Pushkin.

Alexander O'Connor wasn't expecting the music sharing platform's soundcloud to change his life.

Fating your British musician was just uploading songs for fun.

But then people started taking notice of him and his musical persona, Rex Orange County.

These early recordings started racking up hundreds of thousands of plays pretty quickly.

And one of those people listening was Tyler the Creator, who we just featured on the podcast a couple of episodes ago.

Tyler liked what he heard from Rex O.C. so much that he wound up flying him out to LA to work on one of his albums, Flower Boy.

And that's not Rex's only famous collaborator. Check this out.

Randy Newman, the legendary singer-songwriter duetted with Rex on his toy story classic, You've Got A Friend in Me.

After all of that, Alex aka Rex is still only 21 years old and he's hit another major milestone.

He's just released his major label debut, Pony.

Rex sat over the summer with Rick Rubin to preview some of the album for him and to talk through the tracks.

He discusses why he's collaborating less and less with other artists these days and how that's helped him find his voice for his new project,

which he wrote, recorded, and played almost entirely by himself.

This is Broken Record Season 3, Liner Notes for the Digital Age. I'm Justin Richmond.

Let's listen to now on Rex's conversation with Rex Orange County.

Yes. One, two, three. One, two, three. Testing is good.

We can talk. Let's talk.

Okay. So since I saw you last, where have you been?

Since I saw you last, I've been mainly at home in London and I haven't gone away too much.

I haven't actually been in America too much or anywhere else. I've kind of just spent a lot of time in my own space.

I've been in the space and with the people who I've made the first music ever with and kind of just like gotten back to how it was, how it always worked best after trying a few things.

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