O Starry Night, Rob Thomas, Nate Ruess, Matchbox Twenty, fun, George Ezra, Elle King
Petersen Events Center
12/07/2015 07:00 PM EST
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Rob Thomas
Rob Thomas has been one of modern music's most compelling and commercially successful artists for well over a decade – between Matchbox Twenty, his solo work, and his various collaborations with iconic artists like Santana, Mick Jagger and Willie Nelson, his tally now stands at more than 80 million albums sold worldwide. Arguably the most accomplished singer/songwriter of his generation, it all comes back to the creative source for Rob. As he says with typical understatement, "I'm a guy who hears songs in his head, and I have to write them down, and I have to get them out. I'm just lucky enough that I can make it my life's work."
"The whole thing started over 17 years ago because I had a bunch of songs," says Rob of the genesis of Matchbox Twenty. Since then, he has penned a remarkable string of smashes, including their #1-charters "Push," "3AM," "If You're Gone," "Bent," "Disease," and "Unwell," and other major hits like "Real World," "Back 2 Good," "Mad Season," and "Bright Lights."
In 1999, his smash collaboration with Santana, the Thomas-penned "Smooth," earned Rob three Grammy Awards and today ranks #1 on Billboard's "Top Hot 100 Rock Songs" chart and #2 on the magazine's "Hot 100 All-Time Top Songs."
In 2004, the Songwriters Hall of Fame presented Thomas with its premiere "Starlight Award" – created to recognize a composer in the early years of his or her career that has already made a lasting impact. He has won numerous BMI and ASCAP Awards, and has earned the Songwriter of the Year crown from both Billboard and BMI for two consecutive years.
2005 saw the release of Rob's first solo album,"…SOMETHING TO BE", which was produced by Matt Serletic. The #1, multi-platinum "…SOMETHING TO BE," made history as the first album by a male artist from a rock or pop group to debut at No. 1 on The Billboard 200 since the chart was launched 50 years earlier. The album earned a pair of Grammy nominations and spawned a string of hit singles, including the smash "Lonely No More" – which was #1 in 15 countries, "This Is How A Heart Breaks," "Ever The Same," and "Streetcorner Symphony."
Rob embarked on a world tour and also appeared at the historic Live 8 multi-concert event in July 2005, performing both as a solo artist and joining Stevie Wonder for a duet version of the Wonder classic, "Higher Ground."
In 2007, Thomas reunited with Matchbox Twenty for "EXILE ON MAINSTREAM." Their first album in five years, the set combined a retrospective of their greatest hits with six new songs produced by Steve Lillywhite – including the RIAA gold single, "How Far We've Come." Debuting at #3 on the Billboard 200, the RIAA gold "EXILE ON MAINSTREAM" scored the biggest first week of the year for a greatest hits collection.
Thomas landed another solo hit in 2007 with "Little Wonders," from the soundtrack to the Disney animated feature, Meet The Robinsons. In December 2008, he performed at the 31st Annual Kennedy Center Honors in Washington DC, where he paid tribute to Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey with an emotionally charged rendition of The Who's "Baba O'Riley," featuring a choir of 150 New York City policemen and firefighters.
In 2009 Rob released his second solo album, cradlesong with Matt Serletic again in the producer's chair. The album features the chart -topping singles "Her Diamonds and "Someday." Rob made Billboard chart history once again as the only male artist with multiple #1 hits at Adult Top 40. With this coronation, Thomas tied Pink with the most No. 1's by a solo artist in the chart's history.
In 2011 Rob Thomas and his Matchbox Twenty band mates released a brand new studio album, "NORTH". The album's unprecedented success marked their first chart topper --debuting at #1 on the Billboard Top 200. "NORTH" was fueled by critical acclaim as well as the hit singles, "She's So Mean", "Overjoyed" and "Our Song". The band toured the globe including two SRO tours of the U.S. and a dynamic performance at the famed Rock in Rio.
In spring '14 Rob hit the road again for a five week North American special intimate headline run. The shows offered the rare and unique opportunity to catch the superstar performing in a more up close and personal setting, playing a career-spanning set. Rob also returned, for the fourth year in a row, to Atlantic City's Borgata Casino in January for three sold out shows to benefit Sidewalk Angels, the New York based not-for-profit foundation that Rob started with his wife Marisol.
Sidewalk Angels is dedicated to providing critically needed funds and support to grassroots groups across the country. It is the primary supporter and sponsor of a number of no-kill animal shelters and animal rescues, reflecting the passion of the foundation's co-founders to fight for the rights and fair treatment of those with no voice. Additionally, the foundation also supports a myriad of other causes, from childhood health and wellness to the fight against homelessness.
