George Ezra walks into the Old Barge, the Hertford pub that’s been his lifelong local, and within three minutes his song, Budapest is on the stereo. “They’re so supportive here,” he says, with shy gratitude, as he stoops under a curtain into a back room. Ezra first came here after school, searching for a loo. At 16, he started working behind the bar. When friends come home for Christmas, this is where they meet, “and where we would have always met”. It still smells the same. (Currently: of yesterday’s log fire, a comforting contrast to the January damp.) Over the next few hours, locals stick their heads in to wave hello to their friendly neighbourhood pop star, drinking lime cordial and soda in crisp double denim, and he greets them all back by name.
This is the approachable figure Ezra, who is 28, cuts in most settings, whether playing a radiant set at Glastonbury or warmly chatting about mental health on his podcast. A music college dropout born George Ezra Barnett, he emerged in 2014 as part of a cohort of middle-class British boys with acoustic guitars. Unlike most of them, he wasn’t lachrymose or ambition-crazed. Instead he had a good-weird sense of humour and a big voice, cultivated after this ardent blues fan became obsessed with the US blues singer Lead Belly.
Ezra’s label sent him Interrailing to inspire his first album, Wanted on Voyage, and he famously saw much of Europe except Budapest, the name of his breakthrough single. That song set the George Ezra template: primary-coloured bonhomie, a yearning for escape, an awed insistence that he’d give up anything for a girl. For album two, Staying at Tamara’s, he Airbnb’d in Barcelona and came back with the rabidly catchy singles Shotgun and Paradise. Both of his albums hit No 1 and spent 336 weeks in the charts (and counting) between them: rare numbers that put you in the Sheeran leagues.
Having always used trips as creative inspiration, Ezra intended to write album three as he walked from Land’s End to John o’Groats in the spring of 2020. Instead, he spent five weeks of lockdown alone in London before family and friends convinced him to move back to Hertfordshire. For two months, during that mood-spiking heatwave, he lived in a van on a friend’s farm. “It was dogs that needed walking and fields that needed mowing,” he remembers dreamily. He soon bought his own place. Being back has done him the world of good. He loves community: “When you can walk out your front door and the whole town feels like an extension of a back garden.” And though he knows this might seem weird – regressive or stuck – “I feel comfortable in the fact that I’ve moved on, and then some.”
Ezra says change is beautiful, and it suits him. His strong features sit more comfortably on a man’s face. When his hair grew out during lockdown, he swept it back and realised this was his look. (He has laughably nice skin, another recent change: “I started washing! I said to my sister, ‘Washing your skin really makes a difference doesn’t it?’ She was like, ‘Fuck off, yes.’”) On his first two albums, he often sang about escaping and giving it all up; the transformations on his lovely third album, Gold Rush Kid, are less about tearing up the script than recognising a moment as it’s happening, and discovering contentment within it.
It’s a steadier album, he says. The first time around, he relied on his travels for something to write about. Second time, he had seen the world – played New Year’s Eve in Tasmania – “and so then writing about crocodiles and dreaming becomes quite realistic”. This time, he says, it felt “honest and cool” to write about the everyday substance of his life: assignations in hotel rooms and bars, surrendering to a lover’s beauty on the dancefloor. On the big-chorused title track, he sings of “robbing the bank / Making a run for it and learning to dance” – winging it, basically. He had been thinking about the opportunists who rushed west in the 1850s and “understood it as people deciding: over there is something worth pursuing and it’s finite, so go and get it”. Ezra writes to reinforce the things he needs to hear and he has realised that this is the attitude he wants to cultivate towards his career and his life: “Remember: enjoy this.”
It is odd to hear that George Ezra – who wrote the lyric “bikini bottoms, lager tops, I could get used to this”, and sang it with a giddy whoop – needed that nudge. But his earlier, bright exterior concealed a bleak mindset. “In the past, when I’ve been the most intimidated and the most scared, it was really easy to tip over into nihilism and go, ‘Fuck it, it’s all going to end anyway, so what does it matter?’” he says bitterly. Perhaps that outlook has benefits, he considers. “But I don’t think I ever got there in a good way.”
