Josh Groban Wakes Up London Scene Magazine
March 1, 2007
By Bob Klanac
“My fans are really open-minded,musical, intelligent people...”
Save for new millennium media synergies, Josh Groban would probably not be selling truckloads of CDs or playing venues like the John Labatt Centre. It was Groban’s appearance on a spring TV episode of Ally McBeal that started his career trajectory. He played a part, sang a song and enough women swooned – and wrote letters to the show – that they brought him back for an encore the next season.
In 2004, while speaking of the response the show generated, Groban said, “After my guest spot on Ally McBeal, I got 8000 fan emails, mostly from young girls. I got a lot of marriage proposals. Girls were giddy about it. It was the kind of thing we were hoping we’d get, because it’s important to me that I reach my peers, and if the female peers happen to be those peers, then that’s fine with me.”
By that time, the breaks Groban had received would act as tiny career builders that would slowly put him into the zeitgeist of middle-class America. Canadian-born MOR producing legend David Foster was responsible for most of those breaks. He put Groban on the stage for the late-90s inaugural ceremonies for the then-Governor of California Gray Davis and as many music tribute concerts as he could find. It was also Foster who signed him to a recording contract with his Warner-distributed label.
Despite the building talk about opera-boy at that time, Groban was still pursuing his education like any other good student. Although renowned for his “poperatic” voice, in truth, Groban had been developing his thespian talents as much as his musical ones. Having graduated as a theatre major from the Los Angeles County High School, he was enrolled in drama at Carnegie Mellon University when he was offered his first recording contract.
Putting his academic life on hold, Groban concentrated on his first eponymous album with Foster. Starting with his young protégé’s operatic voice, Foster fit Groban into opera pieces and opera sound-a-like tunes, lathering it all up in the orchestral backdrops that are a Foster trademark. Light-pop pals like Carole Bayer-Sager, Albert Hammond, Richard Marx and Foster himself all lent a hand in penning the material.
The album found a home not only with Ally McBeal fans but in the fern-infested living rooms of middle-class North Americans. Whatever his talents, this was music for soccer moms to swoon over. And for boomers finally getting their lives back from their children’s schedules, this was a ‘serious’ artist they could follow.
Groban may be the latest recording artist to make middle-class people feel like they’re listening to ‘real’ music but he isn’t the first. Mario Lanza, Beverly Sills and Pavarotti have all found mass audiences and even some pop cache during their careers. However, Groban has never released a pure opera recording for the purists, focusing exclusively on the pop market, albeit via some operatic pieces produced by pop hands.
“When I was growing up, my parents introduced me to a lot of styles, so I was influenced by a range of genres and by people who decided not to settle into just one thing ...” Groban told Interview magazine in 2005. “I trained my voice classically, but the influence of all those other styles was there.”
Those who missed all the Groban-itis taking hold in the music industry at that time likely caught his name and voice on a PBS special in 2002. The special consolidated his success and tied in as it was with a live disc and DVD, Groban became the Starbucks CD buzz-boy of his time.
He followed up with his second set of recordings in 2003. Groban stated that the Foster-produced Closer was more reflective of who he was as a recording artist. Aaron Latham’s review of the disc in the All Music Guide captures the focus of the music quite well, writing, “Although the disc still focuses on bland rose petal confessions, its highlights point in the right direction and bring Groban closer to creating an album that eliminates the sick sweetness while remaining a tasty, satisfying treat.”
That struggle between being a housewife heartthrob with overwrought love songs and using his voice as an artistic instrument would be the musical paradigm of Groban’s career for the next few years. Critics acknowledged his superb voice, while rolling their eyes at some of the mundane material. For the most part, Groban’s singing and writing on Closer, especially on the African-techno tune, “Never Let Go” (with Deep Forest), was lauded as the sort of thing he should and could be doing.
By the time Awake hit the marketplace in late 2006, Groban had become a top-flight recording and performing attraction. It would seem that the 25-year-old (he turns 26 the day after his Feb. 26 JLC show) singer truly had nothing to prove anymore. He was a top-notch performer and in terms of sales his albums were a bright light in a music industry facing declining CD sales.
However, Groban still does have something to prove to himself and the evidence is on Awake. He sings some of the songs in his non-native language of Italian, an opera staple. He continues to explore different genres of music, this time with South Africa’s Ladysmith Black Mambazo and Herbie Hancock. And a couple of the tunes he penned for Awake show real growth.
“I learned from touring that my fans are really open-minded, musical, intelligent people, and I feel like they want to come on this new journey with me. The music still sounds like it’s coming from my heart and my soul and my voice. My goal on Awake was to create the music and find the best people to help me create it,” states Groban on his Web site.
Having gone from teen prodigy to young adult hit maker under David Foster’s svengali-like direction, one senses that Groban is struggling to break away artistically. In fact, one can almost count on it in the future. In 10 years time it’s more than likely the name of Josh Groban will mean a lot more artistically than it does now, that the music of this pop balladeer may well be found in another category in music stores. And it seems clear that, as of now, that may be Groban’s dream as well.
