Benson Boone Is Just Getting Started

W
hen Benson Boone is about to jump out of a helicopter hovering 60 feet above Utah Lake, which is the kind of thing Benson Boone likes to do, a single thought passes through his mulleted, 22-year-old head: This is gonna be sick.

On clear days, that very body of water, and the white mountains beyond it, are part of the panoramic view from the terrace of Boone’s house, a sharp-angled, industrial-gray luxury fortress with towering windows atop a cliff 30 minutes south of Salt Lake City. “It’s always good to try things in life,” Boone says one early-January ­afternoon, peering out from the terrace at the distant lake and the endless azure sky, his hands shoved in the pockets of an unseasonably light canvas jacket. “Like, adventure-wise. If I can just try everything once, then I’ll know what I like and what I don’t like. And I know that I like jumping out of a helicopter.”

“Beautiful Things,” the song that paid for his house, the most-streamed track in the world last year, the national anthem of baby-and-puppy Instagram Reels, finds Boone singing about an almost existential terror, ­begging God not to take away what he loves. But most of the time, he says, “ I’m not much of a fearful guy. Like, I don’t worry about many things.”

He doesn’t worry about back-flipping off pianos onstage, even if insurance companies might not love it. He didn’t hesitate to try out for American Idol in 2020 as a teenager who had only been singing seriously for a year, a hobby, he says, that “ came out of nowhere, but took ahold of me very quickly.” (“They’re gonna swoon over Benson Boone,” predicted one of the judges, a perspicacious Katy Perry.) He wasn’t scared to drop out of the competition’s top 24 in 2021, vanishing from the show in the middle of the season after he decided it would hinder rather than help a real music career. “My biggest weakness, and sometimes my biggest strength,” he says, “is when I convince my brain of something, I have to do it. There’s no backing out or stepping down.”

He just had his first full week off in three years, which was all that brain of his required to recharge and reboot. Tonight, for the third night in a row, he’ll head out to snowboard with his girlfriend, the effervescent influencer Maggie Thurmon, who’s currently hanging out upstairs. “I’m ready for this year,” he says, breathing deep. “I’m so rested, and my mind is so clear. It’s unbelievable.”

He had smaller-scale viral songs beforehand, but “Beautiful Things” made him a star, and it’s the kind of uncontrollably huge hit that threatens to overshadow even the artist who recorded it.  “I mean, it’s the reason I’m here,” Boone says. “Like, it is the reason this year has been a big year.” He still performs it with seemingly fresh passion, not that he has a choice, given the way it pushes to the Freddie Mercury-ish top of his considerable vocal range: “ It’s not really a song you can half-ass, you know?”

But he’s finishing up a new album, tentatively titled American Heart, set for spring or summer, and he’s more than ready to move beyond his hit. “I think I’m getting to the point where I just want people to know that there’s more than just that song,” he says. “I think I’m a little past that point. But of course I still love the song. I’m still proud of it. And I’ll be performing it for a while, so I hope that feeling sticks around.”

Until that album drops, he only has two dozen or so released songs, total. So he’s already been slipping in stuff from the new album into his concerts, mostly because he’s dying for up­tempo material to match his onstage athleticism. “Beautiful Things” began as two in-the-works songs jammed together, so it disguises itself as a ballad in its verses before bursting into full-on rock crescendos — the “please stay” bit in the chorus even bears an odd resemblance to the “hey, wait” chorus of Nirvana’s “Heart-Shaped Box.” The song’s ubiquity underscores 2020s pop’s startling but decisive turn toward guitars and (relatively) live-sounding instrumentation, from Olivia Rodrigo to Teddy Swims, and on his new album, Boone is trying to pick up where that energy left off.   

“A lot of it,” he says, “is very Bruce Springsteen, Americana, like a little more of a retro vibe.” He doesn’t know if he has another world-conquering single this time, but that’s not necessarily the point. “It  all started with me believing in the song ‘Beautiful Things.’ Now, I have a whole album just about ready to go — and I’ve never believed so much in a body of work.” 

