Ethan FrenchThere's a particular kind of comment that appears with striking regularity under Ethan French's videos. Someone will drop in a reference “this sounds like Radiohead, this is giving early Timberlake, Yebba would approve”, and French will go and look it up, sometimes genuinely unsure what they're hearing.
"Like, maybe 50% of the references people come up with, I'm not familiar with," he admits, with the kind of easy candour that turns out to be a defining trait.
"People are hearing influences that are obviously somehow making it through, but a lot of the stuff I've never heard."
For an artist who has, in a comparatively short time, accumulated a genuinely staggering international following, this is not the answer you'd expect. But then again, very little about Ethan French is what you'd expect.
The 25-year-old Perth-based multi-instrumentalist is currently in the middle of what might be the most organically viral music moment Australia has produced in recent memory.
His Idea A Day series (exactly what it sounds like; a new song ‘sketch’ posted daily to his socials) has transformed what was intended to be a humble content consistency strategy into a rolling masterclass in musicality that has stopped some of the most respected ears in the world mid-scroll.
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We're talking Jacob Collier sliding into his DMs. John Mayer. Ty Dolla $ign. Producers working on the biggest records being made right now. All of them, apparently, unable stop listening.
"I just... I don't understand why, you know," French says, with a laugh that sounds genuinely baffled. No false modesty here.
Spend any time in the comments of French's videos, and you'll quickly encounter a prevailing narrative: This guy is a prodigy. A neurodivergent/savant type. Some kind of theoretical wunderkind who emerged from the womb with a fully formed understanding of harmony and complex chord structure.
It's a compelling story. It's also, by his own account, largely wrong.
"I'll claim the neurodivergent, maybe not the savant," he says with a self-deprecating chuckle. "Everything I've ever done has been hard-earned. But probably everyone feels that way."
The theory-guy reputation is particularly ironic given that his music teachers spent much of his schooling actively frustrated with him. French got his first keyboard around age four and did what countless kids do. He sat down and mucked around.
"My teachers were always like, ‘please, Ethan, go to theory class’," he recalls. "But I would just be so persistent on playing everything by ear." There were genuine concerns about whether he'd even manage music ATAR. He did. He did well. But the credential-first pathway was never really him.
This is a crucial piece of the French puzzle that gets lost in the mix. Yes, he can now break down what he's doing in his compositions with articulate precision. Yes, he eventually learned the names for things. But the sequence matters: he felt the sounds first, then reverse-engineered the language for them.
"I learned the names for things way after I learned how to play them," he explains. "I still play entirely by ear. I’m aurally driven."
When he eventually enrolled at Western Australia Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA), he picked composition over piano performance for exactly this reason. The idea of spending years divorced from the creative process didn’t appeal.
"I'm not interested in skill acquisition devoid of creation. Not really. I like to create stuff that moves me, and hopefully other people."
He's candid about the fact that he spent much of his time there contemplating the exit.
"I thought about dropping out the whole time. I hate educational institutions for the most part. I don't feel like I fit in within them."
What kept him going, ultimately, wasn't the curriculum. It was the people he met and access to the studio next door. That pragmatic calculation is very Ethan French: not romantic about the institutions, but clear-eyed about what they're actually good for.
And as for the whole musical family history that tends to accompany stories about exceptional musicians? French doesn't have one, at least not in the way you’d expect.
Sure, his mother plays some guitar… “open chord stuff, a bit of strumming and singing, something she finds therapeutic rather than anything approaching serious”, he says.
Somewhere further back, there's a possibly apocryphal great-great-relative who played accordion and may have had something to do with circus performing.
"I don't know anything about it, but that's how the story goes,” he shrugs.
Sadly, Ethan’s father passed away when Ethan was just sixteen. He mentions this loss quietly and without drama, but it clearly landed hard, and at a formative moment. Ethan fondly recalls him “noodling around” on guitar.
“Pink Floyd songs, that kind of thing. Musical in the way that many people are musical: for the love of it, not for the career of it.”
