George Ezra spent the summer of 2018 worrying he was about to become horribly famous. That May his balmy single Shotgun – don’t pretend you don’t know the chorus – spent three weeks at the top of the UK singles charts. A sun-streaked anthem had been born and, though obviously delighted, Ezra fretted that his life would never be the same again. He quickly discovered that, while people loved Shotgun, they were completely disinterested in George Ezra. He was the invisible superstar.
“I was anxious that the success of Shotgun was going to affect my personal life,” he says “The truth is, it doesn’t at all. When these songs get as big as they do, you really have an audience that just wants to hear the song. They don’t care about you.”
Ezra is speaking over Zoom from his parents’ house in Hertfordshire. It’s the week before the release of his third album, Gold Rush Kid. A brisk collection of singalongs, the LP is sure to please the huge audience that discovered him through Shotgun – regardless of whether they care what about he had for breakfast or his favourite colour underwear.
Shotgun has one of those surging melodies that feels as if it has been around forever. Ezra recalls composing it relatively briskly. The complicated bit was getting it down on tape
Gold Rush Kid also sees Ezra (28) grappling with an existential crisis or three. With his 30s looming, his vulnerable side is on show as never before. And so, alongside the dreamy backpacker anthems with which he is synonymous, we find him taking stock of life and confronting issues such as anxiety and OCD.
It’s quite a turnabout for an artist who, on his early records, had “happy go lucky” practically stamped on his forehead. And he has a very specific memory of where his perspective changed – both as a songwriter and a person. It took Ezra gatecrashing a funeral to finally understand the meaning of life, he says.
“I was in St. Lucia [in the Caribbean],” he recalls. “There was this huge cookout party – lots of dancing, hugging.”
A party it certainly was. But not the sort he was familiar with growing up in rural England. He’d stumbled upon a wake for a recently deceased member of the community. It was a celebration mixed with sadness.
Until 2018 and Shotgun, Ezra was a well-regarded member of the “After Ed” club. He was one of a number of boyish troubadours who had the good fortune to come along as Ed Sheeran had turned young men with guitars into the hottest concept in pop
“It turned out it was a funeral day. In my journal I wrote, ‘green, green grass, blue, blue sky – you better throw a party on the day that I die’.”
The juxtaposition of celebration and loss, joy and despair spoke to him. And he poured those complicated feelings into Green Green Grass, the latest single from Gold Rush Kid. It unfolds like a sort of chirruping Gen Z remake of Road To Nowhere by Talking Heads or Day I Die by The National – two of the great uplifting songs about mortality. And the chorus is that very sentence he jotted down in St Lucia: “Green, green grass, blue blue sky/You better throw a party on the day that I die.”
As a lyricist, Ezra will never be confused with Sleaford Mods or Thom Yorke from Radiohead. The hook from Shotgun, after all, features the nursery rhyme lyric “I’ll be riding shotgun underneath the hot sun/ Feeling like a someone”. Yet, as Green Green Grass demonstrates, he’s digging deeper on Gold Rush Kid. The title track arguably goes further yet, in that it finds Ezra wondering if his career is really just the story of someone chancing their arm and making it up as they go. “Gold rush kid, robbing the bank,” he warbles. “Making a run for it and learning to dance.”
“I don’t want to be the person that’s like ‘life is great’,” he says. “I don’t believe that’s necessarily true. I get to talk about that on this record and about the gold rush nature of life.”
The philosophy he is putting out there, he says, is that we should all learn to live in the moment. “Pursue this thing while it’s here. And that’s great. I actually started to assign that way of thinking to day-to-day life. It’s far more powerful then [to remember our time on Earth is finite and that we should make the most of it]. That’s the truth, I think.”
Until 2018 and Shotgun, Ezra was a well-regarded member of the “After Ed” club. He was one of a number of boyish troubadours who had the good fortune to come along as Ed Sheeran had turned young men with guitars into the hottest concept in pop.
He was popular but not quite a phenomenon. This, moreover, was a crowded field, which also included Tom Odell, James Bay and Dermot Kennedy. And then he released Shotgun and suddenly went from headlining theatres such as Dublin’s Olympia to playing heaving outdoor venues like 20,000-capacity Malahide Castle. A super star was born – or at least a superstar song. Four years on, he’s still struggling to process it all.
“Luck played into it hugely,” he says, though he adds that Shotgun was an explicit attempt to craft a mega-hit.
“I pursued it. Prior to that, I didn’t know exactly what had to happen to get us to that spot. Going from the kid playing open mics who really wasn’t that aware of pop music at all – to go to ‘oh I get this – let’s see if we can take it all the way’…”
In other words, he had picked up enough tricks to finally know how to write a smash to order. And yet, despite his ambitions for the track, Shotgun still took Ezra by surprise. The most shocking revelation was, as pointed out above, that when people fall in love with a number one they don’t necessarily fall in love with the artist.
