Finding Fans Everywhere
Cleveland Plain Dealer
February 11, 2005
By Gary Graff
Like a tennis pro's racket or a home-run slugger's bat, Josh Groban's voice is serious business.
The classically trained instrument is, after all, one of the reasons why the 23-year-old is one of the hottest singers in the world right now, a genre-crossing phenomenon whose good looks don't exactly hurt his appeal.
So it's not surprising to learn that Groban studies voice health as closely as he learns the notes and arrangements of his songs.
"I've kind of experimented with lots of things to keep my voice healthy," he says. "The one thing I've found consistently is just sleep, sleep, sleep. . . . I can recharge and rejuvenate even if I've had a really late night, even if I'm just shot from a show and I'm tired.
"If I get a good eight, nine hours of sleep, 10 hours of sleep, I'm as good as new. So that's what I try to do more than anything else."
Of course, the demands of his success can make it a bit challenging for Groban to catch some Z's. His third album, 2003's "Closer," climbed over the likes of OutKast, Linkin Park and Britney Spears to hit No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart. "Closer" has sold more than 2 million copies, and Groban's "Live at the Greek" CD/DVD package was one of the hits of the 2004 holiday season -- as well as a top-rated PBS fund-raising special.
Groban is nominated for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance at this weekend's Grammy Awards for the "Closer" track "You Raise Me Up." Also, "Believe," which he sang for the movie "Polar Express," is nominated for an Academy Award.
Since he's more Bocelli than Backstreet Boys, Groban knows that this kind of reception is unusual in the pop mainstream. But he says part of the reason it's working is because he's approached his career on the same terms as those he's sharing chart space with.
"I think it's the same connection that any rock band or pop or rap or country or whatever artist makes with fans," explains Groban, a pop and rock fan himself who covered Linkin Park's "My December" on an expanded edition of "Closer."
"It's about building a fan base. It's finding your style and finding what you want to say with the music and what you're trying to get across with your genre, and then finding people that want to hear it."
Groban started finding himself artistically as a youth growing up in Los Angeles. A self-confessed "rock star in the shower," he caught the performing buzz in the seventh grade when he performed George Gershwin's " 'S Wonderful" at a school jazz cabaret, complete with a scat solo in the middle.
He began taking private voice lessons, learned a variety of instruments (guitar, piano and drums) and attended High School for the Arts in Los Angeles, where he starred in high school theater productions of "Fiddler on the Roof," "Sweeney Todd," "Finian's Rainbow" and others. After graduating, he enrolled in the musical theater program at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
Groban's Broadway ambitions were sidetracked when a voice teacher introduced him to Grammy-winning producer David Foster, who signed the fledgling singer to his 142 label, a subsidiary of Warner Bros. Records, and navigated Groban onto high-profile movie ("A.I.: Artificial Intelligence") and television ("Ally McBeal") soundtracks before beginning to release his own albums.
Groban says he still keeps musical theater "in the back of my mind," but he and Foster are working on his next album, which the singer hopes will be as surprising and disarming - and have as much mass appeal - as its predecessors.
"Beautiful music doesn't have to be confined to one particular genre," he says. "I try to keep myself as open as possible and take songs that are very different and make them my own. I want to get that person who's going to Tower Records to buy the OutKast CD to also listen to mine."
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