The New Zealand DJ's interviews on Apple's Beats 1 have gone from promotional stops to opportunities for deep thoughts, anchored by an impulse to share his own story.
Justin Bieber cried. Hayley Williams too.
Sitting in a studio in Culver City, California, opposite Zane Lowe, the gray-stubbled Beats 1 host and Apple Music honcho, musicians tend to unspool, even shed a tear. They talk about their albums, but also their divorces and regrets, their influences and coping mechanisms. It's therapy, but for an audience of millions, and with a propulsive, ever-enthusiastic host who also helps shapes the narrative, and the placement, of the songs we hear.
As one of the largest digital music services, Apple is a must-visit for musicians pitching a record, and Lowe — who, as Apple Music's global creative director and co-head of artist relations, helps oversee programming for its radio station Beats 1, and anchors several shows — is its cheerleading emissary. With major artists increasingly eschewing interviews with traditional journalists, he still manages to reel in big names.
"I'm not really promoting," Lady Gaga said when she stopped by recently to discuss Chromatica, her latest album. "I view this conversation as something that I would want to do anyway. You know how I feel about your perception of music and how it affects people and the world."
Since 2014, when Lowe, now 46, was recruited from London and the BBC to join Apple in California, he has emerged as a trusted figure — a hyped-up fan stand-in who artists also view as a peer and a pleasure to talk to. But over the past year, Lowe's role has shifted. His conversations started veering into how the creative process intersects with mental illness or emotional stability, and he leaned into it, using himself as an example: He has anxiety, he will freely tell you, and obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Even before the coronavirus pandemic, revealing his own struggles helped others open up. Now that everyone wants to talk about their mental state, Lowe is primed to coax unusual realness out of locked-off megastars. Hip-hop has Charlamagne tha God; comedy has Marc Maron. And pop music has Lowe.
"His empathy is evident, and he's not afraid to level with you about things that are often not talked about in a promotional environment," Williams, the Paramore frontwoman, wrote in an email. She's been on his show with her band and, most recently, as a solo artist. "Did you not have a normal childhood?" he asked her, 10 minutes in. He mentioned his own depression in a way that presupposed that she'd gone through something similar. It was, in fact, some of the same stuff she'd been talking about with her therapist. In her 15-year career, it's the first and only time she's cried in an interview, she said.
Lowe's hourlong daily interviews are a promotional stop, for sure, but they don't feel that way for performers. "Never once have I felt like I was selling myself or even selling an album while doing promo with Zane," Williams said. "Thank God for that. There's genuine curiosity in his voice, and the allowance for vulnerability means that nobody has to walk away feeling misrepresented."
Lowe's friend Mark Ronson, the musician and producer, said: "He's extraordinarily perceptive. He'll mention something to me or notice the way I've been acting the past month — just kind of notice something that I didn't even notice in myself."
Another friend, the country star Keith Urban, wrote in an email, "He knows I don't wanna just be interviewed. I want a conversation."
Talking with Lowe, said Trent Reznor, who helped bring him to Beats radio, "you feel safe."
If a Beats 1 interview is a release valve for artists, it functions the same way for Lowe, especially lately. "I have these voices that I'm trying to bury through work and productivity, just like everybody else," he said. In the past, "the simple thing for me was to go really deep into music — just pull the thread and go deep, deep, deep."
For as long as he can remember, Lowe has had obsessive-compulsive tendencies — a need to "know the tap is off, know the door is locked," he said. "It never got to the point where it was debilitating," physically, but it nagged him mentally. "I was so obsessed with things in my head, I couldn't shake them — spiralling," he explained. "It took me a solid four years of therapy and work to find a pathway where I could see what the road [out] looked like, and I had the tools to be able to take that road."
He didn't talk about it while he was going through it, when he was a DJ on BBC Radio 1, anchoring its flagship music show. But over the last few years, as he settled into his role at Apple (which bought Beats in 2014), he has been increasingly open about his anxieties and mental health.
Lowe feels a kinship with artists because he is one: He has writing and producing credits on Sam Smith's In the Lonely Hour, which earned him a Grammy nomination in 2015. As a DJ, he's played Glastonbury and Coachella, and opened for Skrillex and the Foo Fighters. In the '90s, before he left his Auckland hometown, he was in hip-hop groups with some local hits.
It was only a few years ago, he said, through a conversation with the British rapper Mike Skinner, better known as the Streets, that Lowe understood the tension that sustained him. Skinner told him, "You kind of have a restlessness to you, and you feel frustrated that you can't be a full-time artist,'" Lowe recalled. "And I'm like, 'go on.'" Because it was true: As much success as he'd had, a part of him still wondered if he'd failed by not pursuing music full time — or, worse, if he'd been driven away by self-doubt.
Skinner's advice was to dive into that. "You have this unresolved artistic ambition, and you drive it through your conversations, and you help us," Skinner said.
It all clicked for Lowe. Now, he said, "I really want to continue to learn the language of the artist, and how they think and how they speak, because it's in me. I just haven't been able to speak it as fluently."
