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"FacebookPinterest\n\n When I interviewed Wouter \"Wally\" De Backer, AKA Gotye, for Australian GQ last year, the symptoms of his fame were small, like getting recognized at his local bakery, or complimentary waffles from a waitress with a crush (\"We accidentally made too many and I thought you'd maybe like them.\") Despite the burgeoning success of his song \"Somebody That I Used To Know,\" he proved devastatingly affable: an unassuming independent musician from the outer Melbourne suburbs, interested in Depeche Mode and the audiophilic nuances of vinyl. \n\n That was late 2011 and that was Wally: a 31-year-old with two quietly acclaimed alt-pop albums\u2014a third gaining momentum\u2014and a solid niche in the Australian indie scene. In the few months since we met, his gateway drug of a pop hit shot to number one in a dozen countries. Suddenly, Wally was being Glee, Gossip Girl and 90210-ified. Suddenly, Wally had more than 140 million people studying his naked torso in 1080p.\n\n So at his sold-out London show, I was ready to forgive him some pop machismo. Walking into the dressing room, all he could offer was spirited\u2014sober!\u2014bonhomie, a big grin, and a slice of chocolate mousse cake. We chatted about his skyrocketing fame.\n\n\n\nGQ: How have you been since London?\n\n Gotye: The Europe tour was really good. Lots of little highlights. Unfortunately\u2014and it's almost to be expected\u2014I got really sick, for like nine days. I've had a really heavy flu. I felt really shithouse. And I was so bored. Belgian television...struggled to sustain my interest.\n\nGQ: You hold yourself to really high standards when it comes to the technicalities of your shows. Has this newly global attention amplified those tendencies?\n\n Gotye: I want to be at the top of my game. Doing shows is a chance to show off to a few thousand people every night that there's a lot more to what I do than, y'know, \"That Guy Who Sings the Song with the Face Paint and the Girl.\"\n\n For a lot of people, that's their entry point. I got that sense, walking around New York and Washington these past few days, there's a few people going, \"Oh you're the guy who sings! Aren't you! I love your song!\" They probably wouldn't be able to tell me what the name of the act is. Or the song, for that matter. Shows are a chance to show more dimension.\n\n\n\nGQ: Glee, Saturday Night Live this week\u2014you keep hitting new levels of exposure. Are there symptoms of all of this in your everyday life? Are you being recognized more?\n\n Gotye: I don't feel like there have been many major things. I've become more aware when I'm wandering around strange cities. I've realized that I'm more self-conscious, maybe, than I once was. There's something about it that makes me feel not quite at ease: that people are looking at me all the time. I don't particularly like that feeling. It'd be nice to lose that.\n\n Maybe I'm not even aware of how much low-level mental time I'm spending mapping what's going on around me. Trying to match that up what it is to be me as a guy, with the guy who's a Proper Pop Star...whose music is now being listened to by millions of people, instead of thousands.\n\n It's like, Stop thinking about that. Wait, why are you thinking about that? \n\nGQ: Maybe it's the Pop Star Condition. 140 million views later...\n\n Gotye: It's nothing particularly interesting. It's kind of boring, the conclusions I'm coming to [laughs]. It is there, somehow. I'm trying to ignore it, or get over it.\n\nGQ: Obviously, all of these plays, number ones, and sold-out tours, you must have a big influx in cash. You've been an independent artist for a decade. How have you treated yourself?\n\n Gotye: Right now, it's an outgoing expenditure thing. Royalties take about nine months to come through. At the moment, it's totally an outgoing expenditure thing: you'd be amazed how the accounts drain when you're taking 11 people around the world.\n\n Once this tour's finished, I'm looking forward to taking stock with an accountant. I've been trying to make sure that it's managed well. Cash flow becomes a challenge.\n\nGQ: Cash flow? C'mon. You haven't splashed out on anything?\n\n Gotye: Hey, I went to Uniqlo and bought a new jacket. I got a great jacket for fifty dollars! And I got a tricked-out, two-terabyte hard drive. How's that? And it's got Thunderbolt! I just bought the Rolls Royce of hard drives!