"If my younger self could see me now, they wouldn't believe it."

There's a moment in every Benson Boone performance where he does something that makes you hold your breath. Maybe he's backflipping off a grand piano at the Grammys. Maybe he's flinging himself into a crowd. Maybe he's singing a note so high it shouldn't be physically possible while mid-flip. And you think: what is going on inside this guy's head?

Behind the acrobatics and the massive vocals sits a mind that never stops seeking. The next thrill. The next song. The next feeling. If you decode that drive, you decode everything about Benson Boone.

TL;DR: Why Benson Boone is an Enneagram Type 7
  • Relentless experience-seeking: From cliff jumping 629 feet off Auckland's Sky Tower to competitive diving to backflips off pianos, Boone's life revolves around the next rush.
  • Self-acknowledged addictive personality: He avoids all drugs and alcohol because he knows he'd go all in. His evidence? "Dude, candy." Classic Type 7 intensity.
  • Fear of being trapped: He quit American Idol despite Katy Perry predicting he'd win, left the Mormon Church, dropped out of college. All to avoid being defined by something he didn't choose.
  • Reframing pain into positivity: When online hate campaigns exploded, he leaned into humor instead of breaking down. Type 7s master the art of converting pain into something lighter.
  • Multi-talented restlessness: Self-taught on piano, guitar, drums, and bass. Studied architecture. Designs his own album art. Owns an ice cream truck. Cooks for fun. The man cannot sit still.

What is Benson Boone's Personality Type?

Benson Boone is an Enneagram Type 7

Enneagram Type 7s carry the label "The Enthusiasts." Their core drive: pursue experience, dodge pain, resist limitation. They always seem to have three projects running, five ideas brewing, and zero interest in slowing down.

The childhood wound typically involves a sense that their needs wouldn't be fully met, that they had to manufacture their own joy. This doesn't mean neglect. It means they learned early that the world's offerings felt finite, and the way to survive emotionally was to chase everything with intensity before it disappeared.

Boone grew up as the only boy among four sisters in a tight-knit Mormon household in Monroe, Washington. He learned piano not through formal lessons but by eavesdropping on his sisters' practice. He taught himself guitar, drums, and bass. He joined the diving team. He played tennis. He started flipping off couches at age three.

Nobody told him to do any of this. He couldn't stop himself.

Benson Boone's Upbringing

Born June 25, 2002, in Monroe, Washington, a small town about an hour northeast of Seattle. His parents, Kerry and Nate Boone, raised him alongside four sisters: Kaylee, Natalee, Emma, and Claire.

Two forces shaped the household: the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and an unusually deep emotional openness. Growing up "surrounded by girls 24/7," Boone says, made him "more emotional and aware of other people's emotions and my emotions." He credits his sisters for shaping his ability to write emotionally vulnerable songs. Claire sometimes joins him onstage during performances.

His father introduced him to physical fearlessness early. By high school, he was one of Monroe High's first competitive divers, placing sixth at the 2020 state championships despite lacking a dedicated diving coach at his school. He sought outside coaching on his own.

Music came almost by accident. He didn't discover he could sing until his junior year of high school, when a friend asked him to perform at a battle of the bands. Then he attended a Jon Bellion concert that shifted something inside him. He watched Bellion perform and thought: that's what I want to do.

Leaving the Church

The religious dimension of Boone's upbringing runs more complicated than it appears. He grew up in the LDS Church and participated fully for years. But something never clicked.

"Growing up, a lot of people at church would talk about these experiences that they've had and these personal revelations and feelings and voices," he told Rolling Stone. "I never felt it as physically present as they did, and so I was always confused and frustrated."

The worst part was the silence. He was afraid to say any of this out loud. "I was always scared to bring that up to people because I just didn't want to accept that I wasn't feeling what everyone else was feeling." He carried that disconnect quietly until he confided in a friend, who responded, "Thank goodness. I feel the same way."

