Meet Harry Rooks Who Still Has “Call Me Maybe” on His Phone

The beach-town kid turned singer-songwriter opens up about life, music, and the creative DMs he definitely can’t talk about.

There’s something refreshingly unpolished about Harry Rooks. At nineteen, the Australian singer-songwriter and producer could easily lean into the mysterious artist persona that so many of his contemporaries adopt. Instead, he’s the guy who will freely admit that Carly Rae Jepsen‘s “Call Me Maybe” lives permanently on his phone — and he’s not even a little bit embarrassed about it.

“Zero shame,” he says of the 2012 mega-hit. “It’s a perfect pop song.”

That kind of earnest enthusiasm runs through everything Rooks does. The Central Queensland native has been performing publicly since he was nine years old, busking on street corners in his small beachside hometown while other kids his age were still figuring out their times tables. Now, a decade later, he’s built an entire creative empire by himself — writing, producing, and directing every aspect of his music and visuals without a traditional label team behind him.

When asked what his nine-year-old self would think of where he’s landed, Rooks keeps it characteristically grounded. The young Harry would probably just be excited that he’s still making music every day, he reflects. The scale has changed, but the reason he started hasn’t. It’s the kind of answer that suggests someone who hasn’t let early success go to his head — possibly because the friends back home won’t let him.

“They’re supportive, but they keep me grounded,” he says of his hometown crew. “To them, I’m still just me.”

That sense of being grounded extends to his relationship with social media. As a Gen-Z artist, platforms like TikTok and Instagram are essential to building an audience, and Rooks maintains an active presence on both. But he’s clearly still adjusting to the more… creative… aspects of internet fame. Asked about the wildest DM he’s ever received from a fan, he pauses diplomatically.

“There have been a few that caught me off guard,” he admits, choosing his words carefully, “but I’m not sure any of them are appropriate to share. Some have been very creative — that’s probably the politest way to put it.”

Despite his growing profile, the beach-town kid hasn’t completely abandoned his roots. While studio sessions now dominate his schedule, Rooks still sneaks in time at the beach when he can. The water, it seems, remains part of who he is, even as his world expands beyond the Australian coastline.

What sets Rooks apart from other emerging artists his age is the scope of his creative control. He handles everything himself — the songwriting, the production, the visual direction — building a cohesive artistic universe that blends organic instrumentation with modern pop sensibilities. It’s an unusual amount of responsibility for someone who can’t yet legally drink in America, but Rooks approaches it with the kind of quiet confidence that suggests he’s been preparing for this moment for a very long time.

His sound favors live instruments — piano, drums, strings, guitar — over the synthetic production that dominates current pop charts. The result is something that feels both familiar and novel, modern enough to connect with streaming audiences but warm enough to stand apart from algorithmic playlist fodder.

With new material in development and international expansion on the horizon, Rooks is clearly just getting started. But even as the scale of his career grows, he seems determined to hold onto what made him pick up a guitar in the first place: the simple joy of making music, every single day.