Josh Groban says his career hasn’t turned out the way he planned.
It’s been much, much better, thanks.
With his deep, rich tenor singing voice, Groban is one of the top-selling vocal artists of the 21st century. There’s something both soothing and uplifting about the way he croons a standard, or a romantic pop hit, or a Christmas gem or a song in Spanish, Italian or Portuguese.
To date, Groban has sold in the neighborhood of 25 million albums. All without, he notes with pride, a single with tons of radio airplay, or a music video that anybody’s seen on TV.
His 10th studio album, Cinematic, was released in May. It’s a carefully-curated collection of his favorite movie songs.
Groban will sing June 19 at Benchmark International Arena in Tampa, with Jennifer Hudson as support act (they duet on “Unchained Melody” on Cinematic).
It was producer David Foster who plucked Groban, 17 at the time, out of obscurity. Foster, whose hit catalog include albums by Celine Dion, Barbra Streisand, Andrea Bocelli, Michael Bublé, Diana Krall, Madonna, Chicago and Whitney Houston, was the young Los Angeles native’s mentor.
In the years since his 2001 debut (the first of five platinum albums) Groban has returned time and again to acting, both on television and the Broadway stage. He has twice been nominated for Tony Awards (for 2016’s Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812 and the 2023 revival of Sweeney Todd). He plans to do more acting in the future, in between singing commitments (a symphony orchestra tour is planned for the fall).
The original career plan was to perform in musical theater. “I was always going to express myself through singing,” Groban says in this Catalyst interview. “I just thought that it would be … my original dream, which is still an ongoing dream, which is one of my great joys: Doing theater.”
St. Pete Catalyst: When you choose what to sing or record, are there certain parameters you keep to, for your fans? Certain kinds of songs? Like “Does this song sound like it belongs on a Josh Groban album?”
Josh Groban: Whatever that parameter is, it’s been dictated by my own voice and soul. It’s not a parameter that’s been dictated by any kind of data on a piece of paper. That’s just my own artistic compass, and that’s something that I’ve had to hone.
You can’t overly strategize that. There are things that tell you what that parameter is: OK, are the hairs standing up on the back of my neck? Does it make me want to cry while I’m singing it? Do I feel like my voice is loving this, or do I feel like I want to cough up blood?
There are things that your body and your heart will always tell you, whether you’re on a lane of truth or not. And so for me, even though my influences are wide-ranging, that feeling is something you really learn to pay attention to, I think, as an artist.
What kind of a passion project was Cinematic for you?
A huge passion project. This concept has been rolling around in the back of my brain for a great majority of my singing career. Any time I’ve taken a step to the side to make a concept album that’s just purely interpretive, I really want to hone in, close the lens a little bit and honor a group of songs that shaped who I am as a singer.
A lot goes into it. The actual recording of the songs is often the smallest amount of time, because you have to start with a very long list of ideas. That’s one of the reasons why it can feel so paralyzing and can take you so many years. Because it’s just, where do you begin and where do you end with this kind of list of songs?
Slowly, I think though, the songs really start to find you. In this case, Francis Ford Coppola was being honored by the American Film Institute, and I was asked to sing the Godfather theme for that. That was just the universe saying “Hey, here’s a song that might be right for you.”
I was doing a residency at Caesar’s Place Coliseum. And Adele had just been there, and I thought “Why don’t we do a song of Adele’s, just to tip our hat to her having just been on the stage?” This was before I ever knew I was doing this album. And we thought, OK, “Skyfall” would be a really good one for my voice. And it would be an epic one to end the show.
And that just kinda started to pop up.
There are plenty of them that I love, that when you sing them you realize “You know what? This one’s just not in my bones.” I’ll sing it for fun, karaoke’s the thing, but it’s just not for me.
These are the songs that were for me.
So was there a moment in your distant past, maybe in your teens, when you sang “As Time Goes By” and thought “This is universal, it speaks to me, and I will record it one day?”
[Laughing] I think what winds up happening is, you collect these internal memories of just singing them in general. You just know that your soul is getting kind of tattooed by them over the course of many years. And sometimes it takes this aha moment, many years later, to say “Wow. There really is a lot here that’s maybe more influential to my musical upbringing than I even realized.” We go through life listening to things, being entertained by things, being moved by art … and then in the next hour we go on with our days.
The wonderful thing about being able to do this as a job is that you’re able to look back and go “Wow! That WAS a moment that changed the way I thought about this kind of a song,” or “That was a moment, now that I’m thinking about it, where I closed my bedroom door and I couldn’t stop singing that song.”
Revisiting those memories, and revisiting why these songs were so pivotal and so important for me, was part of the fun.
OK, let’s say “Stayin’ Alive” was one of your pivotal tunes. Would you have attempted to sing it?
A song like that, I know I’m not gonna sing it even remotely like the Bee Gees did. But what I’m gonna do is break down the lyric: Is there something about this lyric? What does “Stayin’ Alive” mean? What are they actually saying here?
This is all the stuff that happens in the studio that nobody sees. With your producer, you play around. You try it slower. You try it an octave down. You try it a different way, and if you hit something that makes you go “ooh,” this is something that now makes the song a story I can tell, and a story I can sing.
Those are sometimes the greatest surprises when you cover songs. But yeah, on the surface a song like that feels like probably not right for me, and 90 percent of the time that is the correct instinct. But every so often you get surprised.
Let’s talk about the route you took to discovering you had The Voice. Did you have another career in mind?
Singing, for me, was always in service of theater. I was discovered, so to speak, pulled out of school and put into a kind of high-pressure environment. I was being courted by David Foster and Warner Records in that whole time period.
I went to Carnegie-Mellon for musical theater. So singing was a huge part; I was not studying to be a lawyer, I was gonna sing. I just wasn’t gonna sing on a $20,000 microphone, standing in theaters and arenas. I was gonna be standing in theaters, but in costume and makeup, and with a script.
I was always going to express myself through singing, I just thought that it would be … my original dream, which is still an ongoing dream, which is one of my great joys: Doing theater.
Was it David Foster who said “You know, you have a really good voice”?
It was a couple of people before David. Obviously I give huge credit to those early teachers, who kind of pulled me out from the back of numerous choirs and said “Hey, there’s something special here.” David was the first one who said there was something with broad appeal there.
For someone of David’s success to not only say “I think you have a naturally beautiful voice” but “I think you have a commercially beautiful voice,” that was a surprise to me. Because I never thought that my voice was one that would be able to be part of the music business. Would have mass appeal.
I always thought that it would be something more niche, would be something where I could lean into a character and be of service to a script. When I looked at the other artists that he had produced, I never thought that I fit into that echelon of universal appeal. You’d be hard pressed to find a producer who put more great vocals on record.
There’s a trust there. Leaving school in your freshman year was something that neither myself or my parents took lightly. At all. I come from a family of educators. This was not something where I had stars in my eyes, “oh goody, I get to sign a record deal.” I would not have done it were it not for that track record that he had.
But I never expected it to hit. I thought I would just go back to school the next year.
Tickets for the June 19 concert at Benchmark Arena are at this link.
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