"I have almost zero musical connection with my family," French continues. "As far as career or connections in the industry go, I was basically starting from absolute zero."
It's a detail that matters. The image of the gifted young musician handed down some hereditary genius, fed into a pipeline of conservatorium excellence and industry connections, has nothing to do with Ethan French.
He built his palette the way someone builds one who has nothing but time, curiosity, and an unusually strong sense of what he likes (and maybe a hint of hyper-fixation thrown into the mix). He would hear a chord he'd never encountered before, sit down, figure out what it was, and add it to his internal collection. Repeat, for years.
"That's kind of been the process for me, but it's been over a long period of time,” he insists.
As for his Idea A Day series: it was not conceived as an artistic statement. It was mainly conceptualised as a bit of a brain hack strategy.
"My initial idea was, how do I stay consistent on socials without spending much effort?" French admits, with characteristic honesty.
The original concept was even more modest: a Chord Of The Day series. He posted one.
"‘It's so boring’, I thought. ‘I can't do this every day’." So he pivoted to composing part of a song a day instead. The first one came easily.
The first few posts went largely unnoticed. Then Day 10 picked up some traction. Then things started to climb. Then, aided by some savvy use of Instagram's Trial Reels feature, it became something else entirely. Now he’s counting his views in the tens of millions.
What's striking is that the format itself reflects something genuine about how he thinks and creates. French is, by his own description, someone who loves the beginning of things.
The dopamine hit of the new idea. The moment before the last 20% of the work (which is, of course, 80% of the effort) kicks in. He is, by his own description, "a pretty high-resolution kind of guy in the studio," someone who gets deep in the weeds of detail when he's working on something polished.
The daily sketch format sidesteps all of that. "It's either get the idea out, or obsess,” he admits. “And I'd rather get the idea out.”
Paradoxically, he believes this constraint has made the work better. The ideas that come quickly and intuitively tend to be stronger. The absence of pressure to produce a magnum opus distributes the emotional stakes across a hundred small things rather than concentrating them in one.
"I actually found it a little bit freeing. I don't feel like everything has to be perfect... I don't have to obsess over it."
His release strategy around the series kind of epitomises the modern music appetite, with the snippets being released on streaming platforms raw and incomplete. However, an album is currently in the works which will include some of the most popular days’ ideas – some extended, some left in their original form.
The question of what Ethan French's future looks like is one he approaches with the same honest uncertainty he brings to everything else. There’s no five-year-plan as such. The doors opening are not just on the performer side either. Production enquiries, co-writing opportunities, and messages from some of the most significant figures in contemporary music are what are filling his inbox these days.
Jacob Collier sent him a message a couple of days before we spoke.
“Just a nice message”, French says, still slightly awed. "That was big for me. Growing up with him on the scene… someone who does it all, puts himself out there, is unapologetically himself and hyper musical."
There's an LA trip being planned. Every single person who DMs him, he says, assumes he's already there. He's not. He's in Perth, playing piano gigs at a restaurant where nobody looks up from their meals, even after he's just posted a video that the internet has lost its mind over.
"No one cares,” he says gleefully. “No one even looks at me. It's like I don't exist." He is tickled rather than wounded by this. It's very on-brand.
He wants to keep making things that move him. He wants to work on records by people he genuinely admires. He's still figuring out the performing side, still calibrating how much touring fits his temperament, still being "really intentional about building a career that I actually like."
"It's easy to get swept along by opportunities," he says. "People say, do this, and then you just go with the flow, and then suddenly you find yourself five years down the track doing something that you're not happy with."
From where things sit right now, that particular fate seems unlikely. This humble, hard-working Aussie artist is self-taught, unique, obsessive, a near-dropout, and never once the prodigy the narrative wants him to be.
Ethan French has spent years building something from scratch, in the dark, following only the sounds that moved him. The rest of the world has just caught up.
Ethan French’s sight of me – day 10 is officially out now. Follow him on social media for frequent updates on his musical journey.
This piece of content has been assisted by the Australian Government through Music Australia and Creative Australia, its arts funding and advisory body
