What if, instead of lusting after Stacy’s mom, you wanted to date Stacy’s brother? That was the question that singer Mad Tsai asked himself while writing his 2022 single “Stacy’s Brother,” a reinterpretation of the 2003 Fountains of Wayne hit. Thanks to its clever plot-twist lyrics, the song went viral last fall, along with a cinematic music video that acts as a queer teen fantasy, ending with Tsai and his new lover making out in the abandoned band room. Coming from the 21-year-old Taiwanese and part-Peruvian artist born Jonathan Tsai, the song and video felt like a total subversion from the typical depictions of the American high school experience, with listeners immediately latching onto Tsai’s pithy storytelling that he translates into fun hooks.
Gaining over a million listeners in the past three years, Tsai has emerged as a Gen-Z icon who’s reimagining a world where queer Asian and Latinx boys can become the main characters of their own stories. Writing all his songs so far by himself, including his breakthrough 2020 single “boy bi” and his 2022 debut EP homecoming!, the artist born Jonathan Tsai has forged his own kind of independent pop stardom based on humor, sincerity, and a will to break the status quo. He also comes up with concepts for all his detailed narrative music videos, many of which unpack the horrors and disillusionment of high school — all through his earnest and self-deprecating bedroom pop melodies. His early success has already led him to create an original song, "Here Comes the Bride," for last year’s Sony thriller, The Invitation. All the while, he’s been pursuing a major in Music Industry and History at UCLA, where he will graduate this June.
On April 27, Tsai released the new single “In My Head,” a somber pop ballad, whose melody interpolates “The Avatar’s Love” theme from Avatar: The Last Airbender. It continues the storyline from “Stacy’s Brother” by revealing that Tsai’s relationship with his new beau is “bound to end, isn’t meant to be, and doesn’t really exist,” he tells Teen Vogue on a video call from Tokyo, where he’s spending his senior year spring break. In the song’s music video, the montage of memories between the couple starts to glitch, and in the end, Tsai is left by himself, standing in an empty parking lot. “Guess happy endings only happen in my head,” he sings over the song’s swelling strings.
“Stacy’s Brother” and “In My Head” are the first two singles on Tsai’s forthcoming EP, Teenage Nightmare, which will interrogate idealistic media narratives around romance, coming-of-age, and the “American dream,” he explains. These ideas stem from the fact that, in adolescence, he would “hyperfixate” on teen dramas like Perks of Being a Wallflower, Edge of Seventeen, and Breakfast Club, and wonder why his own upbringing in Fountain Valley, California, wasn’t nearly as exciting. “I remember thinking, ‘How come my life does not look like that?’” he recalls. “[Watching those movies growing up] I just remember feeling othered. [...] I felt like my story was not being told in a proper way. I felt like I didn't really have a voice or any autonomy in how these stories were playing out.”
That’s partly why it was so important for Tsai to get the rights to sample the song from Avatar, his favorite show and “my first view of representation for Asians,” he says, for “In My Head.” The song also took on special significance considering it became his late grandmother’s favorite. He would play it for her in the hospital while she was getting treatment for her cancer, before she passed away last December. “It’s a very near and dear song to my heart,” he says.
“In My Head” is also a critical part of Teenage Nightmare’s overall message that “the American dream and American coming-of-age isn’t real,” Tsai explains. As a high schooler who didn’t have many friends and had his nose in the books, aspiring to be valedictorian, he spent so much idealizing what his life was supposed to look like, that he never really stopped to appreciate it for what it was. He’s written about feeling like a “background character” in his own life on his 2020 song “That Friend,” but with his new material, he’s giving himself a chance to see himself in a new role. “[Teenage Nightmare] is me going back in time to rewrite some of my story, to place myself in this main character role and live out some of my fantasies, while also deciding for myself what I want in life.”
“I think all my music in a way is part of me healing my inner child,” Tsai continues, hoping that showing his own journey can help others. “I needed that shake on the shoulder, just that jolt of [someone else telling me], ‘You will survive, you will live on another day, and it'll be fine,” he says of his younger self. Then he grins. “I think the fun thing about having a shit coming-of-age is you get to tell other people who are also having a shit coming-of-age all the advice that you wish you heard.”
