Conan Gray shares the story behind upcoming album, ‘Wishbone’ at his London acoustic show
On July 11th, the American singer-songwriter, Conan Gray joined fans in London for an intimate show and Q&A hosted by Rough Trade.
In celebration of his upcoming album, Wishbone, Conan played a set of songs both old and new within Islington’s iconic venue, The Garage. A sold-out evening with 600 fans in attendance, the Q&A portion of the night saw Conan discuss everything from his experiences on tour to the creation process behind his most recent single, Vodka Cranberry.
Due to release August 15th via Republic Records, Wishbone is Conan’s fourth studio album, with 12 songs that became an “egregiously niche soundtrack” to his life over the last two years.
Within his May 22nd Instagram post, Conan confessed: “Over the past two years, I’ve been secretly writing songs. After shows in the basements of the venues, in the sheets of my hotel beds, in narrow gaps between tours. I didn’t tell my friends. I didn’t tell my label. After all, I didn’t know I was making anything, and I had no plan to release any of it. But over time, I began to feel something I’d never felt before.
It felt like the music was reminding me who I am, at an experimental time in my twenties where ‘who I am’ had no definition at all. My driftwood childhood in Texas. My lucid summers in London. My blue striped bed sheets in my college apartment. [When] I began to record, I didn’t know why I was recording, I just was. I didn’t know what story I was telling, I was just living in it. Slowly, I started to see myself in full picture; the slivers of myself I’d always been, but never faced. The songs I’d always been writing, but never singing. Before I knew it, I was surrounded by an album. That album is Wishbone.”
The day of Conan’s London show, fans had been queueing outside the venue in 30+ degree heat since 8am to get the very best view of his performance. Once inside, a pre-show playlist of older classics and modern hits readied the crowd for the night ahead, with ABBA’s Mamma Mia and Olivia Rodrigo’s Brutal prompting the entire room to sing along.
8pm swiftly arrived and phone cameras went up in anticipation, until Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight) blared through the speakers and the crowd broke into laughter. Fashionably late by a couple of minutes, the lights then dimmed as Conan walked onto the stage.
“Hi, its a bit cold in here isn’t it!” he joked. “My name is Conan, nice to meet you. I’m really happy to be here in London I love London so much. I’m really happy to be here on the day that Vodka Cranberry came out, so thought I’d sing some songs to celebrate. Thank you for being here! I know its only been out for seven hours but if you don’t sing along I’ll be really offended,” he laughed, playing the opening strums of Vodka Cranberry. Accompanied by soft pink lighting and all the love around the room, Conan’s acoustic rendition of the song was nothing short of dazzling, and his vocals were - unsurprisingly - just as perfect as in the studio version.
"This is a classic if I say so myself," Conan said to introduce his next song, Maniac. A beloved track from his 2020 debut album, Kid Krow, he certainly wasn’t wrong, and the entire crowd sang with him louder than ever before.
"Woah, I forgot how good of a crowd London is,” he said. “You guys know how to sing along! Actually, the first time I played in a venue here they told me that you guys broke the record for the volume. They measured the decibels and it was the equivalent to a jumbo jet taking off in the middle of the street.”
Calling his next song sad, yet also a classic, four spotlights surrounded him on stage, illuminating him in the shape of a star for his performance of Astronomy. The fifth track of his 2022 album, Superache details “a tale old as time, [where] young love don’t last for life”, with a heart-breaking bridge that fans knew every word to. Earning some sniffles from the crowd, Conan’s performance saw friends in the crowd hug and sway along to its melancholic melody.
“I wrote a lot of my album, Wishbone here in London,” Conan said, taking a momentary break from singing. “I love it here so much, and feel like its simultaneously peaceful but there’s also so many places to have fun. You guys have parks and we don’t have those in America,” he joked. “My favourite things about Brits is yall’s sense of humour. I love sarcasm and you know how to do that which is a huge relief. Sometimes I’ll tell a joke in a written interview and I sound like an asshole, but you guys get it.”
“Who here is in high school?” he asked. “What about college?” Met with louder cheers for the latter, he said, “College educated? Okay! Couldn’t be me.” The crowd laughed. “This is one I write when I was in high school, and to the girl that its about, I’m sorry."
The crowd gasped when they realised his next song was Heather, the fan-favourite track from his debut album with over two billion streams to date. During the chorus, he asked the room to sing with him, and the lyrics “wish I were Heather” could probably have been heard by people outside they were so loud!
"Yall converse around yourselves for a few minutes so I can retune. Talk! To each other cause I don’t want to hear silence," he said whilst tuning his guitar. The crowd obliged, and someone near the front help up a picture of Conan in a snap back from when he was 15. “Ew, literally ew,” he laughed. “Good times!”
Once retuned and ready, he looked out across the room. “This is one of my favourite songs and its about having a crush. This song was the beginning of the Wishbone album, and it very much reminds me of London; putting your headphones in, going for a walk, looking at people and eating a Nandos. This is also my last one because there’s only so long we can last in this heat, so sing along!” he said, strumming the opening chords to This Song.
Unsurprisingly just as incredible as the studio version, Conan sang with pure emotion - this time alongside fans who had been his supporters since the very beginning. Across the room, it wasn’t difficult to spot merch from his previous tours, sailor hats and fans holding up their hands in heart-shapes under the soft green light. With the song’s ending lyric, “You know that I love you," someone yelled I love you back and it was such a fitting end to the acoustic section of the night.
“Now were going to invite my friend Maya here (everyone say hi Maya) and we’re gonna answer some of yall’s questions,” he said as she joined Conan on stage. Sat on chairs about a metre apart, it didn’t take long before they were jokingly spinning around in them.
