Addison Rae’s Next Act: Pop Star

“It’s not as deep as people will think,” says Addison Rae, discussing the meaning of her surprise debut single, “Obsessed.”

Rae has 78 million subscribers on her TikTok, which she launched in the summer of 2019. In less than two years, the 20-year-old has built an empire that spans fashion, beauty, podcasting – and , from today, music.

When Rae first downloaded TikTok, she was an ordinary teenager, preparing to attend Louisiana State University, where she would study broadcast journalism. She gave up after just a few months, as videos of her doing TikTok challenges and dance moves were seen by millions of people and moved to Los Angeles as first member of the Hype House. She was determined to take on the entertainment industry.

About a year after starting its TikTok fame, Forbes reported that she was the highest paid person on the platform, earning $ 5 million from her posts. Rae now sells his own branded clothes and products, and advertises celebrity-backed clothing companies such as Fashion Nova and Kim Kardashian’s Skims. She was the face of American Eagle’s 2020 campaigns. She rose far above her roots – marked by her parents’ intermittent relationship, living in a one-room motorhome and traveling between Louisiana and Texas.

Rae, a trained dancer who started dancing competitively at the age of six, “has always been around music,” she says. Rolling stone via Zoom. “I was always too interested in this, and I didn’t know why,” she says. “I knew I was a dancer, I knew I loved dancing to music, but I didn’t really know what I wanted to do with the music. In high school and college, I always wanted to branch out and start singing and expressing all this love for music in a different way. she started singing with a local church group in Louisiana, but the dabbling didn’t go much further.

In the summer of 2020, Rae started a podcast series with her mom, a Spotify original called Mom knows the best, before launching Item Beauty, a clean make-up line. What most people don’t know is that Rae then quietly began to plot his next play: Becoming a Pop Star.

Rae, who has been trying to figure out ‘who I am as an artist’ for two years, used the extra time allotted to him by the Covid-19 quarantine to study songwriting and production, and build a team tight-knit that she could trust to help him take on a new shade of fires. Four to five times a week for about six months, the bright-eyed optimist visited a private studio in Hollywood owned by Jacob Kasher Hindlin – a songwriter named Jkash who helped create hits. for Charlie Puth, Jason Derulo, Maroon 5 and 5 Seconds of Summer.

“I learned a lot of things about myself as an artist very quickly because I was there so much, I was really exercising every part of my brain to write and learn melodies and things like that” , Rae said.

Hindlin agreed to release his music through his own independent label, Sandlot Records, and teamed up with Adam Mersel. (Mersel is perhaps best known for dealing with people like Bebe Rexha and Dear Evan Hansen Ben Platt, but he also recently launched a record label, Immersive, via Interscope.) Rae hired the leading advertising agency The Lede Company to manage his media outreach, particularly tapping publicists Katie Greenthal and Courtni Asbury, who spent 10 years with Def Jam before joining Lede last year.

After the first four months of cohesively spent in the studio, just tinkering and breaking down demos, Rae and a team of experienced songwriters and producers produced the bulk of the first single “Obsessed” in one session. Benny Blanco – who is a good friend of Hindlin and has worked closely with superstars like Katy Perry, Justin Bieber, Halsey and Ed Sheeran – co-produced the song with Ryan McMahon, who co-wrote “Shut Up and Dance” by Walk the Moon, “And Blake Slatkin, who co-wrote and produced” Mood. “

McMahon and Slatkin have also been co-writers with Rae, executive producer Madison Love, Tia Scola and Brett McLaughlin (aka Leland). Love’s credits include “Sour Candy” by Lady Gaga and Blackpink, “Bad Things” by Machine Gun Kelly and Camila Cabello and “Sweet But Psycho” by Ava Max. Love also worked on Selena Gomez’s “Rare” with McLaughlin, who appeared in several songs by Gomez, Troye Sivan and Sabrina Carpenter. Carpenter’s latest single, “Skin,” was co-written by Scola.

Rae is the first to admit that she wouldn’t be where she is today without her “legendary” team: “I feel so honored to be able to work with people who truly have a love and passion for it, knowing that I have a growing love and passion for it too, ”she says. “They were very patient and understanding in helping me every step of the way.”