That moment of shared honesty broke something open. Boone eventually left the church, though not in a scorched-earth way. He enrolled at BYU-Idaho for a semester to study architecture and interior design, then left that too. His parents gave him room. "Whatever I come to, and whatever I feel is right, that's what they want for me," he has said.

What replaced the church wasn't another system. "I don't want to be a part of one religion," he told Consequence of Sound. "I have my own opinions. Some are from this religion, some are from this religion, some are from no religion." He kept certain values, sobriety in particular, as personal choices rather than religious mandates. Coffee? He tried it. "It literally tastes like burnt wood."

The pattern here matters. Boone didn't leave because he stopped believing in everything. He left because the container felt too rigid for what he was actually experiencing. That same instinct drove him off American Idol, out of college, and into a career built entirely on his own terms.

Rise to Fame

The American Idol Quit

In early 2021, Boone auditioned for American Idol Season 19. Katy Perry told him, "I see you winning American Idol." He got three yeses and a standing ovation. Then he did a backflip out of the audition room.

He advanced to the Top 24. And then he quit.

Why? Because he didn't want to be "the American Idol guy." He wanted to build something on his own terms. "I want to be Benson Boone because I write smash hits and they love my music," he said. Walking away from a sure thing because it felt like a cage. Pure Type 7.

The Dan Reynolds Mentorship

What happened next was the real turning point. Dan Reynolds of Imagine Dragons had discovered Boone's singing videos on TikTok and reached out via Instagram, saying he loved Boone's vibe and voice and wanted to work with him.

There was a problem: Boone had never written a song. Not one. He flew to Las Vegas anyway.

Over three days, Reynolds taught him the fundamentals of songwriting. The experience hit differently because Boone had grown up listening to Imagine Dragons. Here was someone who had accomplished everything he dreamed of, sitting across from him, treating him like a peer.

At the end of those three days, Reynolds said he wanted to keep working together. Boone's response: "I packed up and moved to Vegas the next day."

What Reynolds gave him went beyond craft. The advice Boone cites most often: "Whenever you make a decision, always think ahead, is this what you really want?" In an industry where young artists get exploited constantly, Reynolds became a guardrail. "A lot of people get screwed in this industry," Boone has said. "He is such a good human and always wants what's best for me."

Reynolds signed him to his Night Street Records label under Warner Records. And Boone's very first solo composition, a song he wrote after observing Reynolds work, with a chorus melody that popped into his head during an Uber ride, was "Ghost Town." It has since amassed over 350 million Spotify streams.

The Explosion

Everything after that happened at a speed that defies normal career timelines.

"In The Stars" hit Platinum. "Beautiful Things," written at 2 AM on his grandmother's old piano in his LA living room, became the biggest-selling global single of 2024, with 2.11 billion streams and the #1 spot in 19 countries. His debut album Fireworks & Rollerblades hit #6 on the Billboard 200. His sophomore album American Heart debuted at #2. His first all-arena world tour: 50 shows across North America and Europe.

All of this in roughly four years. From a kid who had never written a song to a global pop star with a world tour. For Boone, there is no speed limit.

Benson Boone's Personality Quirks and Habits

The chart numbers tell one story. The patterns beneath them tell a more revealing one.

The Adrenaline Addiction

This is the most visible layer. He doesn't perform so much as launch himself. At one Salt Lake City show, he had done five flips by his seventh song. He's climbed the walls of Wembley Stadium mid-performance.

Off stage, he cliff jumps. He once leaped 629 feet from Auckland's Sky Tower. He rollerblades. He hikes, rock climbs, and fishes. When asked why he does things like the Sky Tower jump, his answer was unsettling and honest: "Maybe a part of me has a death wish, and I just don't know that part of me yet, because I don't want to die."

For Type 7s, physical intensity isn't showing off. It's how they feel alive. When the body moves, the mind can't spiral.

The Sobriety Paradox

Boone has never tried drugs or alcohol and says he never will. Not because of his Mormon upbringing (he's left the church), but because he knows himself.

