Meet Kellan Christopher Cragg, the prodigious talent making ‘accidentally vulnerable’ music

Ask Kellan Christopher Cragg how he made his excellent 2025 album WRONG BALLOON, and he’s not entirely sure.

The 18-year-old from Minnesota knows the 15-track collection was created in a hazy spell during his school holidays last summer in a rush of creativity that felt almost subconscious. “I would essentially make a song a day and then wake up the next day and be like, ‘I made this song?!’. As the person making the music, you’re never really able to hear your song for the first time, but I really was. It was trippy!”

Cragg has described his music as “accidentally vulnerable,” with unfiltered truths about himself and his life flowing into his songs. “When I was about 10 years old, I would write pretty surface level love songs about my feelings, and an aspect of that never left,” he says from London, where a family trip to catch the Oasis reunion tour has turned – after the hype-building success of WRONG BALLOON – into a BBC Radio 6 Music session, interviews and meetings with multiple labels scrambling for his signature.

The songs on WRONG BALLOON span lo-fi indie pop, old-style R&B, jazz, pop and beyond, reflecting a songwriter that grew up on Justin Bieber as well as Ella Fitzgerald, and the abundance of music at his fingertips from birth in 2007.

“I always found it really funny when the project first came out and I would see articles [that would call it] indie-folk, R&B – all these polar opposite genres – or it’d be bedroom pop and a lot of sounds in different realms. That plays into the fact that I don’t sit in one spot.”

At his debut live show in London the night before our conversation, brilliantly composed and stirringly sung songs of longing and self-understanding were performed with composure and class, all bookended by extended instrumental sections and organ drones. It showcased a songwriter as close to the avant-garde as he is to writing radio hits.

Read our Play Next interview with Kellan Christopher Cragg and listen to him via our Play Next playlist on Spotify below.

Can you explain your songwriting process?

It’s weird. It’s so weird. People think I’m being metaphorical when I say I just let it happen naturally. If you try to be natural, you’re just controlling it. How do you enter that very meditative state of mind? It’s this presence, and it’s very, very nuanced. I’ll literally come up with a line or a verse [including] a word that I’ve never used. ‘How did that just come out?’ It doesn’t even just apply to words – it’s instruments too and songs as a whole.

You’ve been writing songs since 10-years-old but aren’t from a musical household – how did the bug hit you so early?

I grew up listening to my dad’s CDs and discovered One Direction and A Tribe Called Quest at an early age. I had a little kid’s curiosity. My mum says that when I was an infant she wouldn’t have to swaddle me because I would literally hum myself to sleep. It didn’t have to be musical, but some sort of drone to send me off. Whether it had substance or not, it’s cool to think about now. We had a piano in the house that no-one played, and I started messing around on it at about eight or nine, just making sounds. That was the first step into it.

Do you think your genre-resistant sound is a deliberate thing, or just a product of your personal taste and generation at large?

It was never a thought. While I was making my stuff, it was never me thinking that I’ve gotta make this kind of song, or ‘I wonder what people are gonna think about it.’ There’s a real beauty to being alone when you’re making stuff, because there’s nothing as intrinsically intimate as actually being aware of yourself, when you’re the only one in the room and nobody knows what you’re doing. That’s what it felt that whole month [of writing the album], and that’s what it still feels like when I come up with ideas. There’s a beauty to not sharing and letting things happen how they do.

How do you maintain that insular element to the creation of your music when signing a record deal or entering the industry?

Everybody’s always trying to break through the noise, but it seems like the people who will [succeed] tend to not be trying to break through the noise. It’s about having no doubt and having no reason to validate. I have completely lost a validation button.

You played solo at last night’s show, but the album is packed full of layers and instrumentation – does the idea of expanding the live show excite you?

I’ve always been pretty strongly independent and was always doing stuff by myself from a very young age. Whether I knew it or not at the time, I didn’t really want to do it any other way, yeah, For some reason I’ve tended to just play alone, but actually have a lot of bigger ideas in a live setting.

There’s a version of the song ‘STEPWISE’ that I picture on a stage. For some reason, I picture it at a festival. I picture an ensemble version of that song. In the recorded version, there’s an orchestra, violinists, trumpets – everything. I see it and hear it in my head all the time.

Even as you expand in multiple ways, are there things you know you need to keep front and centre with your artistry?

I’m gonna be the one to care and put everything that I am into this, because it’s me. It’s not like this music is adjacent to me – I literally am that. I don’t even look at myself as a musician or an artist; I do this no matter what.