Greyson Chance Reveals The Real 'Betrayal' At The Heart Of His New Song

Immediately after 39 seconds of scene-setting baritone, Greyson Chance flips the view: He jumps up to a much higher vocal register on the tender pre-chorus of his adventurous new song "Dancing Next to Me." In case you haven't paid attention to the career of Chance — a prodigy who first hit viral fame in 2010 thanks to a Lady Gaga piano cover along with a signal boost from Ellen DeGeneres — this will come as an astounding surprise.


Although in case you pressed play on his silky, raw 2019 re-arrival album Portraits, a collection influenced by Frank Ocean and Bon Iver, you know what Chance's voice can do. On "Dancing Next to Me," its power is felt by means of the diligent arrangements he handled himself, alongside producer and canny pop brain Teddy Geiger. By the time he sings the title of the song a minute in, you've already been taken for a ride.


"I don't know if we necessarily even thought about the change of tone," Chance told MTV News. "I think we just went with the vocal because it felt really good. I think we developed a mutual trust in that lane and my ability to know how to go in and create."


Like so several melodies in the digital age, "Dancing Next to Me" finds its origin in a voice note. Chance woke up one day and went straight to the piano, where he got the bones of the song with each other and recorded it. Later came Geiger; they connected in person and began working right away. "That was our starting day, and that was the opening time I met her, and that's what we began with." (Much like she did for Shawn Mendes on his more exploratory 2018 LP, Geiger is producing Chance's upcoming album in full.)


"She asked me about my relationship life and what's going on there," Chance mentioned about working with Geiger. He opened up, and the lyrics took shape rapidly immediately after that. "The song is really a story about a sense of betrayal from somebody, a sense of these being so present with you in this moment and then as soon as the sun is rising, they're just gone."


Portraits noticed Chance using he/him pronouns in love songs, likening a flame's classic look to Alex Turner's, and even dropping an ex's initials into a song. The 22-year-old wanted to continue that streak of honesty in his songwriting any time while he started work on his next album. "All of this shit happened to me," he mentioned. Specifically, this shit: "I was really tired this summer of being people's experiments."


The narrative of the song makes this tension clear. Chance meets a guy, and so they hit it off. They dance with each other, they kiss, and more. It's fireworks. Nevertheless then, his partner bolts. The song's bridge makes the complications clear — because the beat drops out, Chance sings, "I was yours for the weekend, come sunrise it's time / For you to dodge your feelings, call your girl to deny."


"We were a little nervous about that line," Chance admitted, saying he and Geiger fretted over the specificity of it and why it may would be heard as "targeting somebody." Ultimately, he praised Geiger for her tenacity in pushing them to include it in the final version: "That's the distinction between her and also a lot of other people. She mentioned, 'No, fuck it, let's keep this honest.'"


The "Dancing Next to Me" video spotlights that honesty as well, finding Chance and also a would-be lover mingling on and off a dance floor. As soon as he spoke to MTV News about the song earlier this month, he'd just finished shooting the video, which ran late because of his own scrupulousness. "You'll be proud to know that we were supposed to end around midnight, and obviously my ass pushed on up until 3:15 or 3:30 in the morning," he mentioned. "I mentioned, 'Oh, we need this shot. Oh, let's keep the light around.' It was all a disaster, yet in the ideal way possible."


Chance has gotten to flex more of his personality in his recent videos. In November 2019, he released "Boots," a fuzzed-out bop that noticed him bare-chested and bloodied in the desert, exhaling smoke and surrounded by a circle of trophies. It's the sort of energy he's brought to the complete recording process, an artsy vision inspired by the talismans he'd spy on visits back to his family member residence in Oklahoma.


"I had an enormous obsession this past summer, and going into writing this record, with trophies," he mentioned. "It can have gold and diamonds and platinum and whichever. It may be laced in the most pretty things, however what's interesting is that it all depends on what's in fine print. You can have the hugest trophy, yet at the end of the day, it still says 'Ninth-place runner up.'"


Chance likened this talk of cute statues" to how he was some days viewed both on and off stage by people he was romantically entwined with: "They would come to my show, they would visualize me, and so they would think I was this trophy, that I was routinely this object." What makes "Dancing Next to Me" a true moment for him is how it captures what's real: a narrative with stakes and actual people at the center of it.


Like Chance, those people can be flawed. That's the complete point of making these songs as trustworthy as possible. "There are nights," he mentioned, "where the fine print doesn't look so hot with me."