"I have an addictive personality," he told Rolling Stone. When the interviewer asked how he could know that without ever trying substances, Boone replied: "Dude, candy."

Then he got more specific: "I just think for me personally, like, dude, I would die. I feel like if I started, I would do it so much that my health would just decline."

That kind of self-knowledge at 23 is rare. The discipline it takes to maintain total sobriety as a touring pop star, surrounded by industry excess, stands out. Most people with that level of intensity discover their addictive tendencies the hard way. Boone recognized the pattern preemptively and drew a hard line.

The Ego Check System

Fame distorts self-perception. Boone knows this and built a system to fight it. Every two weeks, he does what he calls "ego checks" with his manager Jeff Burns, a man he credits as "the reason I am here today." The purpose: to remind himself he is "not the king of the world."

He once snapped at his mother during a phone call and felt so awful that he called her back twenty minutes later to apologize. He cited this as a wake-up call. "It is incredibly easy to get carried away with my ego," he has admitted. That level of candor from someone in his position is unusual, and deliberate.

The Body Image Battle

This is where Boone gets most disarmingly honest. And where the darker edge of his personality surfaces.

"Dude, it affects me so much," he told Rolling Stone when asked about body image. For a male pop star built like an athlete, someone who does backflips for a living and could easily lean into the thirst trap, the vulnerability is striking.

"Because I'm so incredibly hard on myself, and when I start to think about my appearance too much, it kills me because there's always something more I could do," he said. "There's always a hairstyle or, like, my arms could be bigger. My shoulders could be bigger. It's never-ending. I can't afford to think that way because I will never be happy if I do think that way."

He's been explicit about what he doesn't want. "I can't be the sex icon of the century, because that's not who I am." And: "I don't want people to come to a show expecting me to take his shirt off and it to be like a gun show. I don't want to rely on my physical form to be the primary driver of my shows."

It "sucks to focus" on it, he said. You can hear the exhaustion in those quotes, the feeling of fighting a battle with no finish line.

This maps to the Type 7 stress pattern. Under pressure, 7s move toward Type 1 behavior: perfectionism, self-criticism, the feeling that nothing measures up. Boone's body becomes the arena where his relentless drive turns inward. The same energy that makes him flip off pianos and write songs at 2 AM also whispers that his shoulders aren't big enough.

How He Writes Songs

For a guy who didn't know he could sing until 17, Boone has developed a remarkably clear creative process.

It starts with the piano. Always. "Every song is written differently, but one thing that never changes is my constant need to have a piano," he told FAULT Magazine. The sessions happen late at night, when sleep won't come. "It's me and the piano, usually late at night. I'll sit there and start playing chords and singing random melodies."

His voice leads the composition. Growing up on Billy Joel, Sam Smith, Adele, Stevie Wonder, and Queen, he lets melody dictate where a song goes rather than building around chord progressions or lyrics first.

The story behind "Beautiful Things" shows how this works in practice. On September 29, 2023, shortly after moving to LA, Boone couldn't sleep. He went downstairs to his grandmother's old piano and created two separate song ideas but couldn't find a chorus.

During a session with collaborator Jack LaFrantz, they suggested combining the two pieces. Then producer Evan Blair joined, pulled out a guitar with distorted pedals left over from a previous session, and started playing. Blair recalled that Boone's "eyes went really wide. You could tell that it had unlocked something in his brain." The catch: the two parts were in different time signatures, 4/4 and 6/8. It took about a month to figure out how to bridge them.

He co-writes in small, trusted circles. "The sessions were less focused on the intensity of finishing a song, and more on the fun we have writing and creating these tracks," he's said. His writing ethic is simple and nonnegotiable: "Nobody is going to relate to your lyrics if they're not real. Being vulnerable is the most important thing in songwriting."

He plays drums, guitar, and piano on his own recordings and designs his own cover art. The artwork for "Ghost Town," "In The Stars," and "Room For 2" are all his. The architecture student in him never fully went away.

