She might be the pop girl of the moment, but Zara Larsson is proving herself to be every bit as committed as she is talented. The pop star has revealed that she’s still gigging at colleges despite her recent breakthrough success.
After years of fame at home in Sweden and the amassing of a small but dedicated fanbase internationally, the pop star, 28, has seen her success soar in the last few months thanks to viral singles such as “Stateside”, her collaboration with PinkPantheress, and “Midnight Sun”, the title track from her latest album.
With a series of festival dates across Europe and the US approaching and a tour in Australia and New Zealand following, you’d forgive the “Lush Life” singer for wanting a break.
But in a video shared to TikTok this week, Larsson evealed that she’s also been playing a series of shows at US universities, having booked them in to raise money before her star ascended.
Filming herself in a hotel room while wearing a Yale University hoodie and baseball cap, Larsson jokingly told her fans that she “went to Yale” before clarifying that she actually just “went there to sing once”.
Explaining that she’d actually performed at two different colleges that day, she went on: “We’re on some kind of college show tour. Two shows today, one show two days ago, one show tomorrow.
“I signed that s*** a long time ago because I needed to pay for my real tour, because it’s so expensive to tour. And once I’ve signed that contract, I’m not pulling out. I don’t do that. I don’t cancel shows.”
Larsson joked that while “some people pay to go to college, I get paid to go to college”. Admitting that she didn’t even finish high school, she said: “But someone has to entertain the educated. And that’s my job, and I take that seriously.”
The singer clarified that the tour, which comes in the wake of her Coachella performance, had been “really fun”. “We started in the high school cafeterias, and now we’re upgraded to the colleges,” she joked.
In an interview with The Independent in October, Larsson, who first came to fame in Sweden aged 10 and had her first top five single in the UK in 2015, said that while she wanted to play her own headline tour, she had to be ”realistic”.
”Obviously in a dream world, of course, I am ready to be the headliner – I will go out and headline my own show here in Europe. You just have to be realistic, a little bit,” she said.
“I would be silly to announce a worldwide arena tour right now… I have yet to achieve that [outside Europe], but I wish and I hope to do it in the very near future.”
Admitting that translating social media buzz to ticket or album sales was tough, Larsson said: ”You’ve just gotta keep shoving it down people’s throat until they’re like, OK I’ll have a listen, I’ll go and buy the ticket.”
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