Garrett Borns, better known by his stage name Børns, is just north of Denver, Colorado standing outside the 1stBank Center in Broomfield. Under a strong October sun, he’s surrounded by the flurry of activity of chain-smoking crew members feverishly preparing for the night’s show, in which he’s supporting the Icelandic act Of Monsters and Men. The air is full of the smell of running semi-tractor trailers, dumpsters and secondhand smoke. “Very glamorous,” he deadpans.  Borns fortunately couldn’t care less about his surroundings, since this Rocky Mountain stop is part of a nationwide victory lap following last fall’s release of his debut EP, Candy. The electro-charged, psych-tinged indie pop has made the Michigan native an indie darling and created a palpable buzz that’s been building up to this week’s release of his debut album, Dopamine. “This past year has put me in a different state of mind than I’ve ever been in,” he says about his ascent from a young singer-songwriter to hyped proto-pop star. “I’m in a different artistic state of mind, a different performance state of mind. I’m testing the introvert and extrovert in me and seeing how far I can push myself both ways.”  Borns has had an eclectic path to success. Growing up in Grand Haven, Michigan, his first creative identity, aged 10, was as Garrett the Great, a child magician – and quite a successful one. “Doing magic at that age and having my own show that I did for good-sized audiences was my first experience as a frontman,” he says. “Being able to feel the energy of the audience and interact with them, that’s my favorite thing about performing. A magic show and a concert are very similar in the way I like keeping things a mystery and not doing them the same way every time. The listener and the audience never know what’s going to happen next.”  It wasn’t just magic in which Borns was a prodigy: he won an art school scholarship intended for high school seniors when he was 13. Some years later, after teaching himself guitar and taking classical piano lessons at a local community college, he decided to try to make it as a musician, relocating from Michigan to New York City, and then out west to Los Angeles – all as part of a process to find himself and discover his voice.  “I knew the only way where I would get better as a songwriter and realise things about myself artistically and as a person is to start travelling on my own, without even having a companion’s influence,” he explains amid the steady bustle of crew members. “I really wanted to see who I was in the world. That ultimately landed me in LA, where I never thought I’d ever live.” In California, Borns let his hair grow – literally and figuratively. “Being where I was and around the people I was with allowed me to relax. Instead of trying to find a certain stream of consciousness, I started floating down my stream and seeing where it would take me.”  Oddly enough, it was the experience of living on the top floor of a house in the Hollywood Hills he dubs the Treehouse that was most important to his self-discovery. Down below resided a family with three kids who were talented musicians. “Having their spirit and vibe around was really great,” he explains. “We were always jamming together, writing songs, and it kind of reminded me who I was when I was younger. Coming from that place of not worrying really inspired the inner child in me, if you will. That youthful energy.”  It’s that youthful energy which is on full display in most of Borns’s tracks, from his biggest hit so far, the T Rex-tinged Electric Love (which Taylor Swift described on Instagram as an “instant classic”), to his most recent single, the sunny, 70s Cali pop Fool. However, it was the breakout track 10,000 Emerald Pools, which he concocted with the producer Jack Kennedy shortly after arriving in LA, that laid the bedrock for everything that followed, skilfully fusing airbrushed, radio-friendly pop with wiggier, psychedelic trappings. “A lot of times you do these writing sessions with someone, and at the end of the day you come up with something that totally isn’t you,” he says of his songwriting experiences in LA, noting that he ran into his fair share of “sleazeballs”.  “Kennedy, meanwhile, is not the kind of dude who’s trying to write a hit song. He’s one of a kind and we’d just have conversations about ourselves. One day he was talking about where he’s from and said that his mom’s address in Las Vegas is 10,000 Emerald Pools and how it could be a cool title for a song. I was like, ‘That’s an amazing title for a song.’” The two finished the track in less than two hours. “I was riding a scooter in circles around the room and singing the lyrics,” he says of the peculiar process as the crew starts to wrap up load-in around him. “It was so chill. We were just lallygagging around. That’s how I like music to come out.”
Taylor Swift said he had made an ‘instant classic’ and with his psychedelia-tinged take on electro pop Michigan’s Garrett Borns is clearly going places