He still mostly writes at a baby-grand piano that belonged to his late great-grandmother, which sits in a sunny corner room of his house. His initial songwriting on that instrument reflected a strong Adele and Sam Smith influence, heavy on soulful ballads, including “In the Stars,” a track mourning the piano’s original owner. “When I started, that’s kind of what felt the most comfortable to me,” he says. “Now that I’m finding how I like to perform, and how I want other people to see me, I have so much energy onstage that it is so hard to come with a set of slow songs. It killed me at the beginning ’cause I was like, ‘I want to be doing something cool, but I’m, like, sitting at this piano, singing a song about my dead grandma.’ It was tough!” 

His fan base leans young and female, and he’s learned the art of eliciting screams. But the heartthrob thing makes him a little uncomfortable. “I definitely remember there was a time where I would take my shirt off because I didn’t know what else to do,” he says.  “After doing a lot of shows, you start to pick up on what people like and don’t like, what girls like and don’t like. There is an art to making anybody go crazy.… I also don’t want people to come to a show expecting me to just take my shirt off and it to be like a gun show. One, I don’t have the guns for that. Two, that’s just not what I’m about.… I don’t want to rely on my physical form to be the primary driver of my shows.”

Some of his discomfort, he acknowledges, comes from profound self-consciousness. He’s been working out hard the past few months, and his refrigerator is full of strawberry-vanilla protein shakes. “It  sucks to just focus on that all the time,” he says, his voice softer. “Because I’m so incredibly hard on myself, and when I start to think about my appearance too much, it just kills me because there’s always something more I could do. There’s always a hairstyle or, like, my arms could be bigger. My shoulders could be bigger. It’s never-ending. I can’t afford to think that way because I will never be happy if I do think that way.” 

“I can’t be the sex icon of the century,” Boone says. “just because that’s not who I am.”

Some people wrongly assume that these issues don’t affect male celebrities, I tell him, thinking of the more serious body-image struggles Ed Sheeran shared with me not long ago, or the way D’Angelo recoiled at the demands to take his own shirt off onstage. “Dude, it affects me so much,” Boone replies.  “Obviously, like, I enjoy working out and I want to keep my physical shape because I need to. But I can’t be the sex icon of the ­century, just because that’s not who I am.”

“I’M JUST GONNA drive around,” Boone says, steering his SUV around the sleepy development surrounding his house. “We’re not gonna go anywhere.” We’ve jumped into the car to play some of his new album, which he wrote with one of his “Beautiful Things” collaborators, Jack LaFrantz, over the course of 17 days. He starts with “Young American Heart,” a surging, Killers-­ish song about a near-fatal car accident he got into with his lifelong best friend as a teenager: “ If I’m gonna die a young American/And this was the final night we’d ever have again/I’d be just fine as long as I’m wherever you are.”

To get closer to performance mode in the studio, Boone prefers as few encumbrances as possible, so he tends to whip his shirt off, LaFrantz confirms later. “Nothing, even clothing, messing up the vocals,” says LaFrantz, who’s become a close friend of Boone’s — he even had a mustache before him, and thinks he may have inspired the look. “I will not confirm or deny whether pants are also on or not.” In any case, Boone and LaFrantz did their best to pretend the pressure of following up “Beautiful Things” didn’t exist. “The studio is kind of a sacred spot,” LaFrantz says. “We always kind of want to keep it feeling like that and not change it because of success or anything else. We tried not to overthink it.” 

Boone plays “Mr. Electric Blue,” an ELO-like song about hero-worshipping his dad, a square-jawed dude who works in computers and still can do backflips of his own in his early fifties. “He’s a man’s man,” he sings. “A good hardworking American/But he ain’t the guy you want to fight.” The next one, “The Man in Me,” not to be confused with the Dylan song, is synthier and dancier, and seems to be about a relationship less happy than the one he’s currently in: “You took the man in me/You took his sanity.” There’s a ballad about missing his mom, too, “The Mama Song.”

The one he thinks will end up being biggest is called “Mystical Magical,” a quirky, Seventies-­vibed pop song with a hooky R&B bass line, where he pushes his voice so high in the chorus that he compares it to Tiny Tim’s “Tiptoe Through the Tulips,” a reference I wasn’t expecting. 

