Despite having lived in Los Angeles for almost five years, I am the one who’s late for lunch at Toast, the bakery-cafe of upscale American comfort food in the city’s Beverly Grove neighborhood.

Toby Randall, his dad Barrie and his manager have been there for at least 10 minutes by the time I sit down, slurping down Diet Cokes with their menus closed after a proper scanning. The Englishmen heard all the horror stories about traffic here and, therefore, left their hotel in downtown with more than enough time to spare. I mistakenly thought LA traffic would be on my side, not that it ever has been before.

If you didn’t know that Toby was a bonafide Vine star—he’s got 1.3 million followers on the social media app, plus another 24,000 on Twitter and 371,000 on YouTube — the only thing that would make you do a double-take is the fact that the 13-year-old seems to be the only teenager having lunch on LA’s chic West 3rd Street at noon on a Tuesday.  

Dressed in a white t-shirt and Adidas pants, Toby looks like any other 13-year-old getting ready for soccer camp—if athletic activities were his thing. “I don’t really do anything apart from music, because I’m not really interested in sports,” he says, scrunching his face at the thought of the LA Galaxy soccer match his dad was dragging him to that evening. “I took tae kwan do, but then I just stopped it.”

He downloaded Vine simply because he was at a friend’s house, and they thought it was fun to scroll through and watch funny videos. After seeing someone sing on Vine, Toby realized that was a viable option, too. 

“I just grabbed my phone and started filming myself singing and put it up,” he says nonchalantly as he reaches for his soda, recalling the first cover he did of Bruno Mars’ “When I Was Your Man.” “I woke up the next day, and I had gotten loads of missed calls from my friends. I rang one back and they were like, ‘Go on this Instagram account. They post Vines.’ They had like 5 million followers and had posted one of my songs on their account. I had like 70,000 Vine followers overnight.”

Other kids may have stopped at that point, but Toby isn’t your average Vine user. Both he and his dad use the word “perfectionist” a few times throughout lunch, and this is an obvious truth as Toby explains how he decides which songs to cover for the one-million eager followers he amassed in just over a year. “Most of the time, I’ll look at the charts or see what people have suggested, just to get an idea of what they’ll like,” he says, not realizing there is an adult sitting in an office a block away at this very moment, wishing they could get their clients to think like this. Toby’s Vines and YouTube videos are curated and calculated in a way that’s almost too smart for a kid who’s about to turn 14.          

He’s moved on from recording on his iPhone to a very professional set-up, using a Canon EOS 7D to record longer videos and a microphone he describes as the kind you use “when a singer’s singing live.” When he creates a video, he makes every element of it himself, playing the background music onto a keyboard, recording it to his keyboard, and singing the vocals over that. 

The videos go up every Wednesday, not because a PR team told him this was how to gain followers, but because Toby intuitively knows that fans will come back if they know what to expect. It’s a smart plan of attack for someone who didn’t set out to be a Vine star. “I didn’t think I’d have any followers,” he says. “I wasn’t really doing it for that. I was doing it for fun.”

And the fun has paid off. After a few days of meetings and tourist attractions in LA, the whole crew’s heading down to VidCon, where Toby’s set to sing a Tove Lo song in the opening ceremony.

“At the meet-and-greets, I get pleasure watching him,” Barrie gushes. “It’s really great to see the kids go, ‘Aah!’ It’s nice.”

The girls are already screaming?

“It’s mental,” his dad admits as Toby laughs. “He gets recognized here. Slowly more and more at home. England’s very different.”

“It’s whenever I go into town, every single time now,” Toby says, his eyes getting wide at the thought of no obscurity.

“But that’s the last couple of months,” his dad explains. “Prior to that it was the odd one or two. Now everybody’s staring.”

Barrie says he’ll push Toby towards some of the fans, especially the ones who seem desperate to meet him. Often, they’re the same age as Toby. It’s a new norm that Toby still hasn’t adjusted to. When talk of fans comes up, he pulls his right leg up to his chest and starts playing with his shoelace. It’s not because he doesn’t love them—he clearly appreciates that without Vine followers, he wouldn’t be where he is—but it’s clear he’s not comfortable with fame yet.

And that’s completely normal. Celebrity’s cool, sure, but other 13-year-olds spend their summer days swimming, skateboarding and avoiding summer reading. Two days after we chatted, Toby was going to stand in front of thousands of screaming fans at VidCon, where he would hang out with big-name YouTubers like Superwoman, who he was planning on collaborating with. 

“Sometimes when I’m doing one thing and I have to film a cover or get a song done by a certain day, I’m a bit like, ‘Oh, God, what do I do?’” Toby admits. “But most of the time, I’m quite good at handling everything. It doesn’t get overwhelming, not really. I go to school, I come home, and I’ll usually have to film part of the cover or the Vine video. There’s always something to do, but I always hang out with friends as well.”       

It helps that he goes to a public school that’s supportive of his musical endeavors—at least for now. He’s got his GCSE subjects picked out to study in years 10 and 11 (not surprisingly, computers and music are two of the five), and Barrie says the school is flexible, because things haven’t gotten too crazy yet. “Most of the time, I do a little bit of school on the road, but they don’t really mind me missing it as much as if it was something else, because these are big opportunities I wouldn’t get otherwise, like meetings in London or events like DigiFest. But at the moment, I’m doing school,” Toby says.          

But it’s July. There’s no reason for us to keep talking about school. The rest of Toby’s meal is getting boxed up, and it’s clear he wants to concentrate on his phone, not in a rude way, but in an “I’m 13” way. And who can argue that?