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Aussie Singer Brendan Maclean Is Ready for the Next Big Bang

After bearing his soul on a deeply personal album, the gay pop musician wants to write some bops.

There’s a car alarm going off steps away from the Hell’s Kitchen gay bar where the Australian musician and actor Brendan Maclean is trying to enjoy a gin and tonic. “The sounds of New York!” Maclean says just as a fire truck comes barreling up 10th Avenue, its siren drowning out the car alarm. “I love it. I keep recording bits of it. It’s so noisy and wonderful. I’ve done that before when I went to Italy: the sounds of each city. And this one is just loud.

Maclean recently played a show in support of his latest album, And the Boyfriends, at Club Cumming, the East Village queer bar and entertainment space owned by Alan Cumming. Maclean’s concerts vary depending on the venue. In Australia, he played with the makeshift band he and producer Sarah Belkner assembled to record And the Boyfriends. Here in the States, he’s performed solo, with a backing track on his more dance-pop infused tracks, and with a piano and ukulele on others. His gig at the intimate Club Cumming was fairly stripped down compared to the one he played at The Basement in Atlanta a week earlier.

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BRENDAN MACLEAN - Live in Atlanta at The Basement - 8/17/19. Featuring Chelsea Shag, Iv Fischer, Taylor Alxndr, and Kimber! Presented by Nonsense ATL, Wussy Magazing, and This Free Life. Photos by Oh Snap!

Brendan Maclean performing live at The Basement in Atlanta in August 2019.

With no plans to book more U.S. shows, Maclean is sticking around New York for the next couple of weeks to write and record some new songs with producer Alex Suarez, his primary collaborator on his first album, funbang1, which debuted at No. 2 on the Australian indie charts. “I’ll dip back into that pop world that I love,” he says, “but I don’t want to predict anything. It might be totally different to what we wrote last time.”

It wouldn’t be the first time he's switched things up. After a series of breakout bops including the loping “Hugs Not Drugs” and the kinetic “Tectonic”—as well as the aggressively NSFW video for “House of Air,” which featured super-explicit depictions of various types of queer sex—Maclean opted for a moodier vibe for And the Boyfriends, which he released in March. He and Belkner spent two years painstakingly perfecting the album’s sound as well as its lyrics. The songs deal with Maclean’s difficult childhood and a physically abusive relationship he found himself in a few years ago.

Brock Elbank

Brendan Maclean.

Maclean.

“I knew it was going to be a different album,” he explains. “You get responses that come from different places in people’s hearts. I get letters about it, people reaching out to say I made them think about things a different way.”

Maclean describes himself as a “Billy Elliot cliché.” He discovered dance while taking karate classes as a kid, and quickly developed a passion for performing. Dance led him to theater, which led him to music. He took up the piano in high school, hiding out in the music room to avoid getting beat up and called a "faggot" at lunch.

“I didn’t really know I could sing until I was 19 or 20,” he says. “Music was the thing I could go home to. I didn’t need a teacher. I didn’t need a classroom. Music is a friend—the song was there with me in the room. You’re never alone with music. It’s my only good addiction, or hobby that got out of hand.”

For a while he struggled to balance music and acting. He landed a role in Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 adaptation of The Great Gatsby playing a manic showman named Klipspringer (“I think that’s how Baz works: He likes people who are the thing.”), and toured Australia with the hit cabaret musical Velvet. But he worried he wouldn’t be taken seriously as an actor or a musician if he did both.

These days, however, Maclean puts things in simpler terms. “I’m entertaining,” he says. “Whatever that is, that’s my job.”

Jeff Andersen

Brendan Maclean.

One arena in which the 31-year-old never expected to make an impact, however, is TikTok. But recently a friend pointed out that people have been creating short videos featuring the first line of his 2013 song “Stupid”: “If you weren’t so stupid / I could have loved you.” According to Maclean, there have been more than 115,000 videos posted of people singing along to it in the past month.

“It’s just the first line of it. Maybe someone popular did it first?” he speculates. “I stay away from it. I don’t belong there!”

As for his upcoming songwriting sessions, Maclean hopes to recapture some of funbang1’s optimism and spontaneity. But he doesn’t have a concrete plan or time line for his next release. He’s more attracted to an old-school music industry model that seems to be making a comeback in the streaming age: releasing a single every couple of months rather than laboring over a set of nine to 12 songs and calling it an album. “I’m certainly not here because anyone’s paid me to work,” he says. “I’m making this happen because I feel I have enough energy to offer my career more songs.”

“I think what people like about me,” Maclean continues, “is that I’m always just doing what I’m doing, whatever it is, to the best of my abilities. I like dancing and singing and acting. I don’t take up that much room in the world.”

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