Singer, songwriter and actor Dalton Cyr may be familiar to fans of the popular TV series Pretty Little Liars, but his recent single “Dying to Love You” has unsurprisingly brought more attention to his music. At only 22, he caught the music bug 15 years ago.
“I got a guitar as a Christmas gift when I was seven, and immediately just lost my shit,” Cyr says. “I started singing at about nine or 10. My father, before I was born, was a touring musician, songwriter and artist. I guess you can tell when a kid’s into something when they immediately drop all of the other extracurricular stuff they used to like. He sat me down and told me, ‘If you want to sing and play, I’m gonna look out for you and tell you now, before you even start, that you want to write your own stuff.’ I started writing at age 10, and then I put out my first serious attempt, a full album, a couple of weeks after I turned 12.”
An album of original material at the age of 12 is undeniably impressive. Obviously, his sound has evolved since then.
“I’ve always fallen into what I call guitar-based pop,” he says. “I feel like that gives me enough wriggle room to move around and do things that I like while still remaining authentic. I’m largely a product of my environment and the things that I listened to growing up. I grew up in Jacksonville, FL, which is solidly in the south of the United States. So you can hear in my earlier work, a southern rocky influence. As I became more traveled and I played and learned more, that fell away. I consider myself the number one John Mayer fan in the universe. I would say that this genre, this place that I work in, is set by him.”
Cyr relocated from Florida to Los Angeles when he was 14—he initially came over for a couple of weeks to scope out the scene, and ended up staying for eight years and counting.
“I play so much and, as becomes natural in L.A., when you’re surrounded by so many musicians and so many creatives, I spent a lot of my time working with other artists,” he says.
For more, visit daltoncyr.com.
