Conan Gray’s a Georgetown kid. Austin should claim this prince of pop.

Conan Gray missed Buc-Ee’s and Sonic, and he missed the way that everywhere in Texas smells kinda like meat.Rising pop stardom has taken the 23-year-old singer-songwriter much farther afield than his Georgetown beginnings, but his excitement Friday to play Austin City Limits Music Festival should warm the hearts of anyone who’s even mildly concerned with hooks and choruses and the fine art of crafting hip-shakers out of unspeakable sorrow.

“Austin, my name is Conan,” he yelled early on from the American Express stage. “I’m so happy to be back in my hometown.”

He was lying, he clarified – Georgetown and all – but anyone from a small town knows you claim the nearest big city, he said.

“This is like a high school reunion,” he said. He urged the huge crowd to have fun in the beating sun, but not too much fun, “because most of these songs are depressing.”

Like all the great earwormers, your Robyns and your Carlys Rae, Gray’s immaculate pop songs tint catastrophic emotions with a crackling starshine. After opening with “Disaster,” he hopped on platform heels straight into “Telepath,” which sounds like cruising through the streetlights with your feet hovering just off the ground.

Gray’s voice is like smoke coming out of a flute, clear and capable of great heights without losing the sense that this person Just Knows What’s Up, oh heartbroken one. “I can see it/ You're comin' back/ Call me a telepath,” he sang, cocking a tidal wave of curls to his shoulder and pressing two gloved fingers to his temple in full display of said psychic prowess.

On “Fight or Flight,” Gray’s sense of theater (high on the Indeed job posting for Pop Star Inc.) came alive. All that dark, endless hair broke a few Newtonian laws in its aerial arcs. Not to be outdone in follicular athleticism, Gray’s eyebrows arched for the camera at a drop. And when he struts, the ostrich feathers on those gloves kind of blow in the breeze like they don’t want to be upstaged by the hair.

“I can't hate you for getting everything we wanted/ I just thought that I would be a part of it/ I was movin' into your apartment,” he sang on “The Exit,” squeezing more syllables out of “apartment” than science would dictate.It’s a fluid situation, a Conan Gray joint.

Gray communes with Gen-Z especially, and his sense of humor is as grounded as is hair is interdimensional. “Y’all, it’s hot as balls out here,” he said, climbing stairs. “Don’t look at my butt.”

He deployed a viral clip of himself on a morning show, saying that he’s never been in a relationship: “Really, I’m just a liar.”

Even if he’s a prodigy of imagination, Gray clearly understands relationships – human ones, even if not romantic ones – which is all you really need to get sweaty young things to scream your words back at you.

“If you aren’t here with a friend today, I’ll be your best friend,” he said. Felt like he meant it, y’know?

Like he did Weekend 1 at ACL Fest, Gray made much of playing in old stomping grounds, where he experienced much of what he sang about. “Every single person these songs are about might be here,” he said.

Gray was open about a “horrible childhood” before the searing, soaring “Family Line.” He spoke of growing up in those northern suburbs, being told you’d amount to nothing, that you’re worthless.

“Your past doesn’t define you,” he told the fans. “Your family doesn’t define you.”

Your mileage may vary on rehearsed vulnerability in stage banter. Someone needs it when they hear it, though.

Then, he sang of physical and emotional abuse, and of the way blood can be quicksand.

“It's hard to put it into words/ How the holidays will always hurt/ I watch the fathers with their little girls/ And wonder what I did to deserve this,” he sang. The big notes brought him to his knees.

Even if Gray calls most of songs depressing, there was buoyancy given away at bargain prices at Conan-Mart. “Overdrive” (this writer’s pandemic anthem, or one of them) was a high point, as was “Maniac,” which the audience mostly sang for him.

But the internet anthem “Heather” was where the phone cameras all went up, and where the air became one big echo. It’s a slower number, but it really shows Gray’s gifts top to bottom. There’s the humor – pulling a face and miming a cut throat when he sarcastically said he wished the title character was dead. But of course, as we’ve learned, it’s his way with those pesky feelings that really calls for Austin music canonization.

The chorus? Come on, of course the kids put all their chips in for the kid from just up Interstate 35: “Why would you ever kiss me?/ I'm not even half as pretty/ You gave her your sweater, it's just polyester/ But you like her better/ Wish I were Heather.”

As Gray said in another internet-familiar clip of himself that he played on the big screen Friday: Why think about things in a logical way when you have the option of losing your mind? OK, logic be damned. The crown prince of pop belongs in the Live Music Capital’s royal family.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Conan Gray at ACL Fest proves he's Austin's own pop prince