Pop’s unofficial therapist
Ever-enthusiastic radio host Zane Lowe can coax unusual realness out of megastars
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 shape the narrative, and the placement, of the songs we hear.
As one of the largest digital music services, Apple is a mustvisit 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 obsessivecompulsive 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. Hiphop 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 has 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. “... 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.”
Talking with Lowe, said Trent
Reznor, the Nine Inch Nails frontman 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.”
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, 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 fulltime artist,’ ” Lowe recalled. 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.”
Lowe has been broadcasting from the Hollywood home he shares with his wife, Kara Walters, and two sons, ages 11 and 14.
If his social media can sometimes take on a California-Zenkoan 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 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.
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.
“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.”