Rae refers to her current state as “a visual producer,” explaining that she can “certainly imagine sounds” now: “I’ll be like, ‘Okay, can we find that kind of sound? I feel like there must be a double here or a triple here or something here. ”

But she was also actively involved in the whole process. “When something is named after me, I feel like it’s very important to know exactly what it is and what the message is,” she says. “When it comes to makeup, I’m really involved – [same] when it comes to my own videos and my own content. Everything is a representation of who I am. This is how I felt when I started with my music… I really wanted to understand for myself, but also to surround myself with people who are trusted, wonderful, and who know exactly what they are. do so that I can learn from them.

She admits that she didn’t even know the musical keys before starting this journey. “[Those] are basic things that people in music, people who have been doing this all their lives, know… I’m a little late when it comes to knowing all this information, but I won’t stop learning ” , she promises.

In a way, that’s the secret to Rae’s success: she learns by doing. When she feels passionate about something, she gets moving and discovers the logistics along the way. She doesn’t sit down and worry about “what ifs”. She says people are often shocked to find out that she has varied interests – but she wants to be known as more than a TikTok influencer.

“I have such an artistic mind and heart, and I’ve always, always, always been drawn to it,” says Rae. “I think now it’s about exploring that and completely immersing myself in this art. I really want to give myself every chance to be a part of it, to understand it and to really appreciate the art of it… That’s what I ate. , slept and breathed for a year.

Although not an engineer, she is certainly the type to skim the board and ask questions of collaborators. She refers to her current state as a “visual producer,” explaining that she can “definitely imagine sounds” now: “I’ll be like, ‘Okay, can we find that kind of sound? I feel like there must be a double here or a triple here or something here. Some nights Rae now plays with Garageband trying to make beats and songs herself.

Rae says that “Obsessed” turned a creative cock inside her, setting the tone for her future. “It was a bit at that point that everything clicked,” she explains. “Me as an artist, what I wanted to do and what I wanted to communicate to my audience literally started with ‘Obsessed’. Every song we did after that felt so good. Now when I listen to all the songs we’ve done before, I’m like, ‘Ah, what were we doing?’ It is a process. It takes a long time to understand who you are as an artist. Normally, it would be easy to laugh at a 20-year-old for saying something like that, but Rae’s seriousness is disarming.

“Obsessed” is based on a conversation Rae had with a friend. “It was a fun joke that turned into an empowerment song, and I think that’s the coolest part about it,” she says. “It’s not, ‘Oh, I’m obsessed with myself because I’m perfect.’ It’s more like, ‘I can love myself as much as I want someone else to love me.’ She says it unwittingly turned into a self-love hymn: “It’s’ Do you love me? Well, I can love myself too. I don’t need this from someone else when I have it inside. I think it’s a great place in life. I’m working on it and I think it’s a good thing for everyone to be working on it. It’s not easy to love yourself, especially since there is so much comparison in this world today.

Self-esteem is necessary to be on social media, she says. “There are people who don’t mind being mean or hateful, or saying things that might affect you as a person and your self-esteem. I think that’s a really hard thing for people to understand because it hasn’t always been that way. I don’t think social media has always been as negative as it is today. If people can truly learn to love who they are, there is no reason to bring down someone else.

When asked how many songs she’s done, Rae chuckles shyly. “I don’t know if I can say exactly, but I have a lot,” she said.

“A lot of people assume that just because of TikTok, I’m getting things done. By doing that [independently], it’s so much more organic.

Maybe not all of them will see the light of day. Rae won’t confirm or deny plans for an album either. “Who knows,” she said cheekily. “There are endless opportunities for me to present myself as an artist now. But like I said, I’m learning. I am by no means a professional in this field. I am by no means perfect in all of this.

When it comes to releasing the music, why did Rae choose to do it independently instead of signing with a major label for a massive lead? The star says she didn’t want people to think she just “came in” somewhere and had a music career all set. She also didn’t want a contract controlling how she shaped her narrative. She’s not opposed to record companies: she just felt the need to set the bar herself. She craved space and space to play without pressure or delay.

“A lot of people assume that just because of TikTok, I’m getting things done. By doing it that way, it feels so much more organic, ”she says. “I want to show that this is one of my real passions and not just something that I jumped into and had the chance to do.” TikTok may have empowered Rae to take such a luxurious approach, but she won it on her own. She didn’t have to intervene. Rae could easily continue to “influence”, but she preferred to grow up.