\n\nGQ: Tell me about your time in L.A.\n\n Gotye: There were a few great little L.A. \"meetings.\" The kind of \"meetings\" meetings that were like, a day before if someone had told me, I would have been, \"Nah. Not going to happen.\"\n\n Meeting Dr. Luke was definitely one of them. Really, he's a very regular guy on some levels. On the other hand, there's a very intense level of engagement with success. And obviously, the man is more successful than anybody else in the pop music songwriting game.\n\n We sat for an hour, and I was um-ing and ah-ing, thinking, Should I even ask? I've got to do it. I asked if he could play me some tracks he was working on. He was totally enthusiastic. He couldn't wait to play all the stuff he'd been writing for Nicki Minaj and Katy Perry and new Ke$ha stuff. It was crazy. Tracks would be playing with his lead lines on it\u2014he sings his own lead lines and hard auto-tunes his own voice. The tracks sounded so massive.\n\n It's like: This is the radio, right now. This can't be a demo.\n\nGQ: You mentioned his very intense engagement with success. How does he measure it?\n\n Gotye: It's the difference between hearing your track on the radio, and doing what he can do now: tune to every radio station on his dial and one of his songs is playing, at the same time. I guess it's a different barometer [laughs].\n\nGQ: How has this album cycle compared to your two previous?\n\n Gotye: Well, I could tour for another year, year-and-a-half, easily. But there is a part of me that's very ready to put things on pause.\n\n Touring relentlessly for the sake of, I don't know, \"backing up\" or \"cashing in\" is definitely not number one on my \"that's what I should do\" list. I'm not quite sure. I'm drawn to write new stuff, or explore some of the opportunities that have come up.\n\nGQ: So is the prospect of writing for the next record more terrifying or exciting?\n\n Gotye: It is daunting. I really pushed myself to try techniques and ways of writing songs that I hadn't done on my own before. Some of them really failed. I feel like I owe it to myself to try something very different: to go down a different path. Maybe investigating a very electronic palate or doing something very acoustic, stripped-back and introspective&amp;amp;#x2013;maybe downbeat. Maybe it's finding a different register in my voice. Maybe I shouldn't make another record that's a mid bag. A record that isn't genre-hopping, schizophrenic pop. I don't know if I'll be able to do that or whether I'll enjoy it or quite what I should do.\n\n There's an element of trepidation and anxiety. There's a part of me that really wants to throw myself in it. Some of it, of course, is the reaction to the success. Could I make a record that\u2014as a whole album\u2014feels as genreless or idiosyncratic as this track does? It seems to have this potency that people have felt\u2014could I do that across a whole record?\n\nGQ: What has been the biggest material difference between this album cycle and the last?\n\n Gotye: [laughs] It doesn't take a lot to please me. When there's a simple, nice spread of food waiting at the venue. You rock in in the morning, on the bus, and there's some fresh fruit and good bread and good jam and butter\u2014it's pretty much all I need. I'm like, \"I've made it! This is amazing!\"\n\n The other thing is a good bed. When you're staying at a nice hotel, they have really good mattresses. It's kinda nice. I spent six, seven years, especially with [Melbourne three-piece] The Basics, sleeping in some very questionable places on friends' floors, or in the corner of rooms, on a blanket [laughs].\n\nGQ: What was your worst night sleep, then?\n\n Gotye: I vividly remember me and [Basics bandmate] Kris Schroeder sharing a couch at a friend, Fiona's, little apartment in London. It was less than even a single bed's width. We were straight-as-a-plank, sleeping Dracula-style with our hands crossed over our chests, under a single blanket. We couldn't even move to the side without inevitably spooning each other.\n\n But those memories are more vivid than staying in a nice bed in room 712 at the Hyatt in, y'know, Hamburg\u2014they stay with you."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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