“Be careful with me,” Omar Apollo warns in his latest album’s opening track, but when he sits down to chat with Us Weekly, the 27-year-old singer – nominated as Best New Artist at last year’s Grammys – is playful and feeling confident after “an amazing two days.”
Apollo has evolved from the hurt man who wrote God Said No, during the “pretty rough year” of 2023, sculpting the shards of his broken heart into music for that album.
He is also someone who recognizes the emotional weight of this project: “If your frequency isn’t there, if you’re not there, it’s kind of hard to [get] into it.” This could explain why his album, released in late June with titles such as “Dispose of Me” and “Done With You,” didn’t explode into summer like Roman candles, despite Apollo’s talents, credentials and the relatable theme his lyrics express. Perhaps fall – when summer flings have festered and listeners need relatable lyrics about relationships gone wrong – is its season.
The sensitive singer spoke with Us between stops of his current “God Said No World Tour,” opening up about recovering from heartbreak, finding freedom and protecting his peace as his star status ascends.
What do you love about a tour this length?
It’s short in comparison to other tours I’ve done. This tour represents the album exactly how I wanted it to be internalized. When I was writing the album, I was picturing it live. I had just got off a tour with SZA doing arenas so I was trying to make songs that would sound good in large spaces.
Your music covers an array of vibes. Can you describe it in close to three words?
It’s all inspired by soul, R&B, experimental ambient music and Ryuichi Sakamoto. It does fluctuate. There are dance songs, ballads, folk-leaning songs and [others].
When do you choose to sing in Spanish versus English?
When I don’t want the person I wrote the song about to understand what I’m saying. [laughs] That is obviously a joke but I grew up with regional, traditional, classic, romantic style of Mexican music. I’m so inspired by reggaeton, from being around barbershops when I was younger and parties in Indiana. I didn’t speak much Spanish on this album at all, really. Just on “Empty.” I didn’t want the person to understand it.
As a gay male Taurus, what are you like as a friend and lover?
I am a really great friend. I will be there. I am flying out, showing up. You can call me, the phone is always on.
And gay male Taurus as a lover?
Oh my god. I hate being a gay male Taurus lover. It’s too much. I feel like we’re too much. I think with God Said No, I kind of let it consume me. I let it bleed into everything I do and speak and say. I’m very loyal. I like to believe in people.
You talk of loyalty, but when we get to “Life’s Unfair” on the album… what’s going on there?
I saw somebody say that song was about cheating. It’s not about cheating. I’ve never cheated in my life! That song was about me falling in love with a religious boy, and he couldn’t be with me for that reason. So then when I was into another relationship, I felt like I was still tethered to that one because we had to change our dynamic, we had to change a lot of things to be able to maintain a type of a relationship. It was messy. So I said life’s unfair.
Does writing about your experiences heal you from the more painful ones?
Absolutely not. [laughs] I think the only thing that’s going to help you is time. It takes time to remove somebody that was so deeply into your subconscious. I do relive some moments of it on stage but most of the time I’m mostly focused on the choreography, the audience, their faces, my performance. To each his own. What do I know? I’m 27.
Are you ever frustrated about being sensitive? Or considering it allows you to make such resonant music, do you consider it now more of a superpower?
Yeah, I definitely have seen it as something that propelled me into exactly the life I want to live. So I’m grateful for my sensitivity, although it’s a burden at times. [laughs]
You’ve talked previously about having an “insane amount of Catholic guilt.”
My Catholic guilt is gone. I believe in God. I did struggle for a very long time, because it was regarding my own safety, my own relationships with my family, but it was a different time, especially when I first started, for gay artists. I think there’s beauty in all religions. I do believe in God, in a very beautiful, spiritual way. I respect religion so much that I wouldn’t want to do anything blasphemous. That’s not out of guilt. I just know so much about it from growing up in a very conservative state, household and ethos.
Do you remember what it was like when you first referred to “he” or “him” in your lyrics?
I remember the exact moment. The song was called “Slurpie Boys.” I was 18 or 19 and it was the first time I ever recorded myself saying anything related to who I actually was writing about. I was living in Whiting, Indiana, outside of this BP factory. It smelled disgusting in the area and the BP could blow up and destroy everything within 10 miles of that area, so it was a weird energy there. But in that moment, I felt very free, like oh, I could just do that and it’d be fine. Because I had felt very unsafe.
When you sent that tweet two years ago, that sort of opened up people’s eyes to your sexuality. Had there been a behind-the-scenes turning point or moment where you were like “I can’t do this anymore, I can’t not be as publicly out?”
No, I didn’t care. That didn’t come to my head, because it was like someone calling me short. Not that being short is bad. We love short kings, but I’m just saying that it just was untrue. [Laughs] When I was in Indiana, there were rumors that people thought I was being gay for clout. They were like, “Oh, he’s not really gay. He likes girls.” Because I didn’t have, I guess, in that I didn’t give off, whatever they thought a gay person looks like or speaks like or talks like, I don’t know. I just wasn’t checking any boxes for them. And I was always with pretty girls, constantly with pretty girls, but you know, if you’re gay, you’re always with pretty girls. Everyone knows that. So they were just confused as to why I had all the pretty girls around me and they didn’t, [laughs] so they were saying, “Oh, he’s not really gay. He’s doing that to get to girls.” I’m just like, “wow, that’s actually so untrue.” So after that, I didn’t really care what anybody thought, honestly, because it was just so ridiculous and so ridiculously untrue that it had no effect on me. But I mean, that tweet is literally, I didn’t even have Twitter on my phone at the time.I saw that tweet on my friend’s phone. I said, “Oh, let me sign in. I got a funny ass quote tweet,” or whatever. And then I logged out and then checked it later, and then I got asked about it on the red carpet and I was like, “Oh, that’s awkward. I thought Twitter was a safe place.”
Social media can be a wild place for anybody but particularly for gay celebrities, between homophobia and people who will say anything, whether it’s rude, untrue, objectifying or prying. How do you navigate that?
I literally had to remove myself. I don’t look at it, I can’t look at it. I grew up as an internet kid. I’ll scroll, I’ll read everything. I was just having this conversation this other day with this very prolific poet, Momtaza [Mehri]. Basically I was like, ‘If they not cooking you, they not booking you.’ [laughs] And, I’m living by that now. I’m like, OK. Yeah, of course, since I have this level of visibility and I do music in this way and I present myself in this way, of course there’s going to be a split, like a divisive kind of opinion on everything that I do, everything that I say, everything that I put out. But as long as I keep an integral mindset, I don’t really care about what is said. But it used to get under my skin. Yeah, really bad. It would ruin an hour of my day and I love my hours. I don’t want to deal with that any more.
So you’re not on Twitter or Instagram at all any more?
If I need to promote something, I make a video on my phone, send it out to my team and they post it.. I’m just like, yeah, that’s not my vibe.