He is a surprisingly careful conversationalist, taking long pauses to risk-assess any admission. I press him for examples of how he would self-sabotage, but he says it wouldn’t do him any good to go into detail. But he admits he almost let this mentality total his career. In 2020, Ezra insisted that he wanted to quit music, telling his manager: “I don’t identify with it, I don’t understand it, I find it really hard to get my head around why I would pursue what I associate with being quite stressful – because the last album was unenjoyable at times, by my own doing.”
Ezra had become “the kid who just says yes,” he says – a punishing identity that gave him a perverse kind of validation. “The diary would be bursting – you could almost see it pulsating. And I lost control, and therefore I started to try to control the things that didn’t need controlling.” He gives the example of spending three hours packing hand luggage: “Dude, you could throw some underwear in that bag, a few T-shirts and a toothbrush and you would be fine.” (As we chat, he often gives himself a second-person talking-to.) “ But this thing could be on display at a museum.”
He also has Pure O, a form of OCD that involves intrusive thoughts without the physical compulsions. He used to lose weeks to them. During the first lockdown, he found a therapist and practised transcendental meditation, which helped. Now the thoughts might loop for just 30 minutes. He has stopped trying to stop them, “because that’s where I used to wind myself up,” he says.
When life opened up again, Ezra got back to writing with his long-term collaborator Joel Pott (formerly of 2000s indie band Athlete), and rediscovered the pleasures of music that his yes-man persona had trampled. “The reason you do this is because you love it,” he tells himself. “And maybe that’s the payoff, that you get to pursue something you love – but as a result, you’re gonna feel it acutely and care too much at times.” (Pott praises the “good people” around Ezra, who told him he didn’t owe anyone anything.)
Given Ezra’s renewed joy, it may seem counterintuitive that death looms over Gold Rush Kid. He cavorts with her on Green Green Grass, another insatiable earworm. On the twinkly closer Sun Went Down, he repeats, with real warmth, “I could die now.” It’s not the old nihilism but a sense of peace that comes from knowing he is giving life his best shot, of accepting himself in this moment.
While Ezra likes his first two albums, he loves this one. “It doesn’t sound like anything but myself,” he says. The first five tracks are classic Ezra – as bright and buoyant as a new pool inflatable. But then it takes a ruminative shift – the album’s most striking song, I Went Hunting, beautifully addresses his past self-sabotage. It’s not a prelude to him becoming a tortured artist, he says – Ezra disdains artists longing to shed their pop fans and get serious – but the result of “a lot of self-reflection”.
He’s chuffed when I single out his favourite line from lead single Anyone for You: “Remember me the way I am, not the way I was.” (Once a month, he prints selected photos from his phone and deletes the rest. “I feel like I’m dragging something along with me,” he says.) He struggles to identify those changes, partly because they’re ineffable, partly because he enjoys privacy. But he gives it a go. He’s discovered that contentment is different from happiness. On this album, he’s telling himself: “You’re all right. You’re not a villain.”
Ezra still walked from Land’s End to John o’Groats with two friends for an upcoming documentary series, ultimately relieved he didn’t have to write an album at the same time. Walking 20 to 30 miles a day gave him the same feeling of peace as transcendentalmeditation, one that’s stuck around. There was another experience as well: he won’t discuss the specifics on record because he says he hasn’t figured out how to communicate it, but it showed him that the love in his life was inescapable. “I have these people around me, family and friends, that are there. The lesson was: what you don’t get, George, is that they just love you because of who you are. And don’t try to make sense of that because you won’t be able to. But accept it.” He thinks about it all the time. “It felt seismic, but really calm. I think that’s true of a lot of the last few years – these huge changes that actually just took one tiptoe to the left.”
