Let the record show that even Ben Platt—a seasoned performer and native Angeleno who’s spent plenty of time around famous people—barely held it together when he met Beyoncé. “She’s like my idol, and has been since I was a child,” Platt told Zane Lowe in the latest episode of Apple Music’s At Home With series, which includes a playlist of favourites he curated for the occasion. Platt, who rose to fame after making his onscreen debut in the 2012 a cappella rom-com Pitch Perfect, was starring in Dear Evan Hansen on Broadway when Queen B came to see him. “I consider my life to be before that day and after that day,” he said. “I had like three days’ notice. I was nervous but so excited: I got an extra voice lesson that day; I got a haircut; I came early. As soon as the show starts, my first monologue is facing the audience, and so I saw this outline of her beautiful hair, and I was like, ‘Oh my god, it’s real!’ And then I tried to not look at her for the rest of the show. I got back to my dressing room, and they were like, ‘She’s coming back to see you!’ and I was like, ‘I don’t know how to react to that information.” Platt left the Broadway cast of Dear Evan Hansen in 2017, but reprised the title role in the forthcoming film adaptation, which is set to debut this September. But this is hardly Platt’s sole project for the year: He dropped Reverie, his second studio album, on 13 August. Reverie is a perfect mix of old and new: Platt was living with his parents at home during the pandemic, and he drew inspiration from the musical memories of his youth—which in turn pushed him in a musical direction that deviated from the trappings of his fans’ musical theatre expectations. “I wrote most of it from my childhood bedroom,” he said of Reverie. “At first I was like, ‘There’s no way I’m going to be creative in here, or write music in here,’ because it’s such a bizarre feeling to be amidst all your teen posters and all of your old clothes and stuff. But I found it really inspiring to be caught between that youth and all those things I used to be. I felt the oldest and youngest that I’ve ever felt at the same time, so the album sort of caught me in the middle of that in a really nice way. It was really about allowing myself to open up to making music that sounds like music that I listen and dance and move to, and take a little pressure off myself to do something that people maybe aren’t expecting, or that is tangentially related to the theatrical world, and to really let that go and do something that feels authentic to me.”