Another favorite is “I Wanna Be the One You Call,” an energetic pop song with a surging chorus. It’s a mutated ­version of an earlier, nearly abandoned track Boone didn’t care for at all, with the final ­version developing in a session with frequent Frank Ocean collaborator Malay.  “It was so quickly just one of my favorite songs I’ve ever made,” Boone says. “I was so shocked. And it came out of nowhere, because the song before was truly, like, so bad.  I think it was the first one we made for the album. So that kind of kicked it off. I got really motivated to make more songs after that, that were of that level to me.”

Boone was a pop fan well before he was a singer. Growing up in rural Monroe, Wash­ington, he was an athletic outdoor kid who didn’t even have a cellphone until his late teens. He and his four sisters would clean the kitchen every night to a Pandora playlist based off of “Hooked on a Feeling,” which tended to yield hits by Springsteen, Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson, and Queen — “a very incredible era of music,” says Boone.

And he had his own musical obsessions. “I always loved Justin Bieber and One Direction,” he says. “I mean, I was too embarrassed to admit it to my friends.” Did he come to them through his sisters? He shakes his head, a little sheepishly. “Honestly, I was probably a bigger fan of them than any of my sisters.” He and his friend Eric, the one from the “Young American Heart” car accident, would watch their videos “for hours.”  “Especially One Direction,” says Boone. “We thought being in a boy band was like the coolest thing ever. And this is before I even knew I could sing. I just thought they were so cool. Thinking of hundreds of girls chasing us was probably like the coolest thing ever. But again, you know, we would never tell anybody.” He recalls watching Bieber’s Never Say Never documentary with Eric at home, only to ­rapidly switch it off when one of his sisters came home.

But in his own life as a pop star, he tends to bristle at comparisons. “I don’t want to be the same as Harry Styles,” he says, “and the same as Freddie Mercury, and the same as Justin Bieber, and the same as One Direction, like, because it’s not me. I’m Benson Boone! I’m completely different.”

In addition to the whole biggest-song-in-the-world thing, Boone achieved another major distinction last year, becoming one of the only male opening acts on Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, at a June show at London’s Wembley Stadium. “I didn’t even know much about her,” Boone says. “Her team reached out, and I literally, like, shit my pants. I could not believe it. It was insane, so I started listening to more of her music. I didn’t want to go to that show and not know anything.”

He came away transformed.  “She is an unbelievable performer and has an unbe­lievable world built around her that is unmatched,” Boone says. “It is incredible to see how vastly gigantic her show is, just
countless moving parts behind the scenes that nobody knows about. She is one of a kind. Such a genuine person. I got the privilege to talk to her, for a while, and she’s so kind.

And she shouted me out onstage, which you do not need to do. It really changed my perspective on so many things that I want to carry into my own career. Just the way I treat people and my crew, watching the way that she treats people. There’s a lot of people who don’t like Taylor Swift. Everybody is entitled to their own opinion, But if you have something against her and you don’t know her, I don’t think that is fair.” 

AT ITS HIDDEN core, “Beautiful Things” is a prayer from a young man in the process of losing the faith of his fathers. Boone grew up in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-­day Saints, and his family was devout. “My faith drives everything that I do and my perspective of what life is about,” his mom told a local newspaper in a 2017 story about his family’s extensive volunteer work. “To me there is nothing more important than strengthening my family and serving other people. That’s what brings joy.”

But currently, Boone says, pacing around his kitchen, “ I don’t want to be a part of one religion. I have my own opinions. Some are from this religion, some are from this religion, some are from no religion.” The break came quietly and early.  “Growing up, a lot of people at church would talk about these experiences that they’ve had and these personal revelations and feelings and voices. I never felt it as physically present as they did, and so I was always confused and frustrated. I was always scared to bring that up to people because I just didn’t want to accept that, like, I wasn’t feeling what everyone else was feeling.” He eventually admitted it to a friend, who replied, “Thank goodness. I feel the same way.”