He has learned to look after himself – phone off at 9pm, light the fire, read – and found work-life balance. “I can actually plan meaningful interactions with friends around work,” he says, “which is the thing I’ve always envied in other people.” And no more yes-man. He told management: “Put things in front of me if you think they’re important, and only fight for them if you think they’re really important.”
Still, he wants to give Gold Rush Kid a “fighting chance”, especially as he anticipates turning 30 and thinks about “drawing a line in the sand” at some point. “It’s the saddest thing I see in pop music when people just cling on to something,” he says. He isn’t retiring prematurely: he might release music more regularly, but cease touring. “I get a lot from it, positive and negative,” he says. “It’s an insane amount of adrenaline to experience and then to carry that with you.”
Ezra is not the sort of pop star who gameplans their career five years in advance – the opposite, in fact. He definitively does not want to break the US. “It’s too big a place to consider mirroring what my work looks like in Europe and Australia,” he says. “To try to recreate that would kill me. I don’t need it.” He also wants children, which feels incompatible with a career at his level. “There are home videos of me as a child saying I want to be a dad,” he says. “I have to question people that are very famous and pursue that after having kids. It’s lost on me. It sounds selfish.”
The most he will look to his future career is to suggest that being adored by the nation’s children means his songs will ultimately become “throwback party classics”. Any kids that didn’t already know him soon did if they followed Joe Wicks’s lockdown PE lessons. Ezra’s mum, a primary school teacher, told him Wicks said he couldn’t play music on the videos because of copyright. She suggested that Ezra let Wicks use his songs for free. So he did, then donated the royalties to the NHS. “It was just a good thing to be able to do,” he says.
What does it say that pop stars are having to donate to the NHS during a pandemic? He pauses. “There’s a lot I don’t understand,” he says, sadly. “The amount that I don’t understand intimidates me to the point where it probably doesn’t serve me to speak about it because I don’t know where to start. But then I’m like, is that the point? Are you made to feel like you don’t understand when really you do?
“And that’s the thing I found hard about the last few years,” he says, with a sudden ragged breath, “is actually feeling… helpless in some way.” He says the last part in the smallest voice, and we’re both surprised to find he is crying, his grey-blue eyes now red. “Sorry!” he says quickly, and regroups. “There’s a lot of confusing stuff going on in the world. It’s sad, you’re right, why are fucking pop stars donating to the NHS?”
Ezra says he hasn’t generally made political statements because he doesn’t feel qualified – although he recalls his parents, Labour party members, taking him on marches – and not because his fanbase is so broad. He casts aspersions as he gestures around the Old Barge. “I love this pub. It is empty of an evening and it shouldn’t be,” he says emphatically, referencing the fear over Omicron. “Not that it should be busy, but they’re not helped. If people shouldn’t be going out, tell them to close the doors and help them through that time.”
He laments that “making the world an intimidating and confusing place is a really convenient way of pitting people against one another”. It runs counter to his worldview. He comes back to the walk, on which they regularly met “two types of farmer: people that live hand to mouth, up at 4am on Christmas, and they were lovely, pointing us in the right direction. We also met men who wear gold rings on their little fingers and live in big houses on the farms, and they were lovely, and told us which direction to go. It’s why he loved Gogglebox so much, he says, “because it’s good to be reminded you’re all the same in many ways.”
Ezra’s music has always expressed his faith in collective goodness: we’re all right together, we’re just human; as he sings on the song Gold Rush Kid. “You’re just like everyone, you’re holding on.” Has that belief been shaken in the past two years, when it’s often seemed as though we aren’t all in this together? “I don’t think so,” he says. “Getting out and walking the country and meeting people – it just isn’t true. I get terrified that everyone’s out to get each other. For the most part, they are – until you step out your front door.”
The single Anyone For You is out now; the album Gold Rush Kid follows on 10 June on Columbia Records
