You get BØRNS!
Interscope Records
We're in the lobby of the Driskill Hotel on famed party drag 6th Street in Austin, Texas, and there are what appear to be the beginnings of a riot going on right outside. Hundreds of young kids are sprinting as fast as they can up the street. Through it all, Garrett Borns, aka BØRNS, remains unmoved, omitting a zen, peaceful bliss, a next-level calm. He pauses for a moment, perhaps because he can see that I have become distracted. One of his label reps walks outside to get a better look, comes back in, and says, "I think Kanye is walking down the street or something."
It turns out it's not Kanye, but instead just another bit of the swirling chaos that is SXSW, which is a giant party thousands of people flock to and spend big money on to walk around worried they're missing the Next Big Thing. There's also music.
"Where were we?" I ask as things quiet back down.
Unblinking and unfazed, BØRNS looks back. "I was just talking about the tree house I was living in."
Yes, the tree house. By now, if you've heard anything by or about BØRNS it's 1) his incredibly catchy songs "10,000 Emerald Pools" and "Electric Love," which will work their way into your head and never escape after only one listen, 2) Taylor Swift's Instagram rightly calling the latter an "instant classic" (more on this in a bit), 3) his name turning up in Taylor Swift's hacked phone (the two traded whale puns via Twitter DM), and 4) the tree house. He lived in a tree house in Los Angeles.
And the tree house is significant. Just a few years prior to living in it he was bouncing around New York City, having moved there from his home state of Michigan because he wanted something to "knock me off-kilter" and push him outside of his comfort zone. New York, as it does, delivered on that front, and BØRNS found himself staying with friends and acquaintances in Harlem, Bushwick, Boerum Hill — if you had a couch, he didn't discriminate. He was 21 and writing songs, but nothing that moved him. And so at the end of a big breakup and the beginning of a broken heart, he headed out West to get away.
He found the tree house on Airbnb, planning at first to stay a month, but ended up there for good after finding it opened him up and helped the music flow.
