Charming? Check. Accent? Uh huh. Mega-talented? Sure. South Africa's Connell Cruise got his start in music at only four years old when he learned to play the piano. Years later, he's leaving his hometown of Johannesburg behind to join Island Records and show the world what he's made of. The crazy part? This was never his original plan.
On a whim, he tried out for a talent competition similar to American Idol, and the audition changed everything. "It created a vibe that I didn't imagine possible. Before then I never thought about doing music as a career—I was actually studying to become a lawyer," he tells us. "I've been playing music my whole life, but I never considered it more than a hobby at most. I just wrote music for girls I was into."
One of those seemingly romantic serenades? Yeah, it didn't work out so well. "It was really embarrassing. It was supposed to be all romantic and sweet. I wanted to do the whole John Cusack scene in Say Anything with the trench coat and everything, but it was in the middle of summer so it was boiling," he says. "As I pulled up into the driveway, my car collided with her gate. Her parents came out and it was a huge deal. They also wanted to know why I was wearing a trench coat in the middle of summer."
Even though his smooth moves didn't always work out, people kept asking when he was going to put out an album. He decided to figure out how to do just that. "I thought I might as well Google what artists do to put out an album, so that's what I did. I got online and put together a demo and sent it around," he says.
His South African debut quickly turned into three South African Music Award nominations in 2014, with one of his covers reaching the #1 spot on the country's iTunes charts. "It was really cool for such an unknown new kid on the block," he says.
Since then, his new dream has only grown—especially with the release of his debut single. "We wrote the song over Skype. I was in South Africa and it was still nighttime for me, but we spent about eight hours working on 'Into the Wild,'" he says. "We wanted to make a song that reminds people what makes Africa so exciting and adventurous."
That's exactly what he did, and we have your exclusive first look at his lyric video for "Into the Wild" below. His EP is coming out soon, and he's calling his sound an entirely new genre. "It's a really fresh sound. We're actually crafting something really unique and really original—almost a new sound. We call it the Connell Cruise sound," he says, laughing. "It's all the really awesome wild, adventurous things from Africa combined with music from Europe and America combined in a really fun vibrant way. When people hear it on the radio, they'll know it's one of my tracks."
