Sorry, FTD, but who needs flowers when you can show your love with a bouquet of songs?
“
” — the second LP from rising pop-star Troye Sivan,
— was inspired by the blossoming of a serious relationship with his boyfriend, model Jacob Bixenman.
“While I was writing the album, I was experiencing love in a way that I’d never experienced it before. I wanted to write, like, a love album,” says Sivan, 23, who started dating Bixenman in 2016.
“It’s exciting to be thinking about the future for the first time and to just kind of allow yourself to have those little fantasies and those daydreams of ‘What’s this gonna be like in 30 or 40 years?’”
In the here and now, though, this South African-born, Australian-bred singer-songwriter is living the music dream. After releasing his buzzy debut album, 2015’s “Blue Neighbourhood,” Sivan made his “Saturday Night Live” debut as the show’s musical guest in January. Then he mixed it up with Taylor Swift — singing his ecstatic “My My My!” during her Reputation tour stop at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, Calif., in May — before musically hooking up with Ariana Grande on another blissful “Bloom” single, “Dance to This.”
Certainly, he’s gone a long way since he came out publicly in one of his YouTube vlog posts in 2013. On “Bloom,” Sivan embraces the “sex” in his sexuality more than ever before in his work.
“That is something that, historically, I would have been a little bit scared to confront and speak about,” he tells The Post. “And I just really wanted to do away with any of that insecurity and any of that shame, and really just celebrate [sex] for what it is, which is something that’s really beautiful and fun and exciting. It’s really liberating and kind of an emotional experience to be able to finally feel like the majority of that leftover baggage is no longer with me.”
In fact, “Seventeen,” an atmospheric ballad that kicks off “Bloom,” explores the “complex emotions” involved with an underage Sivan having sex with an older man.
“I don’t believe I want to condone that experience, but at the same time, I don’t blame myself,” Sivan says. “I didn’t know any gay people growing up, and didn’t know where to look to find any sense of community or sense of self. I looked wherever I could to find that. It’s hard when you feel like you’re the only person in the world going through this.”
Sivan’s more than a musician: He made his film debut as the young Wolverine in 2009’s “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” (“I was at school one day, and then the next day, I was shooting a scene being Hugh Jackman”) and appears in the upcoming Nicole Kidman-Russell Crowe drama “Boy Erased,” about a 19-year-old undergoing gay-conversion therapy. But there’s been no such drama in Sivan’s own life.
“I consider myself extraordinarily lucky to be out of the closet and to be loved and accepted on the other side of coming out,” he says. “I really am filled with pride about who I am and have always just wanted to celebrate that.”
