“I’ll never escape the memes that have been created. There’s this meme of me at 15, of me crying when I got voted off Idol, that still haunts me,” jokes Daniel Seavey. “Yeah, you may think it’s cute and endearing, but then you see it and you’d bust out laughing. And there’s also this famous dance move my bandmates and I used to hit. I’ll never escape that either.

“But I think with this album… I do think I tried to get more serious about proving my chops as a writer and producer. I think with Second Wind, I really backed up and just was like, ‘I need to stop caring so much and make music that jumps out to me and is something I enjoy.’ That was my only goal with this. I really tried to stop overthinking. I tend to do that a lot.”

@SeaveyDaniel when you cry, I cry. Ily pic.twitter.com/VeAoUZLM2z

— Mrs. Daniel Seavey (@mrs_seavey) February 22, 2015

Seavey is hanging out at Licorice Pizza Records in Studio City, Calif., where he just did a Saturday morning autograph signing for his two-years-in-the-making debut solo album, Second Wind. And he’s still astonished by the morning’s mass turnout. Some fans — who lined up around the block as early at 7 a.m., bearing gifts and friendship bracelets — have been following him since he was ninth-place contestant on American Idol Season 14, and Seavey is “just so shocked and grateful that they’re still here after 10 years. It’s just mind-blowing.”

Seavey, now age 25, is in fact on his third wind. When he competed on Idol, he was at that time the series’ youngest top 24 contestant ever, and he had a hard go of it, with TV critics and bloggers often arguing that he wasn’t quite ready for prime time. (Hence the tears.) He rebounded quickly as a member of the successful teen-pop group Why Don’t We, but when he decided to go solo in 2022, he knew that as a former reality contestant and a former boy band star, the odds were stacked against him. He just had to hope that a lifetime of preparing for this moment, starting from his days when he was busking on the streets of Portland at age 8 and “using all the money I got from that to buy more instruments,” would serve him well.

“I was just always obsessively being the nerd-ass that I am. I was in the back of the [Why Don’t We] bus just making songs on my laptop,” Seavey, who eventually learned how to play instruments and co-wrote or wrote all 10 tracks of Why Don’t We’s sophomore album. — “But at the time, honestly, there were songs we were making for the band that were really intended for a band, and I think that was kind of my side hobby where I could so. It was more of my musical journal entries, and I genuinely never thought any of those would see the light of day. And then the first [solo] song that I dropped was one of those — it was ‘Can We Pretend That We’re Good?,’ and it was just one of the ones that had been sitting in there for a year. And when the day came that I had to drop my own music, I was like, ‘Thank God I’ve been doing this for the last five years on my own too!’ It just worked out.”

After the release of “Can We Pretend That We’re Good?” in 2022, Seavey’s seven-song Dancing in the Dark EP, TikTok hit “The Older You Get,” and finally Second Wind followed — along with positive critical reviews comparing Seavey’s evolved bedroom-pop sound to Lana De Rey, the Weeknd, and Cigarettes After Sex. Seavey still can’t quite believe it.

“I honestly have had zero strategy. I wake up every day being like, ‘Today may be my last day I do this.’ Really, I think the thing I was able to do with this last album was just lean on the gifts that I was given by, I believe, God,” says Seavey, whose father is a church pastor and mother is a religious writer/speaker. “I had zero expectations for it. So, even something like this morning is just such a gift for me.”

Seavey embarks on a world tour this month, and he says he’ll be “bringing that same laptop I used to bring with the band on the bus and I’m going to be writing all the time, so I’ll probably drop more music in that time. I’m just going to try to keep doing this as long as I can. I really do live for it. I love it so much.”

As for any advice he might have for any former child stars trying to reinvent themselves, he says, “Just keep going and keep fighting to remain yourself the whole time. I think that the less you look outside of what everyone else is doing and the more you just focus every day on what it is you want to do, you’d be shocked at the results. I didn’t think any of this was going to work out for me — and it is, to some extent. So, it’s been pretty inspiring, even for myself, to really see showing up resulting in things. So, just show up every day and trust yourself.”