WORDS TO LIVE BY

PLAYING BY HIS OWN RULES, CODY SIMPSON HAS TRANSFORMED FROM TEEN STAR TO MATURING MUSICIAN AND GLOBAL CITIZEN

- NATALIE MELL

For a musician who was discovered on MySpace at the age of 12, plucked from his idyllic Gold Coast home and thrust onto the world stage, Cody Simpson has maintained a relatively low profile. No scandalous story of child stardom gone bad, public breakdowns or out-of-control partying. Anyone with an obsessive appreciation for celebrity gossip will be aware of his relationship with fellow singer Miley Cyrus, which has generated buzz in the way only an A-list romance can. But all that coverage really boils down to is the rehashing of their loved-up social media posts.

Lesser known and arguably far more impressive talking points about the 23-year-old include his 2017 appointment as a UN environmental ambassador, the fact that he walked away from a contract with Atlantic Records at 18 to independently release his own music, and that he has been quietly writing a book of poetry, which is due to drop in April this year—the first, but probably not the last, for the home-grown star.

“I do and always have considered myself a writer before a musician. The music was always more of an outlet for my writing to be more widely consumed,” Simpson explains over the phone from the US, where he has been permanently based for the past eight years. “It’s pretty cool to be able to start establishing me like that. All of my favorite musicians are also poets and writers: Leonard Cohen, Jim Morrison, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, guys like that.”