The Ballad of Josh Groban
The Times-Picayune
March 11, 2005
By Keith Spera, Music Writer
He thought he'd sing on Broadway. Instead, Groban is classical pop's reigning rock star. And he's fine with that.
As an adolescent, Josh Groban harbored rock star fantasies. As a realist, he accepted that such dreams were unlikely.
The problem was his voice. It was too good: A deep, dramatic, sonorous baritone, an instrument suited for operas, orchestras and musical theater. Not arenas filled with screaming fans.
"Waking up and having the voice that I have, you don't assume that that kind of attention and venue is going to be available to you," Groban said during a phone interview. "You're not sitting at home singing 'Phantom of the Opera' and thinking, 'I'm going to sell out Madison Square Garden.'
"You think that one day you might make it to Broadway, and that would be the pinnacle."
Groban, 24, has gone far beyond Broadway. He has, in fact, sold out Madison Square Garden and dozens of other arenas and amphitheaters.
By applying his rich baritone to classically arranged ballads and pop music, he has sold more than 8 million albums in just four years. Women of all ages are smitten with him. These "Grobanites" scream his name and craft banners bearing his likeness and travel great distances to see him.
Consider Groban's career arc in New Orleans. In his first professional visit, at 17, he sang one song as the "special guest" of classical pop vocalist Sarah Brightman. Tonight, he returns to headline New Orleans Arena, with jazz trumpeter Chris Botti opening the show.
Groban's across-the-board success is due in part to hard work and the shrewd manner in which he was marketed. His handlers exposed him to a vast potential audience via the Super Bowl, the Winter Olympics, Oprah Winfrey's birthday bash and two hugely popular PBS specials.
In interviews and onstage, he comes across as unpretentious, unselfconscious and unfailingly polite and pleasant. He shies away from stuffy presentations, singing in a jacket and T-shirt or a hockey jersey, his mop of dark curls all akimbo.
He also has an innate ability to interpret a wide range of material, to highlight a lyric's inherent emotion. To millions of fans, he provides inspiration and comfort. "To Where You Are," the hit ballad from his self-titled 2001 debut, is a sentimental embrace of a departed loved one. "You Raise Me Up," the lead single from his 2003 album "Closer" and a departure from the sad songs he prefers, is a celebration of a significant other.
Groban understands that he defied long odds to realize his rock star dreams.
"Now that I think about it," he said, "the journey from actually getting signed, to releasing an album and then getting that album known . . . so many things could have happened so that it wouldn't have happened to what it is now. It's very scary, actually."
Such reality checks, Groban says with a laugh, have so far prevented him from becoming a jerk.
"Once you firmly believe that it's happening and you're set, then you start becoming a jerk," he said. "That definitely hasn't happened yet. Believe me, I'm still pinching myself constantly."
'You can play yourself'
Groban was a 17-year-old senior at the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts when he first crossed paths with David Foster, the mentor who changed his life.
As a producer and songwriter, Foster has earned 14 Grammys. He produced Natalie Cole's smash "Unforgettable" album, Whitney Houston's soundtrack for "The Bodyguard," Celine Dion's "The Colour of My Love" and Barbra Streisand's "Broadway," among many others.
He was thunderstruck when he first heard a tape of Groban.
"It only happens a few times in a lifetime, that a tape sticks out so dramatically," Foster says on the "Josh Groban in Concert" DVD. "When your voice came on, it was breathtaking. There's such a place in this world for your voice."
Foster first unveiled his new discovery at an inauguration concert for California Gov. Gray Davis. A few weeks later, Foster called on Groban again, this time to stand in for opera singer Andrea Bocelli at a 1999 Grammy rehearsal -- singing opposite Celine Dion. Groban later served as a stand-in at an Oscar rehearsal -- making his duet with Beyonce at this year's Academy Awards all the sweeter.
As their collaboration deepened, Foster put Groban on the charity circuit, singing for well-heeled entertainment industry luminaries at fund-raisers and in record executives' back yards.
After a brief stint as a musical theater major at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Groban quit school. Foster convinced him -- and Warner Bros. Records -- that he could succeed in the pop marketplace.
"When David pulled me out of obscurity and took me out of college," Groban recalled, "he said, 'Look, you don't have to do musical theater. You don't have to play a character right now. You can play yourself. I want to make an album with your face and your name and your voice.' "
Together, they collected material for Groban's debut. They reworked 1970s singer-songwriter Don McLean's "Vincent (Starry, Starry Night)." Groban insisted on singing "Let Me Fall," a song composed for the avant-garde Cirque du Soleil. He reprised "Se" from the Italian film classic "Cinema Paradiso," exercising a love for Romance languages instilled by his earliest voice lessons.
"I love singing in other languages," he said. "There's something mysterious and magical about telling a story in another language that just doesn't come across when you translate it back to English."
An album like "Josh Groban" is anything but a sure commercial bet. The usual channels for promotion -- radio, rock magazines, MTV, club tours -- were not available. Groban's team sought alternative avenues, including two memorable cameos as an awkward high school senior in the 2001 season of TV's "Ally McBeal." His scenes, including one in which he sang at a prom, were an immediate sensation.
"And then I got my first lesson -- people forget very quickly," Groban said. "They move on to the next thing."
