Famous People

Justin Kuritzkes

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For Celine

I been famous since I was twelve. Made a vid of me singing the national anthem that got like, ten million views in its first week because I was doing some crazy shit with my voice. I used to be able to hit high notes—like the kind that girls can—before my voice dropped. Now my voice is still tight—I’m not gonna be falsely modest or whatever—but it used to be like, ACTUALLY dope. You know what I mean?

The thing about being famous for so long is that like, you never really hang with any normal people anymore, because it’s just weird for everybody. But at the same time, you’re more connected to normal people than even most normal people are, because you’re one of the very few people on Earth who actually looks at them. Most normal people just look at my life—or they look at the lives of other people like me—and they just spend all their time thinking about how dope it would be, like, how absolutely next-level it would be to be me, and so they’re never really looking at themselves. But then they all show up at my concert—they’re all gathered there, like thousands of them—and it’s like they’re all just lined up for me to examine them. Sometimes it’s like five nights a week that I’m just staring into this massive crowd of normal people—and I’m like: Guys … I get you. I see what you’re all about.

Here’s my daily grind:

I get up, I go to the studio, I turn out some tracks, I go to the gym, I go take my singing lessons, I go take my guitar lessons—I can play all the chords, but I want to get GOOD—I take meetings. I listen to shit.

So much time is spent just listening to shit.

Sometimes I’m on the road. That’s all right. It’s never as fun as you think it’s going to be. Sometimes it’s mind-blowingly dope, but then other times you just want to be like: Okay, fuck Tennessee. But you can’t just say fuck Tennessee because then Tennessee is gonna be like: Fuck this kid. This kid is a stuck-up little bitch who doesn’t care about our time. And I do care about people’s time. It means so much to me that people buy tickets to my shows—they wait in lines for hours, for days even, just to hear the songs they’ve already heard a million times on the radio. Once I’ve committed to something, I NEVER, I repeat: NEVER back out, because in a way, it’s like … that’s the least I can do, you know? People are dying all over the world. People are getting blown up every day. The environment is fucking breaking down. Shit is tough out there. People’s lives are tough. And like, what? I’m gonna miss a whole fucking concert because I don’t feel like it? Nah.