Controversy and Criticism

What People Actually Say

The most persistent criticism of Benson Boone: he's a copy of a copy. Someone doing impressions of Harry Styles and Freddie Mercury without a unique artistic identity.

Pitchfork gave his American Heart album a 3.7/10. Critic Jeremy D. Larson called it "music for people who like how music sounds, but not for people who like music." He described the cover art as "the movie poster for Zack Snyder's lost Bruce Springsteen biopic" and noted that despite the Americana branding, "these songs are American insofar as they do not evoke a specific time or place and have nothing really to say."

TikTok creators have been more blunt. Lincoln Presley: "He doesn't understand that he's not being authentic because I don't think he knows who he is yet." Tell The Bees: "There's no grit, there's nothing to grab onto. It feels very shiny and polished and fake, a copy of a copy, and it's not interesting to the average person." One viral trend paired his songs with plates of white food (plain chicken breast, rice, yogurt) to argue his music was flavorless.

Then there's the purely visceral hatred, the people who can't explain why. One commenter wrote: "idek why I hate Benson Boone but it feels right." Boone saw it and responded in a (now-deleted) TikTok: "Like WHAT!? How am I supposed to improve after reading that?"

How He Handles It

Rather than spiraling into defensiveness or retreating entirely, Boone turned the criticism into comedy. His "Mr. Electric Blue" music video is a masterclass in self-deprecation: he opens wearing a "One Hit Wonder" t-shirt, walks into a meeting at fictional "Industry Plant Records," and his agent (played by songwriting partner LaFrantz) tells him his investments in backflips and "moonbeam ice cream" aren't paying off. The agent suggests "good songwriting" as a new gimmick. Boone replies: "You know I can't do that." He then wears a "Your Music Is Terrible" shirt, mows lawns for "Auto-Tune Trimmers," and sells his sparkly jumpsuits.

The reframing instinct is a core Type 7 move. The strength: resilience. Boone bounces back faster than almost anyone. The risk: reframing can happen too quickly, skipping over legitimate pain that needs processing. Whether Boone has truly sat with the criticism or outrun it remains an open question.

Benson Boone's Legacy and Current Work

At 23, Boone occupies a fascinating cultural position. His American Heart album draws on Bruce Springsteen and Americana, suggesting he's searching for a more grounded artistic identity. His first all-arena world tour proves his commercial power is real.

He lives in a sharp-angled luxury fortress overlooking Utah Lake, about 30 minutes south of Salt Lake City. He owns a pink and orange ice cream truck called "Moonbeam Ice Cream and Popsicles." When asked about his plans for it, he said: "drive it around." Crumbl created a limited-edition moonbeam ice cream cookie to coincide with his album drop.

His personal life carries its own complications. He's single following his September 2025 breakup with actress Maggie Thurmon, a split that got messy when Thurmon posted a since-deleted TikTok implying infidelity. His closest relationships seem to be with people who knew him before fame: his best friend Dawson Wills, his lifelong friend Eric (whose near-fatal car accident as teenagers inspired the song "Young American Heart"), and his sisters.

The question hanging over Benson Boone isn't whether he's talented. His voice, his energy, and his songwriting instincts are obvious. The question is whether he'll slow down long enough to find the depth that critics say is missing.

Growth, for someone wired like Boone, comes from stopping the motion and letting the uncomfortable feelings catch up. He's shown glimpses of this. "Beautiful Things" sits in fear rather than escaping it. His body image honesty, his ego checks, his sobriety: these don't belong to someone purely avoiding pain.

They belong to someone learning that the most thrilling experience of all might be standing still.

What do you think drives Benson Boone's constant motion? Is it joy, fear, or something deeper? Drop your take below and let's explore what makes this daredevil tick.

Disclaimer: This analysis of Benson Boone's Enneagram type is speculative, based on publicly available information, and may not reflect the actual personality type of Benson Boone.