‘I Think I’m Just a Curious Person’: Addison Rae on Her Quest for Pop Perfection

It’s the day before Addison Rae drops her first EP, titled AR, and the TikTok megastar turned musician is in a reflective mood. “I’m feeling very grateful and content,” she says over Zoom from her home in Los Angeles, wearing a vintage baby pink Marc Jacobs tee with the slogan “Protect the skin you’re in” printed over a nude Chloë Sevigny. “I’ve been a little bit nervous, but I’m less nervous now. I feel like I’ve had enough time with these songs, and now I can breathe a sigh of relief that they’re finally going to be officially out in the world.” Even if releasing these songs in this manner was never part of the plan (more on that later), for Rae, making music was always part of the plan. A little like Britney Spears, another pop ingenue who was catapulted to fame as a teen, Rae came from humble beginnings in the Louisiana suburbs; despite a bumpy childhood that included a stint living in a mobile home, her early promise as a performer encouraged her parents to scrape together what they could to support her entering the world of competitive dance. Years of grinding followed (and, you could argue, never really ended) as she set her sights on Los Angeles and stardom—a dream that would come to fruition thanks to TikTok, which Rae first joined in 2019. It’s surreal to think it’s been less than four years since a handful of dancing teenagers rocketed to overnight global fame—Rae now has 88.5 million followers on TikTok and 37 million on Instagram—but even more surreal, you might imagine, to have lived through it. “I grew up as a really big fan of MTV, watching all the music videos and recreating the music videos in my bedroom, and being like, I want to do that one day,” she says of this whirlwind journey. “So it was always a dream, but it felt like a very distant dream, you know? I feel like a lot of people have that dream, but it feels so far away. Growing up in Louisiana, too…it’s a very different world. It was crazy. But for me, it’s always come down to the joy of performing.” Rae’s success also comes down to the kind of effervescent charm and charisma you can’t manufacture; the kind that radiates even through a computer screen from where I sit some 5,000 miles away. But while that played one part in her stratospheric rise, the other part was simply hard work. When she landed her first acting role in Netflix’s He’s All That, she spent eight weeks working intensively with an acting coach, and when it came to business, she was one of the shrewdest operators within her TikTok cohort, parlaying her success on the platform into a multi-million-dollar beauty brand and a multi-picture “creative partnership” with Netflix. And so it was with her approach to music. When Rae first began vocal lessons and studio sessions in earnest back in 2020, she opted to fund them entirely herself rather than sign with a label, meaning she could choose her own collaborators. Naturally, she already had an extensive list of hitmakers in mind, including the Swedish pop powerhouse Rami Yacoub, whose songwriting and production work has spanned everything from Spears’s “...Baby One More Time” to Beyoncé’s “Alien Superstar,” and his fellow countryman and Max Martin protégé Oscar Görres. “The Swedes always know what’s up when it comes to pop music,” Rae laughs.