🇺🇸 Greyson Chance

Greyson Chance was born on August 16, 1997, in Edmond, Oklahoma, to Lisa Chance, an educator, and Scott Chance, a businessman. His family was middle-class American suburban. There was a piano in the house. Greyson, by his family's account, taught himself to play it. He began composing original pieces in his early elementary years. The sixth-grade talent show, in April 2010, was, on his mother's account, intended to give him a low-stakes public performance experience.

The performance of "Paparazzi" — Greyson at the school's upright piano, eyes closed for sections, voice clean and arrestingly mature — was uploaded to YouTube by another parent at the talent show. Within forty-eight hours, the video had reached six million views. Ellen DeGeneres, monitoring her show's social-media incoming, saw the video and asked her team to find the boy.

Greyson appeared on her show the following week. Lady Gaga, by phone, congratulated him during the segment. Ellen, that afternoon, announced she would be founding a record label — eleveneleven — with Greyson as its first signing. The label launched. Greyson's first single, "Waiting Outside the Lines," was released later that year.

His debut album, "Hold On 'Til the Night," was released in 2011 and reached a respectable Billboard position. The career trajectory through his teenage years was, however, complicated by the standard issues that child-pop-star careers face: shifting label expectations, the difficulty of transitioning from a tween-pop audience to a young-adult one, the personal challenges of public adolescence.

In 2017, Greyson came out publicly as gay. The decision, in the context of American pop music in the late 2010s, was unusually frank for a former child-star pop artist. His subsequent music has been more openly personal, more politically engaged with LGBT+ identity, and aimed at a deliberately different demographic than his earliest releases. The career has, in his twenties, taken on the shape of a genuine adult pop-artist identity rather than a child-star afterlife.

By 2026, Greyson Chance is twenty-nine. He has released multiple albums under various label arrangements. He has built a substantial following on streaming platforms. He has, in his words and his work, become "the artist I would have wanted to be at twelve, except now I am the artist I actually am at twenty-nine." The transition is the kind that few former YouTube-viral child stars achieve. The combination of Ellen DeGeneres's early support, his family's slower-than-typical promotional pace, and his own adult honesty about his identity have, by every visible metric, allowed the trajectory to continue.