Chris Crocker Sings Death Cab for Cutie–Like Songs About Life After Britney

Even if you know only one thing about Chris Crocker, you can probably work out what “three words” he’s referring to in the title of his debut album, More Than Three Words, out next week. It’s the three words he tearfully wailed back in 2007, when Crocker—then a bleached blond, guy-linered androgyne—offered a Southern gay boy’s histrionic defense of an embattled Southern girl: “Leave Britney Alone!” As YouTube approaches its tenth anniversary, Crocker’s infamous viral sensation (49 million views and counting as of this writing) is among the platform’s all-time greatest hits.

In the ensuing years, Crocker’s tried his damndest to move beyond those three words. He’s released two EPs and a string of dance-pop singles with titles like “Mind in the Gutter” and “Freak of Nature.” He made the rounds in LA, shot a pilot for an NBC series, and starred in Me @ the Zoo, an HBO documentary about his youth as a rebellious gay kid in small-town Tennessee, who managed to turn his feral rants into internet stardom. He even shot two porn films with his ex-boyfriend, Justin Dean.

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Crocker and Dean broke up a year ago, and Crocker returned home to Tennessee to reconnect with his family and get to work on some very different music. If More Than Three Words is the latest weapon in the Chris Crocker reinvention arsenal, it may be the most effective: ten homespun pop-rock tales of devotion (“Always Be”), heartache (“Did You Ever Love Me”), defiance (“All of Me”), and, yes, Britney. On the track “2007,” Crocker revisits the infamous clip that put him on the map. There are folk and country touches, and the standout gem, “Keepers and Leavers,” has flashes of Jenny Lewis and Death Cab for Cutie from the jump.

VICE: This is such a different record for you. It seems if not totally at peace just really heartfelt and sincere.
Chris Crocker: It all started because I went through this kind of new relationship last year, which is the first that I had felt love again since Justin. He really ignited me in a way that I hadn’t felt in a long time, but he was still kind of in love with his ex. So as you can hear almost every single song is like “he still loves his ex,” like that’s a running thing. The song “Keepers and Leavers” was directly talking about him chasing an asshole.

That song has a great energy to it, and a great hook. I don’t think anyone ever would have guessed you had a folk-pop sort of record like that in you.
I am so happy you like that one, because it’s the first record I have written by myself, and I was so scared that it was gonna sound so left-field for people in terms of the genre I’ve stuck to up to now. Because I do like Britney-esque music, but I grew up on everything from Hole to Fiona Apple and Jewel, and even some country—and I always wanted to make music that was like this. The problem was that I didn’t take myself seriously enough, and I knew that my audience didn’t take me seriously enough. It’s funny because all of the things I did in the beginning—whether it was funny videos or pop music—felt very freeing to me at the time, but then I started to realize it was like a trap. The very thing that I thought freed me, being flippant and crazy, just became a box after a while.

The new songs were all created via email?
That’s right. My producer Christian Medice and I work that way. I would send him voice memos from my phone of the melodies and lyrics, and he would build these beautiful arrangements around them, so the whole record would not even sound the same without Christian, clearly. Also, I was really inspired at the time by Fences, the indie pop singer-songwriter from Seattle, Christopher Mansfield. From him I learned to just say what I want to say, not to complicate it.

“2007” surprised me too, if only because I feel like you’ve spent so much time trying to put the Britney association behind you, but you decided to revisit it here.
It would have been my pleasure to not talk about it. On so many levels, it’s nauseating to talk about, but then I had to think about, What do I need to leave behind? I kept thinking, When I die, is everyone just gonna—there’s no context out there. I’ve talked about the correlation between my mom and Britney, addictions and stuff, but there will always be that group of people that are resistant to listening to more than my Britney video, and listening to my truth. So I was kind of like, “You know, I need to kind of story tell a little bit, in the least playing-up-to-the-Britney-thing way possible.” I need to give context to what’s happened in my life.

It’s interesting how your videos in a sense paved the way for today’s gay YouTube stars like Tyler Oakley, Troye Sivan, and Lohanthony, but on the other hand what they do feels so safe compared to your early stuff.
This is an important topic, but it’s really hard to talk about the new YouTube community in general, and specifically the gay community, because I will always be framed by some people as a Bitter Betty. But whether it’s me, or just YouTube in general, back when I was making videos, there was no motivation to make videos for money. You were either making videos because you had something to get off of your chest, or you had something to say, or you had a bad day and you wanted to make yourself feel better, or you needed to rant and rave about something, whatever the case. Now it’s become the Disney Channel to me! I don’t feel anything when I go on that website. There just needs to be some grit, and I think the problem is now that it’s owned by Google, even if there was a person out there that was like, “Let me set the internet on fire and fucking tell it like it is,” they wouldn’t even feel safe to, because now everything is so politically correct, on every level. How would you even feel safe to have a real opinion?

You said last year that you feel like the porn you did has kept you from getting other opportunities. I’m surprised that would be true in music. I feel like in the music world, who cares that you got naked on camera?
Not so much in the music world, because music is the most liberal, you know? But I mean there were disappointments that really I felt—like there was a time when I did a [Sex and the City writer/producer] Michael Patrick King pilot for NBC, and I was one of the main characters. This was in like 2010, 2011, and I don’t think Michael Patrick King was privy to knowing everything that I had out there. He really believed in me. He kept saying, “I see something real in you.” And I felt guilty because when it wasn’t picked up, I had this huge complex of “NBC probably googled about me or something.” I don’t know, I just have a complex where I think the reason I did the porn was that I started to think, Well I’ve done everything else on camera, why not do this? And also it was liberating because to some people I was seen as this “it.” This crying, lunatic thing, not a boy, not a girl. An asexual being. So it was kinda like, “OK, you made fun of me for so long? Well fuck you, now you’re gonna jerk off to me.”

People paid tons of attention to when cut your hair and began to look more like a boy a few years ago, even though you identify as trans. How do you feel about these responses?
It’s something I think about in the back of my mind daily—transitioning—because there’s a part of you that feels like if you don’t that you’re not fulfilling your destiny, and you don’t know if you’ll ever know what it feels like to be completely comfortable. But then there’s another part of me that’s like, “Well, I’m getting older,” and the real reason I haven’t is—and this is not gonna sound great to trans people—but I’m a huge family person and it’s just really hard to get my family to understand certain things. They’re Pentecostal. But I also don’t want to wake up at 40 and go, “Oh, I lived my life for them.” I am at a point where I’ve become very complacent. I’m at a crossroads, like Britney.

Chris Crocker’s More Than Three Words is available for pre-order on iTunes.

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