He was introduced to music broadcasting early, courtesy of his father, Derek, a founder of Radio Hauraki, New Zealand's pirate radio. (In the '60s, "They fought the government for the right to broadcast and play rock 'n' roll," Lowe said, "and they won! It's the kind of stuff Richard Curtis makes movies about.")
One of his earliest memories — "I must've only been like 2"— is seeing a large cardboard cutout of the prismatic triangle from Dark Side of the Moon at his dad's station. Then there was the rifling through his older brother's record collection, where he discovered the Cure, and the influence of his mother, Liz, a career counsellor, who introduced him to Joni Mitchell and Tom Petty.
Though they arrived in New Zealand six weeks out of date, he collected copies of NME and Melody Maker, the British music magazines, and meticulously cut out the articles to make his own scrapbooks. "I remember the first Public Enemy article, I remember exactly what the picture was," he said, still sounding awed.
Ronson vouched for him as a fellow music geek. When California went on lockdown, Lowe started making and sharing long playlists — "beautifully obscure soul and jazz, records from the '60s and '70s, things that even in my 15 or more years of being tight with Zane, I didn't even know he was up on," Ronson said.
The playlists have blossomed into Lowe's latest show, At Home with Apple Music, in which artists share their own mixes with him. Quarantine has been a vehicle for self-reflection for his guests, sometimes in uncomfortable ways. "Without the touring and the promo and the need for others to ask questions about themselves, to hyper focus on their own lives, they're starting to find themselves a quieter space," he said. "There's a lot more introspection going on."
Maybe — he thinks certainly — that will make for some great music down the line. But as Hélöise Letissier of Christine and the Queens told him, "she had to start listening to herself and unpack the things that had given her a sense of unease" first, he said.
Lowe has been broadcasting from the Hollywood home he shares with his wife, Kara Walters, and two sons, ages 11 and 14 — like all of us searching for the room with the most robust Wi-Fi and best angle for a video chat. (In his case he's trying to position himself to block out an air vent: "I'm talking to Future the other day, he's so intense and so amazing when he talks — he's like jazz improv, like Charlie Parker — and I'm thinking, like, air vent! Jesus Christ, get your head in front of the air vent!")
When Reznor, the Nine Inch Nails frontman, began working on Beats 1 with Jimmy Iovine, he had a vision for a radio show that was almost entirely cribbed from Lowe's BBC program, on which he'd been a guest — "something that feels live, and it feels global," Reznor said. "Let's see if it's possible to have a monoculture in this world."
"He very much lived up to what I hoped for in that capacity," Reznor added.
Lowe's musical boosterism knows few bounds. Talking with Selena Gomez about her track A Sweeter Place, which features Kid Cudi, he spared no hyperbole pronouncing Cudi "one of the cornerstone artists of our time." But Lowe isn't bound to the rules that guide critics or reporters — he traffics in enthusiasm, which can be intoxicating, especially when delivered in his signature rapid-fire radio patter, where he hardly seems to take a breath between fervours. During interviews, he often stands in the studio, gesticulating toward his seated guests like a hip life coach, clad in square black glasses, stubble always dotting his shaved head.
Asked if Lowe was equally full-tilt off-air, Reznor paused to chuckle for a while. "Yes, in my experience," he said. "You're getting 100 per cent authentic Zane at all times."
In three conversations, Lowe was unfailingly forthcoming and polite, thanking me repeatedly for allowing him to talk about himself, which is, you know, the point of an interview. If his social media can sometimes take on a California-Zen-koan vibe — "Frustration is desire for growth" — in his interviews he is remarkably good at meeting his subjects where they're at.
With Bieber, who did his first in-person sit down early this year, Lowe gently probed into the star's fraught relationship with his parents, and tumultuous behavior (Bieber: "I don't know if I would have been alive" if he hadn't cleaned up) before pivoting to calling Bieber a mature leader. A humbled Bieber thanks him, more than once, for asking tough questions and allowing him the space to emote. "I'm not thinking of anything except being present in this interview with you," he said.
For Lowe, discovering that artists might be going through the same hurdles he had — and that they might be ready to share it with him, and his audience — changed his perception of their work. "I just started to listen to music differently," he said, searching beneath the lyrics, "the melody and the energy — there were other things buried in there." And, he realized, he was adept at excavating them.
In songwriting, "there's the work," he said. "The result and the process. Those two things I love and I have spent my life having those conversations." But now, "it's more about the spirit. Maybe at this point in my life, I'm better equipped to have those conversations, and add something of depth."
Lowe rarely revisits his interviews (they exist as audio and video) but recently did watch his talk with Thom Yorke, of Radiohead. "It was the first time he and I had that kind of conversation," Lowe said, "when he was fun and open and just went there. It was such a thrill for me, I wanted to relive it."
"It's the closest these days to knowing how an artist feels when they finish a song or an album," he added. "They get the joy of making it, and I get the joy of being there, and I just think about the next conversation I can have."
Written by: Melena Ryzik
Photographs by: Michael Schmelling
© 2020 THE NEW YORK TIMES