After encouraging fans to do a one-second scream if their question got asked, Maya announced that the first one was from Romeo. “Is there a Romeo in the room tonight?” she asked before Conan joked, “I hope not!”
“What’s your favourite thing about touring?”
“I love routine, and on tour I go to sleep then wake up in a new city, and everyone there loves me,” Conan said. “I sing songs about myself and am like yeah, I’m so great. I do it every day and it’s kind of like a narcissists dream. I love seeing all the new places and small towns that are in like buttfuck nowhere. When they have just like one Starbucks and a gas station, it’s so good - I love it!”
Excitingly, question two was from VoiceNoted’s very own photographer, Emily! “What inspired the sailing theme for this new era?”
“All the sailor hats in the crowd are so cute. Thank you for dressing up, guys,” Conan answered as someone in the crowd offered him a seagull and a hat. “Do I want that? Hell yeah!” he said, realising that the hat was covered in people’s names. “Just making sure there’s none of my exes on here - we’re good!”
“Going into this album,” Conan continued, “I told myself one thing: I can do whatever I want and say whatever I want, as long as its me, and as long as it’s actually who I am as a real person which is really hard to do when you know you’re going to be in front of a bunch of people. With the cover, I was like I want to be in a sailor outfit holding a big silver wishbone. I knew that from the beginning, and as I was working on it, my friends started this insane joke where they called the album ‘Conan’s big adventure'.
The album is in a lot of ways about me taking life by the balls and just jumping into life even if its fucking scary or l feel weird and am like why the fuck am I wearing a sailor outfit? The first song very much feels like jumping into cold water and I really needed to do that.”
For his third question, Conan was asked: “What song from Wishbone took the longest to write?”
“I worked so hard on every single song,” he said. “The original ideas usually come around in five minutes but then I spend a long time thinking so much about every single word and thinking to myself; is this exactly what I want to say and is it exactly me?
Vodka Cranberry had so many versions and didn’t feel write for so long, but it was worth the wait. The first track, Actor took a really long time to write, too. I wrote a lot of versions of it. With Heather, I wrote it over and over cause it didn’t feel like I had the tone of the feeling right, and it was the same with Actor - it was sometimes too happy, too angry or too sad and it took lots of versions to get the song exactly right.”
”When the Wishbone breaks in your favour, what are you wishing for?”
“I thought really hard in my life about what I would do if I had a superpower. Taking away answers like fixing world hunger, I think I would wish to be able to freeze time. I’m on a press tour right now, I’m tired. Imagine if I could freeze time and sleep for 14 years, I’d be so refreshed for you guys on tour! With that superpower, I could punch the shit out of someone, steal a million dollars or cure cancer - it’s the best it’d be so useful.”
“What is your favourite lyric from Wishbone?"
“I can’t tell you yet, but lyrically my favourite song is Class Clown for sure. From the songs that are out, definitely Vodka Cranberry. I really love in the bridge where I say ‘I will’ but in between, I’m singing ‘Don’t make me do this to you’. It’s like a threat and I love the way it sounds and is disguised in there.”
”Were there any special memories made during the making of the album?”
“I’ve never had so much fun writing an album,” Conan said. “I wrote it for the joy of my heart. I was smiling and laughing writing the lyrics like lol what if I said that? I loved every second of it. The songs aren’t fun let me get that correct, but I had lots of fun and I think you’ll be able to hear that in the songs.
The first six months of making Wishbone was mostly myself and Ethan Gruska working in his garage shed outside in the summertime with no AC, trying to produce songs that were very much like sad and sensitive but also dying sweating and laughing about how miserably hot it was. It was in those moments, physically hard to write the album, but so much fun to make it.”
“Do you have any advice for those starting out as musicians?”
“Write what you want to write. Its so simple,” Conan said assuredly. “There’s pressure with writing to do something new or interesting, but if you’ve just started, write whatever the fuck you want until you find who you are. There’s no pressure or time limit so write what you want to and what you think, because that version of you is who people will relate to the most.”
“How do you recharge outside of making music?”
“I love laying down and at the moment, I would love an AC! My favourite activity when I’m not working is to play Fortnight but I probably shouldn’t talk about that right now. I also love to go for really long walks - I’m talking like 10 miles. I like to watch a good show and was obsessed with Severance this year.”
“Which song by another artist do you wish you wrote?”
“I’ve said this so many times but I’m sticking to my truth: Someone Like You by Adele. Its so simple, but its not like you wrote it, or I wrote it also!”
“And finally, what is your favourite British snack?”
“We’ll, Nandos doesn’t count because it’s a meal. It keeps us alive,” Conan said as a fan asked what his go-to order is there. “Any amount of spice makes me have a very special time if you know what I mean, so I go for the lemon and herb butterfly chicken, spicy rice, broccolini and a coke zero. I love it,” he said.
“For the very first time I tried Percy Pigs and that was special - they tasted like yummy foam.” Someone shouted that Monster Munch were their favourites. “They’re so good!” Conan replied. “Yall can I speak my truth? Don’t throw nothing at me, but I don’t really like Smarties that much. I think as an American, I’m so used to my chocolate tasting a little bit like gasoline.” Some fans booed as Conan laughed. “You know what else I had the other day that I loved? Colin the Caterpillar.” The room erupted with cheers. “I don’t know why you guys personify all of your snacks but I loved it!”
And with the final question answered, Conan waved goodbye to the room full of fans. “Thank you guys so much for being here!” Someone near the front shouted “I love you,” and Conan said “I love you more,” walking off stage with his inflatable seagull in hand.
Conan Gray’s new album, Wishbone comes out at local time on August 15th, and you can pre-save it here. In the meantime make sure to stream This Song and Vodka Cranberry amongst the rest of Conan’s discography on Spotify.
