Happy Friday, troopers. Just a few more hours until the weekend, so let’s play some tunes and get carried away. How about the surprise Kendrick Lamar album? Or some live jazz from guitarist Jeff Parker? What about a musical theater-y, country-pop torch song from Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative journalist and documentary host Ronan Farrow?
This morning, the keen minds at Who? Weekly spread the good word that Farrow, reporter wunderkind, has been quietly launching a music career under the moniker Villiers. (Villiers is a family name; the full name of Ronan’s mom, Mia Farrow, is Maria de Lourdes Villiers Farrow.) Villiers’s bio reads that he is a “New York–based writer of mysterious origins” — mysterious perhaps meaning “displayed at length on Wikipedia” — whose foray into music began when he taught himself guitar “instead of going into therapy.”
In fact, a big part of the Villiers story seems to be that he does not go to therapy. Later in his bio, he says he wrote songs because it was too late to keep his stories “to where they probably belonged (again, therapy).” His socials read, “i need therapy but songwriting works too I guess sent from my iphone.” (The pairing of the zoomer-ish strategic lowercase and the boomer-ish “sent from iPhone” here is very interesting.) This is a concerning disclosure: Surely, a celebrity figure who’s been threatened with blackmail and surveilled by Mossad agents should have more than a six-string Fender for emotional coping.
As for his music, Villiers’s debut single, “Cry,” is a duet with Leigh Nash, the lead singer of … Sixpence None the Richer? (Nash’s team has confirmed that Villiers is indeed Farrow, but Farrow himself has not yet responded for comment.) They’ve been performing at wineries together. (This is not Farrow’s first rodeo: Check out his 2015 Avril Lavigne cover at the “Rand Paul for President” hackathon.) “Cry” is a pitchy breakup ballad that may or may not be about Farrow’s ex, Pod Save America host and Survivor season 47’s first victim Jon Lovett. It paints a sad scene of “old jokes with new friends” while complaining that a former partner doesn’t seem to be suffering. Truth be told, it could use some work. Maybe Farrow’s “close friend” Taylor Swift could help him out on the next single?
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