That was not the only hard lesson. The night his album was released, Groban and some friends tried to buy it at the Virgin Megastore in Los Angeles.
"And, of course, they didn't have it," Groban recalled. "They had to go down to the warehouse and find this box. They were like, 'James Brolin released an album?' "
"Josh Groban" sold respectably at first, but was not a runaway success. Groban asked Warner Bros. what he could do to boost sales.
"They're like, 'We've just got to find that thing. We've got to find what it is.' After a few months, I had done everything from 'The Today Show' to the Olympics, and I still felt like the dots hadn't been connected."
Then "20/20" profiled him, and everything changed.
"It was a news piece, a get-to-know-you piece. They did such an incredible job: 'You've seen him here, here, here and here, now here's what the album looks like.'
"It was like a light bulb went off, for whatever reason. The Olympics were seen by a billion people, but that show switched the switch."
The week after "20/20" aired, "Josh Groban" leapt from No. 121 to No. 12 on the Billboard album chart. He built on that momentum with appearances on "The Rosie O'Donnell Show" and "Oprah."
TV introduced Groban; he then gave potential fans a reason to embrace him.
"You still have to deliver, absolutely," Groban said. "It's luck meets preparation. The things that I've had to get through in the last few years are mind-boggling. And I'm glad that it wasn't all extremely easy. I'm glad that I just didn't have a music video that did the work for me, where as long as it was playing on MTV, I could just stay in my suite and count the money."
'Just Josh'
As "Josh Groban" snowballed into a full-blown phenomenon, he taped his first "Great Performances" special for public television -- as Yanni discovered, PBS can be a powerful marketing tool -- at the Pasadena Civic Center in October 2002. The date yielded the best-selling "Josh Groban in Concert" DVD.
On the DVD, Foster says that Groban "can handle a lot of different things vocally. We just happened to find a niche with this (classical pop) for now."
But Groban did not intend to be confined to that niche. His band includes electric guitars as well as strings, and he is an avid fan of popular music.
"That all influences who he's going to be," Foster predicted. "I probably pushed him in the direction of the first album. (On future albums) he'll want some of those other influences to come in."
To that end, Groban has collaborated with a diverse cross-section of vocalists and instrumentalists: R&B singer Angie Stone, Beyonce, avant-jazz and bluegrass banjo wizard Bela Fleck and violinist Lucia Micarelli, who turned her featured spot in Groban's band into a recording career of her own.
"I'm mostly attracted to the collaborations where people go, 'What? Wow. I want to hear that,' " Groban said. "I want to make sure that my fan base doesn't become close-minded. As I've started out, I've felt the pressure of 'stick to this' or 'stick to that' or 'why's he trying this?' My fans have always been the group of people that have said, 'No. Try everything. To us, you're just Josh. You can do whatever you want.'
"So I want to make sure that I can introduce new styles to them, and that the vibe out there isn't, 'He's just going to stand up there with an orchestra and sing pretty Italian music.' I'm trying to shake things up a little bit."
That desire has led him to unexpected places. Such as Linkin Park.
Driving to a Los Angeles studio one day, Groban tuned in to modern rock station KROQ-FM and heard rap-rock band Linkin Park's "My December." Foster also heard the ballad en route to the studio. They both agreed that Groban should try it.
"It just got to me," Groban said. "It's an incredibly beautiful song. It was totally different from what I usually heard (Linkin Park) scream. It's an example of a song that is so universally beautiful lyrically and instrumentally that it doesn't have to be confined to one genre."
"My December" appears on the special edition of "Closer" and on Groban's recent "Live At the Greek" DVD/CD. He recorded the studio version with an 80-piece orchestra.
"If I'm going to do it," he said, "I should do it definitely my way."
'A rock star dream'
Regardless of genre, Groban's criteria for choosing songs is the same.
"Coming from loving theater, the first thing is a great story, a great message, something that I can portray and tell honestly," he said. "A lot of music out there is so surface. Anything with the word 'baby' in it is probably not something that I want to sing. I don't want to sing 'be my love' either. For me, it's finding songs in English that don't sound cheesy with the kind of voice that I have. I want stuff that is edgy and that appeals not only to an older audience, but my peers as well.
"That's what inspired me to write on 'Closer.' Being frustrated, having that itch that you just can't seem to scratch with other people's music."
His composing credits on "Closer" include two songs from a week-long writing session in France with Eric Mouquet, one-half of the world music duo Deep Forest. Groban writes on the piano, but only recently started playing one onstage.
"I feel like I can express more sitting at an instrument than I can just standing there singing," he said. "I love the feeling of playing a piano and singing."
He loves the drums even more.
"Singing in front of 15,000 people in an arena is a rock star dream," he said. "Playing drums in front of 15,000 people is a major rock star dream. I'm definitely living it, for sure."
He plans to start recording his third studio project -- so far, he's issued as many concert albums as studio albums -- after the current tour wraps up at the end of March. He's extended the tour several times to meet demand; he recently returned to the Cincinnati area for the third time in a year.
"I'm already turning into Cher," he said, a joking reference to the diva's never-ending farewell tour. "It's been incredible that the fans have allowed me to do this.
"But on the other hand, I've got to break it off now and give them something new."
Millions of Grobanites await.
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