Troye Sivan enlists high class talent to to transform “Easy” from moody to scintillating

Kacey Musgraves and Mark Ronson take Sivan’s dark new wave tale of heartbreak to the disco

When Troye Sivan broke out a couple of years ago, he was a new kind of queer icon: a beautiful idol who elicited comments from women like “I wish I was a gay man so I can marry him”; and a bankable pop artist with unmistakable talent.

Not content with being a typical pop star, Sivan has decided to let through his artier, darker side. He hasn’t abandoned pop, but rather tried to use his strengths to make the weirder stuff more palatable to the masses. It is no wonder that in the video for the original version of “Easy”, he is watching himself play a David Bowie tribute act on TV.

In its initial form, “Easy” is a sad dance-pop song, something we seem to be getting a lot of this year. Like many recent hits, it has a 1980s vibe and quite a bit of Autotune. Even without embellishment, it is a pretty good song; words, music and Troye’s singing meshing nicely in low-key harmony. It was so good, in fact, that it needed to party!

Enter the master of retro himself, Mark Ronson. If he made Amy Winehouse sound like she recorded in the 1960s, Bruno Mars sound like he was in the funky 1970s and Likke Li sing like the 1990s, he could certainly give a more clubby 1980s sheen to this. To his credit, he succeeds without changing the heart of the song. He starts by blowing up the “WHOOP!” that was barely noticeable in the original, using it sparsely yet making it somehow the first thing that comes to mind when you conjure up the song. He speeds up the beats, adds electronic flourishes, throws in a bit of guitar, and generally wraps up the melancholy feel in brightly coloured neon.

Then after the first chorus, the world’s coolest cowgirl steps in to take it away. Kacey Musgraves re-wrote the second verse, and her voice, with that unmistakeable twang, lifts the song off to a higher plane. You can take the girl away from the Country, but you can’t take the Country out of the girl: Kacey might be doing dance-pop, but the way she says “darlin'” will just make your knees wobble. When the two sing the second chorus together, the lament becomes a chant that is begging to be shouted out on a dancefloor.

Obviously a new video was needed for this steroid-pumped version, and it certainly delivers its share of thrills. Troye and Kacey are on the run, clearly not lovers but mutually supporting each other. Troye rocks a mullet, Kacey dyes her own hair and dons a fur coat, and off they go to haunt line-dancing clubs, strip joints, and generally drift through the night. The “Part II” at the beginning makes it clear that this is an evolution of the original, not a replacement. The Troye that emerges at the end of the new clip–more attractive, more interesting and more daring–is obviously the one Sivan has wanted to be all along. And the one we’ll keep rooting for.