. On the morning of his Atlanta show, his first and largest U.S. headlining show, Brendan pads into the kitchen in mismatched socks, ukulele in hand. “Sometimes, just holding an instrument makes me feel better,” he says before shuffling back into the music room where you can actually hear the nerves melting away at the piano.

When showtime finally comes in Atlanta, a packed room of people 9,300 miles from Australia sing along to nearly every song. “That was special. That was shocking,” he says. “It’s been so much more — so many more people, so much queerer — than I expected. It was real. It felt like the very best shows I do at home. When it’s real, the queer community, it’s a party for me too.”

After the show, the joy radiating from every meet-and-greet shot causes one Twitter follower to quip, “You actually look happy. Have you even seen a meet and greet before?”

So if meeting 200 U.S. fans is good, would meeting thousands be better? Would he get to Taylor Swift–level fame if he could? “I really, really thought I wanted that,” he says. “Then I got a little taste of it through some side hustle gigs, commercial gigs. Just a little taste of that big audience world thing, and every show I did just proved that that’s not something that satisfies me. Besides, I don’t think I can. I don’t believe it’s possible because of actions I’ve taken in my career.” Actions? “House of Air.”

Forever in the House of Air

As Brendan enters the “Camp: Notes on Fashion” exhibit at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, he stops in his tracks in front of an image from Hal Fischer’s iconic photographic study of gay semiotics.

Fischer’s 1977 work, Gay Semiotics: A Photographic Study of Visual Coding Among Homosexual Men, was the inspiration for the provocative, critically acclaimed video for “House of Air,” and seeing it in the museum has made the musician squeal with delight. The NSFW film directed by Brian Fairbairn and Karl Eccleston garnered more than 700,000 views during the 10 days before YouTube banned it and currently has 5.4 million Vimeo views.

Russia, in particular, has embraced “House of Air” as a form of protest against homophobia and a celebration of queerness. When asked if that reaction makes him feel pressure to engage in more activism, Brendan says, “I think what I already did is that. I made that product and that’s what it became to them — because of them, not because of me — so I just celebrate that as best I can. Otherwise, it’s far too much of a burden. To get messages from people in the Middle East who talk about my music and then they say, ‘I’ve been sent a letter because I was listening to your music.’ That’s really upsetting. You know, maybe the username goes missing and you just wonder...”

He trails off, tears in his eyes, then continues: “Because if I had so much pride that I took credit for everything that the videos and songs mean, I’d also have to take on that, and I wouldn’t be able to do that. So the product is what I do. That’s what it is.”

“In my early 20s, I was definitely like, ‘Oh, you use your queerness to be on a talk show or write an article or lead a march.’ Those were things that I felt really ineffective in, and it didn’t feel like I was reaching anyone that way, but the songs always have. That’s where the activism is. [My gay uncle] Paul Mac always says, ‘Brendan, stop fucking tweeting and write. You help more people that way.’ And yeah, I do.”

“I do think there is value in brattishness sometimes and rebelliousness and continuing to not be too concerned about respectability politics and earnestness in queer culture because we do censor ourselves for the broader heterosexual community.”

Removing Barriers

But it’s unlikely that Brendan will stop tweeting. Though he refers to it as one of his three worst habits (along with smoking and “eating shitty food”), he says social media has “made his career.” It has connected him with countless career opportunities, provided him with a place to share humor (“I love jokes. A lot of my songs have jokes in them, even if you can’t tell. There are jokes in the new album as well; they just became a little more secret and metaphorical.”), and given him a platform for his views.

“I seem to switch between these two personalities of ‘Fuck you. Here’s porn!’ and ‘I hate this’ to a very mature adult man all the time. It’s just the two sides of my coin,” he says. “I do think there is value in brattishness sometimes and rebelliousness and continuing to not be too concerned about respectability politics and earnestness in queer culture because we do censor ourselves for the broader heterosexual community. We do put a cap on ourselves at the point of being respectable so we can be the doctor or lawyer.”

As someone who has taken much advice and inspiration from his “gay uncles,” Jonny Seymour and Paul Mac, Brendan also uses social media to mentor other young queer artists.

“The second I had a bit of success, I was able to pass that forward,” he says. “I think that’s a really common thing in the queer community. We know we suffered, so the quicker you can help someone else, the better. Just be like, ‘Do you need any help? Is something crazy happening in your life right now that you think no one else has ever gone through? It’s just this.’ We’re just offering in a kind way. That can be everything for someone. When you’re queer, there are extra barriers, so whatever you can do, you do.”

Ultimately, what Brendan Maclean does is make songs though. Asked what’s next, he says, “You should always have songs. I’m not going to go ‘Look out for the next single!’ but I’ll make more music. That’s it. That’s it.”

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Check out Brendan’s latest single, Easy Love, available for streaming now!

This interview originally appeared in WUSSY Volume 7, which can be ordered here.

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