Before dropping out to pursue music, Boone spent a semester at Brigham Young University, but it was during Covid, so he had no experience of its various on-campus rules — the dress code, the prohibitions on sex, beards, and cursing. He’s grateful that his feelings about faith haven’t affected his relationship with his parents. “ My parents definitely have their own views, but when it comes to religion and God, they want me to figure it out on my own,” he says. “And whatever I come to, and whatever I feel is right, that’s what they want for me.”

He compares his religious uncertainty to politics, another subject he’s not super eager to get into in detail. “ People think if you have one or two views that are on the left or right side, that you have to be the left or on the right. And I don’t think that’s how it is.” He does want to make it clear that calling his album American Heart isn’t meant to drag him into any culture wars. “It’s not political at all,” he says.  “It’s more of a personal thing. It’s just me. American Heart is my heart, and it’s not my heart because it’s American. It’s my heart because I’m Benson Boone.” 

Mormon or not, he still doesn’t drink or do drugs. He has at least tried coffee, also for­bidden in the religion. “ There was a period of time where I really wanted to like coffee,” he says, “and [would] go out to this place in L.A. with Maggie, and I would try sips of her coffee every day and, it literally tastes like burnt wood.”

He’s convinced he needs to stay away from other substances, for his own good. “ I just think for me personally, like, dude, I would die,” he says. “’Cause I have such an addictive personality. I feel like if I started, I would do it so much that my health would just decline and I wouldn’t enjoy touring as much.” But how does he even know he has an addictive personality? “Dude, candy,” he says, as if it should have been obvious.

He and his manager and best friend, Jeff Burns, a cocksure thirtysomething who’s also grown a mustache, did used to pound Wild Berry Blast energy drinks while brainstorming the social media strategies that helped launch Boone’s career. “We would crack those, and that’s what we would call our ‘scheme time,’ ” Boone says. “We’d  drink those and think that it would get our brains ready to take over the world.” Properly fueled, he would post dozens of TikToks for weeks straight as he sought to make early singles like “Ghost Town” break through.

But if Boone has one real potential vice, he thinks it’s pride. “I think this year has taught me a lot of things, especially that it is incredibly easy to get carried away with my ego,” he says. “After ‘Beautiful Things,’ I was like, ‘Dude, I can do anything.’ And I can’t.” He has biweekly “ego checks” with Burns.  “It’s good to talk about, ‘Hey, you know, I’m not the king of the world. I’m not somebody that everybody in the world knows. I’m still an up-and-coming artist.’ ”

It was his mother, though, who really brought that home.  “I said something really snappy to my mom,” he says, wincing at the memory. “I hung up the phone. I was like, ‘What am I doing? I just snapped at my mother, the sweetest angel of a woman.’ And I felt so bad and I called her like 20 minutes later and I was like, ‘I’m so sorry. I don’t know what has gotten into me.’ ” She suggested that Boone spend some time writing down a list of things he’s grateful for, and lessons learned over the past year. “You’re going through a lot right now as a 21-year-old kid,” his mom said, “and it’s not normal. Not everybody goes through this. Just take it in for a second.”

So he sat down in an apartment in L.A. and made his list of all the new beautiful things in his life. “If this is a bigger year than last year, I want to be ready to keep the fabric of who I am,” he says. “Just hold on to everything that I have. If this is a bigger year it will be so easy to get carried away. Again.”

He’s still thinking about the future a few weeks later, when he’s back in Los Angeles for Grammy week. Fresh from a rehearsal for Clive Davis’ Grammy party, where he will, once again, sing “Beautiful Things,” he’s in the back of a chauffeured SUV headed to his West Hollywood hotel. “Regardless of how my career goes, when I grow up, I don’t think I can ever just chill and not do anything,” he says, gazing out the window.

Wait a second. When he … grows up?

He’s exhausted tonight, after spending the intervening weeks touring Japan, South Korea, and Australia. The Grammy performance in two days, the highest-profile appearance of his career so far, is looming large. But for a moment, he manages a smile. “I’m still very much a kid,” Boone says.