When I caught up with Dylan a few days before the release of his new single “OFF,” he told me the song was written seven years ago, but only now does it connect enough to release.

“OFF, funny enough, is a song that I actually wrote in 2018. So it's an older cut, for sure, that I never ended up doing anything with,” he said. “And it was in a different time of my career where the original version was much more on the electronic side. Much, much more on the electronic side.”

As time passed, Dylan’s style, taste, and sound changed enough to fully connect with the song.

“Time has been really helpful for this one where I grew into it versus growing out of it,” he said.

That idea of growing into something is a quiet through line in his story. To understand why this rebrand matters, you have to go back to the song that changed everything, and the less talked about challenges of creating a Double Platinum record.

“I had just started having some success in the dance world. I wrote a couple songs that were doing far better streams than any solo music I put out at that point, and was getting really excited about it. I remember writing the chorus for Love Is Gone and playing it for my friends in the car and being like, ‘Oh this is something, this feels really good’.”

He cut the original version with Slander, which today sits at 156 million streams on Spotify.

But even after that release, he felt the need to interpret it differently.

“I felt that song and that vocal and those lyrics deserved a different interpretation as well. So I played around with some piano, recorded the acoustic version, and sent it off to the guys as an option. They were like, ‘Yeah that sounds awesome, let’s try it’.”

For a while, it was just a special song that worked live. Then the internet got involved.

“It wasn't until COVID hit in 2020 that it started really moving. At first it was Facebook in China. It started catching on to these viral videos. And then TikTok came out, and I made the video of me sitting at my desk singing the chorus. That's all it was,” he said. “And that video got 15 million views, and it was just wild. I had no following, it was at the beginning of TikTok. From there, it just kept growing and growing and growing and has reached numbers that I never, ever would have expected in my life.

Today, “Love Is Gone – Acoustic” sits at 621 million streams on Spotify.

Even with the numbers, the videos, the comments, Dylan is honest about how strange and heavy that kind of success can feel.

“It's tough, honestly,” he said. “I've gotten a lot better with it now, with a lot of time and learning different kinds of ideology and whatnot. But it's tough having something be so big, and then feeling like you need to follow that. Because realistically, it's not necessarily super possible to do again. Yeah, to recreate something that has well over a billion streams on all platforms is not something that's just, ‘Alright well, let's do it again’. It's very, very uncommon to have multiple that do that well. When you do, that's when you turn into the Bruno Mars's of the world, you know?”

The numbers started to talk louder than his instincts.

“So for a while it was pretty hard for me honestly, because anything that I put out on my own wasn't ever coming close and wasn't ever gonna come close,” he said. “And it took a while for me to really feel okay with that. The business side of things requiring a certain kind of structure to create music started to kill inspiration. Because it was all about, ‘It needs to perform this well. It needs to have this many streams in the opening day. It needs to have this kind of reaction.’ Instead of just creating something that I love and putting it out and being proud of it.”

Creating for numbers instead of himself affected Dylan for years. But with his recent releases, that harmony is finally coming back to him.

When I asked about the rebrand, he made it clear this was not a sudden pivot or a marketing play.

“I mean, it's been years and years of decision making. It wasn't that I woke up one morning and was like, ‘You know what, I’m gonna switch it all,’” he said. “It was years of fighting myself and fighting different opinions. A lot of it comes from other people, fans, labels, managers, agents and all these different kind of things. But none of that really holds weight like my own opinion does of myself, nothing is stronger than how I feel about it.”

There was a point where that opinion of himself was not good.

“I had a period of time where I just felt so negatively towards myself as an artist and myself as a person, and the music industry as a whole, and so many different things about it that I took a hiatus break because I didn't know what else to do. I just felt so stuck and uninspired and just had no idea where my place was in the industry or in life. A lot of us have that,” he said.

Pulling back gave him one clear answer. There is a specific feeling he is always chasing.

“When you create something and it doesn’t just sound like something you made out of your garage, it sounds like something that really came out of me that I love. And that's my favorite, that moment.”

To protect that feeling, he had to change the way he creates.

“And so I just wanted to stop creating in a business way where we have to think about what’s in or hot right now, it becomes such a job,” he said. “And I know that it's a business, and I know that you have to have some sort of business aspect to it. But in the creation process you can't give away the art for business, because it's at that point you have no perspective. And people want the artist's perspective. That's what an artist is, you know?”

So he pulled the focus back to something simple.

“I just thought to myself, what kind of music do I listen to? What kind of clothes do I like to wear? What style tattoos do I like to get on my body? Who am I? And then just create and export that,” he said. “And if people resonate with it, because they resonate with me and who I am as a person, and they care about my perspective on whatever it may be, awesome. And if they don't, so be it. But at least I want to fill my artistic cup, and feel that I'm doing what I want to do and what I'm here to do, which is create and be an artist.”

That is where this new era lives. Less beholden to an algorithm, more grounded in his actual taste.

“I mean, I would say my biggest influences at the current moment, musically speaking, are Western/Americana and Spanish music,” he said. “The lyricism and poetry of that country style I love. And the rhythm, musicality and the soundscape of Spanish music is second to none.”

He talks about how he can’t find a good mix of both, and that gap is inspiring him to create something that is. His music isn’t chasing numbers anymore. It is filling gaps.

“I'm really, really excited to get that where I want it, because it's something that I can't find anywhere. I cannot find an Americana salsa mix, you know, you can't find it,” he said. “And my goal is to make it work, and to enjoy it. But at a certain point, it's just fun to experiment with it. And maybe people hate it, and maybe people will love it. And I have no idea, but I'm really excited to get it in my head where it's right, and just see what happens.”

You can feel how much lighter he is when he talks about the future now. The pressure to beat a billion has been replaced by something more real.

When I asked what he looked forward to the most, he kept it simple.

“Creating more and being able to collaborate with different artists, genres, cultures and being able to create stuff that I'm proud of. And really the biggest thing is just getting back on the road and playing these songs for people that want to hear it,” he said. “Because you can put out as many songs as you want and have as many streams as you want, and have as many Instagram comments as you want. But nothing, nothing compares to being on a stage or being anywhere and performing those songs like they're supposed to be performed, and hearing people sing it back to you and connect. And seeing the emotions that people go through because of the way that they've connected to the song. A billion streams is not equivalent to one person where you can see the emotion on their face from an experience they have, from something that you created. Nothing compares to that.”

“OFF” and “SEX” might be the official start of the new chapter, but the real story is what had to be let go to make space for it. Dylan is not trying to outrun his biggest song anymore. He is building something that feels like him, even if it never touches those numbers again.

You get the sense that for the first time in a long time, that trade finally feels worth it.

“OFF” released last night and is streaming on all platforms.