“One thing I didn’t appreciate at that time is that when a song is that big, you kind of rely on this ‘passive’ audience. That’s not a negative thing. They’re not interested in your B-sides, your demos, what you’re wearing, where you shop. They’re not.”
Shotgun has one of those surging melodies that feels as if it has been around forever. Ezra recalls composing it relatively briskly. The complicated bit was getting it down on tape.
“The writing of it happened quickly,” he says. “I’m an extremely slow writer. But it was a quick process to write the song. The thing that took longer was the production. It was the song where the label said, ‘Come on… we want another single before we put the album out.’ I’m always grateful when they do that. The production we got wrong quite a few times. At first it was a bit too ‘campfire’. As a reaction to that, we did something that was a bit too Eurodance. When I hear it now, it’s its own thing. That’s a result of those two worlds finally meeting somewhere.”
Ezra was born in Hertfordshire in 1993, the son of teacher parents. After school he moved to Bristol, studying at the British and Irish Modern Music Academy. His big break came in 2013 when he played at a new artists stage at Glastonbury. The following year he was longlisted for the BBC Sound Of... award. All that hype was justified a few months later when his debut album, Wanted on Voyage, charted at three in the UK.
It certainly affects the way that your days play out. I kind of have to ask myself: for all of the discomfort – and I guess discomfort is the word – would you trade it out?
He has always been ambitious. However, Ezra is also driven by an immense curiosity. This is what led him to host a podcast, George Ezra & Friends, in which he interviewed musical heroes such as Elton John and contemporaries including Jessie Ware and Ed Sheeran.
The Sheeran episode felt particularly revealing in that it highlighted their contrasting outlooks. Sheeran talked about having a long-term plan and of aiming, as far back as his couch-surfer days, to sell out Wembley Stadium. Ezra isn’t averse to being successful. Still, listening to their conversation, the sense was that he was more spontaneous than Sheeran – and perhaps less gimlet-eyed about shifting zillions of units.
“Ed’s approach is completely unique,” he says. “I don’t know if I’ve heard him say this himself – but it is certainly something I’ve thought of Ed. Whatever it is or was he was going to pursue, I imagine he would pursue it until he couldn’t any more. It boggles my mind. When I think about his output and workload and all of that. It doesn’t appeal to me in anyway. I think he gets an awful lot from it. It’s an example of a unique person I think.”
Ezra is a contradiction in that he radiates both a floppy-fringed insouciance and a nervous energy that, even over Zoom, has a contagious quality. He’s experienced anxiety since childhood and, several years ago, was diagnosed with Pure-O, a form of OCD involving intrusive thoughts. He’s more than happy to talk about it. But he is clearly still on a journey of discovery about the subject.
“There’s something here George,” he says [as a rhetorical device, he often refers to himself in the second person]. “It certainly affects the way that your days play out. I kind of have to ask myself: for all of the discomfort – and I guess discomfort is the word – would you trade it out? Because I’m sure that in some way it has played a part in the way you have approached things.”
In other words, he may have ultimately perhaps benefited from it. “I don’t know if that answers your question. Maybe it’s worth even just reminding myself – before the second record [2018′s Staying at Tamara’s] – I didn’t realise it [his OCD] was this thing. I recognised it through life, figuring it out. This is my first time going into a project of this size with a bit of knowledge [about his psychological make-up]. That is probably helping an awful lot.”
He’s always been an anxious character, he says. After signing his deal he got so wound up about writing songs that his label sent him backpacking to Hungary to help him chill. The change of scenery brought out the best in Ezra, yielding early hit Budapest.
He repeated that approach on Staying at Tamara’s, holing up in a Catalan Airbnb for a month and magicking up Shotgun. Third time out, the pandemic forced him to stay at home. Happily, he had reached a point where he didn’t need the novelty of a getaway to connect with his mojo. For the first time in his life he is comfortable in his pop star shoes.
“Don’t get me wrong. It’s full-on [with the album coming out]. But my stress and worry about it is far less. I’m sure that’s because we’re coming up to [a decade] of releasing the first record. It’s that kind of – ‘Oh this isn’t so daunting any more. This is your life experience now’. Man, the energy I went into the first record with was hilarious. I was convinced it wasn’t going to last. Not in a negative way – ‘Odds are, George, this is a fun moment in time and you move on’. I lost that on the second record and become far too protective of this thing that I didn’t want to lose.”
Third time around, amid the grey, numb horror of Covid, he hit reset. It was time for some perspective – for him to enjoy being a pop star. “We can get a bit head-scratchy. At the end of the day, it’s pop music. And the thing you can offer people is a distraction. It is fun.”
Gold Rush Kid is released on June 10th
