Garratt did not, in fact, spend his youth in the big city, but in Little Chalfont, a small town west of London. It is a place of forests and fields rather than clubs and malls. At home, the record player played LPs by Stevie Wonder, Tom Waits and Stevie Ray Vaughan – and they became his idols. Early on, Garratt began fooling around with instruments and his parents, a teacher and a policeman, sent him to music classes as a child. He yearned for attention and he used the classes as an attempt to fulfill this need through singing and making music. “I just really enjoyed making noises and really enjoyed the reaction that I got from making those noises,” he told the BBC in a recent interview.

He recorded his first songs at the age of 12 and appeared on television for the first time at 13. The occasion was the British competition to decide its representative for “Junior Eurovision.” Jack Garratt sang a song called “The Girl” – and came in last place.

That, Garratt says today, was the first time that he had wanted to achieve something with music. But his intentions, he said, were misguided. “I did it more for attention rather than for a love of what I was doing.”

But Garratt was not discouraged by his last place finish. He continued writing his own songs and his music shifted toward the blues. But he never released the first album he made. "I knew I needed to change something because I wasn't having fun and wasn't liking the songs I was writing," he says. Instead of having a mid-life crisis at the age of 40, Garratt had his when he was in his early 20s. "That freaked me out even more."

Garratt’s new independence: He's found his voice

Garratt had originally wanted to become a teacher, but he dropped out of university to take a year off for himself and his music. He experimented and practiced and listened to his inner voice. And he wrote new songs, like "I Couldn't Want You Anyway," a piece which opened his ears and his eyes, as he says. For the first time, he was able to communicate exactly what he was feeling. “The minute I started to treat music with a totally different level of respect and integrity, everything changed and suddenly things started to fall into place.”

He hired a good friend to be his manager. “I found my way back to a path that I felt was very familiar, but knew I’d never walked on before," he says. Garratt had found his voice.

Following his own path with creativity

Today, Garratt is celebrated for exactly this sound and voice. In addition to coming in first place on the BBC Sound of 2016 poll, he also won the Critics’ Choice Award at the Brit Awards for his debut album “Phase.” He is now under contract with the well-known music label Island Records.

Despite his growing fame and the honors he has won, Garratt's songs still evoke memories of the time when he was still searching. “The right side of my bed has always left me feeling stuck in between; Everything I know and all the lies I tell myself so I can sleep," he sings in "Worry." Garratt himself speaks of a natural darkness within of the kind that everybody has - a darkness that can be heard in most of his songs. Perhaps it is exactly this search and this feeling of not yet having found oneself that so many young people in big cities can identify with.