Mad Tsai is coming into his own as a pop star. When we speak, the 25-year-old singer-songwriter is preparing for his first world tour—a run through Europe, the U.K. and North America beginning this September. He is back in vocal lessons, working with a choreographer on how to move better onstage, assembling decks for the production design and thinking through a set list that will translate the strange, dark world of his new EP, CANINES, into a live show.
“I put a lot of pressure on myself, but I kind of had to sit back and, like, really just tell myself, like, I need to start prepping now, and just take it slow, and, like, find joy in the process of becoming an artist,” he says. “I’m just focused on becoming a better singer, a better dancer, a better performer, as well as a better artist as a whole.”
It is funny to hear Tsai (real name: Jonathan Tsai) describe himself as still “becoming” an artist. I first encountered him like many others: online, when clips from his breakout track “Stacy’s Brother” suddenly seemed to be everywhere. Released in 2022, the song cheekily flipped the premise of Fountains of Wayne’s rock anthem “Stacy’s Mom,” accompanied by a provocative music video that pushed the joke even further. It was catchy, subversive and knowingly over-the-top, but what stuck with me almost as much as the song was the personality behind it. Follow Tsai online and you quickly encounter someone funny, unfiltered and unusually willing to say exactly what he thinks.
As Tsai explains, that confidence was hard won. Raised in the suburbs of Orange County, California, Tsai—who is of Taiwanese and Peruvian descent—started writing songs at 13 but had little idea how someone like him was supposed to turn them into a career.
“I always kind of had, like, the little dream in my head that I wanted to be a singer and be an artist, but I really just didn’t tangibly know how I could do that,” he says. “I was a kid in the suburbs of Orange County and, like, there is no music anything. There’s just nothing happening.”
Like plenty of aspiring musicians, he imagined discovery as something that might simply happen to him. “I had this idea that, like, if I put out my little songs that I wrote on my shitty piano back at home, and that I recorded on my iPad, like, some A&R at a record label would find me and, like, sweep me away to L.A., and, like, I would be, like, a star or whatever,” he reflects. Instead, Tsai went to UCLA to study English, initially imagining a career in music journalism before adding music industry as a second major.
Then lockdown sent him home. With little to lose, Tsai began posting songs online for fun and discovered that strangers were actually listening. Early signs like “Boy Bi” and “Killer Queen” built an early audience before “Stacy’s Brother” broke through much more widely. “I feel like ‘Stacy’s Brother’ is when my bubble kind of bursted,” he says. “A lot of people that weren’t introduced to me, or didn’t know about me prior, found out about me through the music video and through the song.”
There was no record-label fairy tale behind this story. Tsai stayed independent for five years, writing every song he released, learning production, developing music-video treatments and self-funding his work while juggling UCLA and a restaurant job. Eventually music became demanding enough that he dropped English and graduated with his music industry degree. “It was very, very self-contained, and it felt very scary, but also, like, very liberating,” he says, “because I was living my creative dreams on my own terms.”
Along the way, Tsai also found a more outspoken public voice. As a non-white mixed race Asian, he has spoken candidly online about Asian and mixed-race representation, including conversations that can become contentious over who gets recognized as Asian and what representation is supposed to look like. It is an unexpected position for someone who describes himself as an intensely shy child.
“I used to be really, really shy. Like, I used to be so introverted, and I still am pretty introverted,” he says. “I faced a lot of shit when I was growing up. Like, I was pushed around, and I didn’t really have the best time.” Those experiences ultimately made him more willing to speak as an adult, even when he knows not everyone will like what he has to say. “I think of everything as, like, a conversation,” he says. “At the end of the day, you can’t appease everyone.”
He would rather risk saying too much than say nothing at all. “I would rather start an uncomfortable conversation and have it move us forward, rather than stay silent and be complicit with a shitty situation, or, like, shitty treatment of us,” he says. “You know, as a community.”
CANINES, his third EP, arrives at a moment when that confidence is increasingly audible in the music itself. Where Homecoming! and Teenage Nightmare were rooted in coming of age and adolescent angst, Tsai describes the new project as “stepping into my own skin as an artist.” The sound is broader—moving through pop, R&B, rock, Brazilian funk and harder electronic influences—but Tsai is less interested in genre exercises than in allowing himself more room to experiment.
The title gave him a world to build around it. “You either think of canines as in dogs, or you think of canines as in teeth,” he says. “CANINES has this very animalistic, angry, sharp kind of imagery to it.” Inspired partly by Anne Rice and Interview with the Vampire, Tsai layered the project with Gothic and religious imagery and invented a mythological figure, Saint Canine, whom he calls “the king of sensation.”
Some of that imagery reaches back to his own upbringing. Tsai’s mother and grandparents grew up Catholic, and he grew up around the church; as an adult, he has taken that visual language and repurposed it for his own mythology. “I kind of wanted to create, like, a myth, in its own storytelling, around this project,” he says.
Yet the record became more personal as he made it. Tsai says CANINES initially began as a full-fledged pop record—“only just bangers”—with songs like “BITE,” “DIET” and “MONTEREY” inhabiting what he describes as a “Gothic, like, church underground rave.” As the project developed, however, he began writing songs that pulled him out of that fantasy and revealed more of what was happening underneath.
On “NO ONE’S SON,” Tsai plays with the title’s double meaning: he initially considered spelling it “sun,” extending the album’s vampire mythology while describing the feeling that “I’m not the light of anybody’s life.” Changing it to “son” opened up something more personal. “It feels like I’m not very attached to anything around me,” he says. “Like, it feels like I’m a free agent, and I feel very foreign in my own self, in my own life and my relationships.”
That introspection culminates with “WISDOM TOOTH,” a song about growing beyond a relationship that Tsai fought to finish in time for the EP, receiving the final master only a week before our conversation. “‘Wisdom Tooth’ was, like, by far the most hard-hitting song for me to write as an artist, but also as a person,” he says. “Growing past a relationship and moving on is very, very difficult, and not something that I am used to experiencing.”
Its late addition gave CANINES the ending Tsai felt it needed. A record that began as an exercise in heightened pop fantasy ultimately leaves him somewhere more exposed: alone, moving on and trying to understand who he is becoming once the party is over.
Earlier this year, Tsai performed at Grammy House in New York—a particularly surreal invitation for someone who had once been a Grammy U member at UCLA, attending Recording Academy events and panels as a student. When an email promoting his own performance landed in his inbox, he sent it to his managers and laughed.
“It kind of took me back for a second, ’cause I was like, wow, like, I’m on the other side of this now,” he says. “I always felt like I was just a kid in my bedroom writing songs and stuff, but now it kind of made me feel emboldened as an artist, and also proud that I put in the work.”
And this world tour represents an even bigger moment. Tsai says he barely traveled as a child and has never been to continental Europe; yet now, he is about to begin a world tour there. “This is kind of me living my pipe dream through my little pop star dream, in a way,” he says. “I’m really, really excited, but also kind of nervous, ’cause it’s a new experience and a new chapter.”
Maybe that is why Tsai’s description of himself as still “becoming” an artist makes more sense than it initially seems. Though the teenage dream was that somebody would discover him and transform his life overnight, the reality has been more interesting: learning how to write, produce, speak up, perform and now command a stage, one step at a time. This September, when Mad Tsai gets on a plane for a continent he has never visited and a tour bearing his name, he will simply be taking the next one.
