Josh Groban: so how did Josh Groban manage to woo millions of hearts with just his set of prodigious pipes?

Interview, March, 2004 by Renee Fleming

Bringing the force and romance of a classically trained voice to contemporary love songs and ballads, Josh Groban sold more than five million copies of his heartfelt eponymous debut, attracting opera admirers and pop fans alike. His second album, Closer (Reprise), is an even more extravagant and successful synthesis of old-fashioned vocal grandeur and up-to-the-minute sincerity. So, on the eve of a tour that will have him criss-crossing the United States until April 24, who better than another great chart-topping classical singer, diva Renee Fleming, to quiz Groban about fusing tradition and modernity?

RENEE FLEMING: I remember being very surprised that your first CD [Josh Groban, 2001] wasn't nominated for a Grammy. I felt like you should have at least been included in the "new artists" category. I suspect the reason for the omission was that it wasn't clear which category you belonged to. How do you define yourself?

JOSH GROBAN: 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--people like Paul Simon, who took folk music and put African music on top of it. Initially, I trained my voice classically, but the influence of all those other styles was there, and when I put out my first album, I wanted to reflect all that while staying true to who I am as a singer. I knew when I decided that I didn't want it to be classified as one specific genre that I'd be doing a good thing, but I also knew there would be a downside--when you're new there's always a desire to put you in a slot. The Grammy situation is definitely an example of how it's worked against me. My music is hard to classify, but it's great when I walk into a record shop and see my album in different sections.

RF: So you come from a musical family?

JG: Both my parents are very artistic and love theater and music and the arts. My dad plays piano by ear, as do I. He played trumpet through college and really loved jazz but was told early on that music was not a career, so he went into business, which he's brilliant at.

RF: How do you think the general public perceives you?

JG: It's hard to say. A lot of times people just go, "Oh, there's that singer," and that's great. I would have to say that I'm more of a pop singer right now, but I wouldn't want to rule out the idea of doing opera in the future. I have such enormous respect for opera that I've made the choice at 23 not to record or perform any of the major arias at this point because when I do them, I want to do them right. I want to do a certain amount of experimentation now, then do things in the beautiful, traditional way later.

RF: What was your first big musical influence?

JG: Watching a video of Stephen Sondheim's Sunday in the Park With George [1984] when I was very young. I didn't understand a lot of it, but for some reason it just got to me.

RF: How did you discover you had a voice?

JG: I was taking a vocal class, kind of just blending in, when the teacher asked if anybody knew how to scat sing. I said I thought so, and he asked me to demonstrate. I did a little riff, and the teacher went, "Oh, wow! You're singing [George and Ira] Gershwin's "S Wonderful' at the next cabaret show." When you're a boy in the seventh grade and everybody's listening to rap, it's not the coolest thing to discover you have a voice like mine, so you kind of need someone to single you out and say, "I think you're really good at this." At that point my mom had never really heard me sing, so I said to her, "You have to come to Cabaret Night next week," and during the performance she started to cry. I realized then that this was something I could do to stand out and express myself in a way that I didn't normally know how to do. And that became something very powerful.

RF: How did you meet your producer, David Foster?

JG: I was 17 years old and a theater major at the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts. At the time I wasn't even studying voice that seriously. This teacher I was doing some voice training with on the side knew David, who called him up and said, "Can you give me tapes of some of the kids you're working with? I'm doing an event, and I need someone who can sing 'All I Ask of You' from The Phantom of the Opera [1986]. I made a tape of myself singing the song, and David called me up and said, "Hey, you're really good." To be honest, I didn't really know who he was, but I went out to Sacramento [California] and ended up performing for 20,000 people in a basketball arena with a full orchestra. It was an experience unlike any I'd ever had before. I was walking on air. And then I went home and thought, Back to reality. I didn't think anything like that would ever happen again, especially since I'd realized David was a 14-time Grammy-winning pop producer.

RF: So what happened

JG: About two weeks later he called and said, "I'm at a rehearsal for the Grammys right now. Celine Dion is here, and she's supposed to sing 'The Prayer' with Andrea Bocelli, but he's in Germany and can't make it. She needs someone to sing with." I turned it down because I didn't think I could do it, and he said, "I'm not really asking you, I'm telling you. You've got to sing this song." [Fleming laughs] So sure enough, I found myself onstage singing with Celine Dion, which was pretty daunting because I was very much a baritone at that time and the song was written for a tenor. But it turned out to be a groundbreaking moment because of the people that were in the room and because it was the first time I understood that sometimes you just have to go for it.