But yeah, we were trying to break in, making these recordings, getting better and better at it, and then one day my dad had this realization:

People have to SEE you. It’s not enough that they hear your voice. They’ve gotta see that this voice is coming from this adorable, totally normal little kid. Your voice sounds like money, it sounds like this beautiful, polished, Madison Square Garden thing, but they’ve gotta see your shitty little room and your normal fucking posters and your GI Joes and all that shit or else they won’t have the right context. They’ve gotta feel like they’re discovering you.

And so we recorded this video. We like, set-dressed my room to make it look even more normal than it was, and we tried on a bunch of these different outfits in the mirror, and if something looked too good or too hip, we’d take it off and try something new. And when we were thinking about which song to sing, at first we tried all these hits that were on the radio around that time—you know, the same kind of shit we had been recording on the CDs—but then my dad was like: Hold on. And I was like: What? And he was like: It’s the Fourth of July soon. And I was like: Shit. And he was like: You gotta sing the national anthem. And I was like: Genius.

And I killed it. First take. I’m not trying to brag or whatever, but if you’ve seen the video, you know. I just totally fucking killed it. At the end, I had this moment of inspiration—it was just like, this sudden epiphany. All of a sudden, I said: Happy Fourth of July, everybody. Stay safe. And I threw up a peace sign. And my dad let the camera roll for a second—we were just using the camera that was on the computer—and then he stopped it and he looked at me, and he was like: That’s it. And I was like: You think? And he was like: Yeah.

And he was right.

Okay, so I know everyone who picks up this book is gonna be like: Where’s the part where he talks about Mandy? What’s he gonna say about Mandy? So let’s just get it out of the way.

Mandy and I got together pretty much when I first moved out to L.A. So I was like … fourteen at that point. LOL. My dad didn’t want to move us out until we already had a hit on the radio, so we recorded the whole record in Minnesota, put it out while we were still there, and then finally rolled into town on this wave of insane exposure with “Be My Baby” and “Don’t Look Back.” It was weird—my dad had been waiting his whole life for something like this to happen, but now that it was happening, he was being so methodical about it, so patient. He was like, enveloped in this force field of cool. None of it stressed him out at all. It was really beautiful to watch.