Francesco Yates is only 18 years old but he’s already received the highest possible recommendation a musical artist could. “He’s absolutely gonna be just a huge, huge, huge pop star,” Pharrell Williams has said of the Toronto native. “But not in the way people have been thinking of pop music in the past ten years.” It’s a lot to live up to, but Francesco does, both in his songwriting and his impressively evocative musicianship.

The young singer has been making music since he was much younger, but everything clicked at age 11 when Francesco saw the movie School of Rock. Suddenly, for him, music became something that was markedly possible, even a potential career path. The musician’s parents enrolled him in a nearby music camp during the summers in Toronto and Francesco began learning to play piano, then guitar. The first song he wrote was called “Jaguars,” and it all spiraled from there. “I’ve never stopped writing since,” he says. “Music was a passion for me that happened all at once. I just wanted to do it all the time. Something clicked in my head and that was it.”