Gotye

His latest single “Somebody That I Used to Know,” featuring Kimbra, spent more than seven weeks at No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 to become this year’s longest-leading No. 1. Everybody from suburban housewives to 14-year old boys is listening to his music with complete frenzy. But how much do we all know about this new emerged superstar who made a meteoric run on the charts, converting all of us into fans? Here’s what you didn’t know about Gotye.

Who is Gotye?
Gotye, AKA Wouter (Wally) De Backer, is a 31-year old multi-instrumental musician and singer-songwriter from Australia. He was born in Brugge, Belgium, but his family moved in Australia when he was two years old. As a young boy, he was passionate about music, learning to play piano, and drums. During high school, he formed with three of his high school friends a band called Downstares, but it was only after high school when Wally De Backer started recording his first tracks.
His voice is compared to those of Peter Gabriel and Sting, he has released three studio albums independently and he has won five ARIA Awards and received a nomination for an MTV EMA for Best Asia and Pacific Act.

How do you pronounce Gotye?
Most people thought Gotye is pronounced something like “got ya”, but in fact, his name is pronounced “go-ti-yay” or “Gauthier” (like in Jean Paul Gaultier) as it’s the French equivalent of “Walter” or “Wouter”. Of course, De Backer chose his own spelling of this variation and he is internationally known as Gotye.

How did he become so famous?
After high school, the rock band Downstares that he fronted broke up, so Gotye was forced to find another way to express his passion. It wasn’t easy at all, it took him about ten years to get where he is now, so his efforts are highly appreciable. He gravitated toward cut-and-paste electronic music, he put together a four-track CD which included the song “Out Here in the Cold”, made 50 copies of this first collection, handwriting the track list and coloring in the cover sleeve in pencil and send them out to every radio station he could find in the phonebook. After years of making music in his bedroom, he received positive feedback from the famous Aussie radio station Triple J, so he continued to produce two more four-track hand crafted Gotye collections, which also received positive reviews.

Then, in 2003, after two years of tenaciously chasing up every opportunity to get an audience for his work, he issued the first Gotye album, Boardface. At the time, he was fronting The Basics, a regular band on the live music scene. While touring and recording four albums between 2004 and 2010 with the Melbourne pop trio the Basics, Gotye continued to record his own tracks, even if he was moving a lot. Like Drawing Blood followed in 2005, notching the cult hit “Learnalilgivinanlovin” and earning J Award consideration from the radio station Triple J.

This second album brought the success he so badly wanted in his own country and determined him to go and conquer the rest of the world too. “This record found more success than the one before, and then found more success even than that. Success kind of heaped on top of success, and then on top of itself, like a pyramid of genetically modified frogs. Overall, it was really all about success, this record. And lots of it (success, that is). So much success did I find, in fact, that I had to buy up some storage company’s warehouses in West Oakleigh just to kind of stockpile it all,” Gotye writes on his website.

In 2011, Gotye released Making Mirrors, featuring a duet with new starlet Kimbra, “Somebody That I Used to Know.” The song became a global hit in 2012 and Gotye the first Australian in more than a decade to have a US number 1. The title of the album was inspired by an artwork his father painted thirty years ago and which De Backer discovered among old bills and newspapers in his parents’ barn. The album is a piece of art, a ticket for everybody’s inner journey to self-reflection and introspection.

Why is everyone so crazy about Gotye?
“Somebody That I Used to Know” has received over 240 million views on YouTube to date. A simple answer to our question could be ‘why not?’, but it wouldn’t be enough. After all, Making Mirrors is so eclectic that Gotye has turned into a cult following here in America. The songs are very diverse, as if they haven’t been written and performed by the same person, “Somebody That I Used to Know” is quite infectious, sweeping the globe with its electro pop tale of an unpleasant break up, while its music video fuels the fire with its distinct visuals. The right question should be ‘why shouldn’t we be crazy about Gotye?’ when we have all the reasons in the world to be amidst those who are constantly turning their radios on, hoping to hear Gotye and Kimbra one more time.