Nine Songs: Josh Groban

When we meet on a balmy afternoon in London, during a break in his GEMS world tour which ends in October with a residency at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, the first thing he tells me is that he’s itching to get back onstage again to share stories through songs.

“I’ve been travelling the world, and you spend a lot of time in this business isolated, so to have a chance to get shot out of a cannon again, to go out and see people around the world and sing, it's a blast.”

This week he’s back in his native Los Angeles, where his name will grace the 2,843^rd star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Having grown up in L.A. and fascinated with the stars in the street as a child, Groban is infectiously excited about the moment he’ll get a star with his own name on it.

“For a Los Angeleno, who walked with my parents over those stars when I was a kid, looking down at my heroes with all kinds of different little shops on that wacky street, it's surreal. I'm supremely honoured. It's going to be a crazy thing to look at.”

There’s been a serendipity to Groban’s career. His initial break arrived unexpectedly at the age of 17 when he was a rehearsal singer and was asked to stand in for Andrea Bocelli to duet with Céline Dion. The appearance led to him being cast in Ally McBeal and getting a record deal, and since the release of his eponymously titled debut album in 2001 he’s sold over 35 million albums.

Groban’s latest record, Cinematic, is a love letter to the music of the cinema, and a companion piece to 2015’s Stages, a celebration of his love of Broadway musicals. Cinematic sees Groban interpreting the songs from Stand By Me, Breakfast at Tiffany's and others.

I ask him how he felt about stepping into the shoes of such iconic songs and he says, “It takes some stones to sing anything that people love. These songs are adored and I always say that interpreting songs is way scarier than presenting something new”, he reflects. “It's vulnerable, and you want people to like it. If you're singing something that people love and they don't feel you did it justice then I feel terrible, you want to honour it.”

Groban feels that by their very nature songs are meant to be interpreted, that the artist has to find a different way to tell their story, which was his ambition for Cinematic. “They're meant to be done in lots of different ways but there needs to be enough space between the original and the cover, because there has to be an openness and a freshness to it. I thought the Adele song, “Skyfall” was released much sooner than it was, it's actually been 13 years.”

When it came to his Nine Songs selection, Groban says he didn't want to overthink it and went with his instinct. “Every day there's another nine that represent a certain time of my life, the way I'm feeling that day, or a style that I'm influenced by in that moment. I tried to not let perfect be the enemy of the good here.”

When we get to the end of our conversation however, he realises there are connections between each of them, from key moments in his life to the heroes he’s collaborated with, and we end where we started, with Groban musing on the power of stories.

“With these songs, you want to have a good emotional attachment, a story, something that represents what makes you tick and what's made you as an artist, but talking to you about them, I realised I picked the right songs for me”, he explains. “They have more of a connective tissue than I thought, and they drifted into stories and emotions that seemingly have nothing to do with the song!”