Although Tsai claims that his upbringing wasn’t fun, he’s a natural storyteller who is able to make any anecdote funny. When he describes the group piano lessons he received as a kid, he goes on a tangent about how his unconcerned teacher never taught him how to read sheet music and chain-smoked cigarettes; “He’d be like, ‘Yeah, just practice,’ and then go outside for five minutes and come back smelling like smoke,” he laughs. Then when describing his early musical education based on watching musicals like Phantom of the Opera and Annie, he has to pause to talk about the Enya CD that he’d listen to every night. “Oh my god, I love Enya,” he gushes. “I aspire to be her and live in a castle in the middle of nowhere… She’s a badass.”
Everything changed when Tsai discovered Tumblr around 2012. “The minute I got my grubby little hands on a laptop, I was unstoppable,” he says. He found himself on the corner of the internet where was depressed and portrayed it through photos of beautiful oil spills. It was then that he was introduced to his musical idols Lana Del Rey and Marina and the Diamonds — “I still think that she needs her flowers because she paved the way for so many alternative and bubblegum pop acts, myself included,” he says about the latter artist — and got a knack for thinking creatively across media. “I think [Tumblr] helped me curate aesthetics and concepts and ideas of what I like in music.”
So like a true Tumblr kid, Tsai picked up a ukulele and started writing songs at age 13. His next EP after Teenage Nightmare, he says, will pull from some of these lyrical ideas he penned in middle school. “I was writing dark ass shit,” he reflects now. “I'm terrified for little me back then, because I was writing about stuff like, ‘I want to die.’ It was so angsty. It was really bad. I look at those songs, and I'm like, ‘Whoa, whoa, what the heck was I going through.’ But also it helped me be intuitive about how I'm feeling and how to tangibly put my thoughts into song form.”
After releasing original songs and covers through his teen years, Tsai skyrocketed to online visibility with 2020’s “boy bi,” which racked up millions of YouTube views in months. On the lighthearted ukulele song, he sings about his bisexual confusion in a string of extremely relatable lines; “Like I’m watching a Disney movie and the couple gets it on / But who should I look at, is it Shang or Mulan?” goes one. “It is a song that I wrote in five minutes in my bedroom, and I just released it on a whim,” Tsai says now of “boy bi.” “It was something that just came out of me naturally. It wasn't meant to be shared on such a huge, huge level.”
Though he’s gotten some hateful comments calling the song “cheesy,” Tsai doesn’t regret releasing the track, which he used to come out to his mom in a TikTok that’s gotten 1.1 million views. “I wish when I was 13 that I had these songs growing up,” he says. “I would be 10 times more confident now, if I had this cheesiness to sing along to and get it out of my system.” He then adds, “But also, it doesn't mean that I'm going to stay in that lane forever. I'm still growing and learning as an artist on the job.”
But if “boy bi” put Tsai on the map, then 2021’s “Killer Queen” was the song that made him truly feel like he could make music for a living. On the upbeat synth-pop song, he sings of a bloody prom queen, like in the classic film Carrie, who plots revenge on the cheerleaders and jocks. Made entirely in his dorm room over Discord, the song is now one of his most popular to date, with listeners clearly resonating with its campy horror themes. “I think a lot of queer people can relate to horror characters, like Carrie, who are othered and treated differently, but rise above to avenge themselves and advocate for themselves,” Tsai says.
While filming the “Stacy’s Brother” video, Tsai then had to play the role of the hot football player, which he felt strange, but also cathartic, since he was actually insecure in high school. “I [was] playing this character who is confident and self-assured,” he explains. “It was like, psychologically when you tell yourself a lie, you start to believe it. I feel like that was what I was doing. I was playing this role on camera, and I was in a way gaining a little bit of that confidence along the way.”
While talking about his goals to come, Tsai mentions a couple names like Taylor Swift and Lizzy McAlpine — artists who have found success with their detailed, heart-penetrating songwriting. But then he pauses, realizing what he really wants in his career. “I think the thing that I am craving, now more than ever, is to just shape who I am in my own lane,” he declares. “I'm realizing that my biggest fear is actually not having an identity of my own.”
Tsai knows there’s going to be a learning curve, but he has too many ideas and ambitions to give up soon. A vision of the future flashes across his face. He quickly figures out how to sum up what he sees for himself: “Once I get that budget, I'm just going to be a menace about it,” he says, smiling.