Rob Thomas is now putting the finishing touches on his highly anticipated 3rd solo album set for release late summer '15. He has also just announced plans for a North American headline tour kicking off June 11th and continuing through August 10th.
For more information visit: www.robthomasmusic.com
Nate Ruess
Nate Ruess knew he wanted to call his album Grand Romantic long before he finished writing its songs. The singer-songwriter says he's always been a romantic, even if he's also always been the cynical kind. Last summer, as he began writing and demoing tracks for his solo debut, his awareness of these dueling qualities was especially pronounced. Ruess was in the early days of a new relationship, with all of its anxiety and excitement. Standing in the shower one day, he started singing the melody and lyric to "Nothing Without Love," Grand Romantic's linchpin tune. "At first, when I sang 'I'm nothing without love,' I thought, 'Well, that's cheesy,'" he says, with a laugh. "But then I realized it's actually just a simple but very meaningful phrase." Ruess says he felt inspired to make "an album that had more falling-in-love songs than falling-out-of-love songs, because they don't exist enough these days."
He sang the melody for "Nothing Without Love" into his phone's voice recorder and labeled the file "LISTEN TO THIS ONE" -- a note intended both for himself, so he wouldn't lose it in the long scroll of nascent song ideas, as well as for producer Jeff Bhasker, one of Ruess's principal collaborators on Grand Romantic. "When I went into the studio with him to start constructing the track, I had certain instrumental melodies I wanted to hear, but otherwise Jeff straight up built the song," says Ruess. "It was energetic and it felt exactly the way I was feeling, which was amazing. For myself, it was one of the truest times that's ever been captured musically, so I was over the moon about it."
Ruess and Bhasker's musical partnership kicked off a few years ago, when they worked together on Some Nights, the phenomenally successful album by Ruess' band fun. Since its release in 2012, Some Nights has sold more than a million copies, spawned three chart-topping singles, and earned the band a pair of Grammys. "It's exciting for me to work with someone who has such a clear vision of what they want to do," says Bhasker, who has also produced albums by Kanye West and Beyoncé, among others. "Hearing his vision and knowing that I can help -- that pushes me to push him, and we push each other back. We haven't had this relationship where we grew up together and have known each other for twenty years, but we just happen to be totally on the same page."
Says Ruess: "From the moment Jeff and I started recording 'We Are Young,' there's always been some sort of magical connection between the two of us." The duo's batting average is pretty stellar, between "We Are Young" and Ruess's Pink collaboration, "Just Give Me A Reason." "Jeff knows how to get passionate about the songs in a way that, as a self-deprecating artist, you get to feel like, 'Yeah!'" says Ruess. "Working with Jeff helped me learn to start appreciating the songs I was writing."
Meanwhile, musician and producer Emile Haynie (Lana Del Rey) has been an equally significant contributor, programming drum tracks for virtually all of the songs Ruess has recorded with Bhasker. "The three of us have had a pretty crazy few years," says the singer. "We've become so close, and we owe a lot to each other." For Grand Romantic, they set aside a couple weeks each month to get together and work on Ruess's songs, recording from a rented house in LA's Nichols Canyon. Ruess doesn't play an instrument, so he's always relied on his collaborators to help execute the arrangements he's hearing in his head. With Bhasker, he says it's almost like telepathy: "I'd sing Jeff the song and he would immediately know every chord I wanted to hear." In another room in the house, Haynie would be working on the beats. Says Ruess: "Emile's got insanely fresh drum samples from the 60s and 70s, which is perfect for me because all I ever wanted was for my songs to have a snare that sounds like Fleetwood Mac. But he combines it with a hip-hop swing, so it's kind of the best of both worlds."
Ruess also recruited Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist Josh Klinghoffer, who had guested almost a decade ago on an album by Ruess's old band, The Format. "We gave him very little instruction for these songs," says the singer. "We were like, 'Josh, do whatever you want to do.' And we loved everything." Elsewhere, Wilco's Jeff Tweedy plays guitar on the bittersweet ballad "Take It Back." Says Ruess: "He broke my heart, in the best way, with the part he recorded." Lykke Li contributes backing vocals on "Nothing Without Love," among others, and Beck harmonizes with Ruess on the country-tinged "I Guess That's What This World Is Coming To," which he calls "my take on the modern world."
"What's great about him not being able to play instruments is that what he comes to the table with is so pure melodically and lyrically, it can stand on its own," says Bhasker. "The type of lyrics he's writing are really a cut above. In pop music today, there's a lot of pandering in lyrics and appealing to people's lowest qualities and taking the easy way out. I think Nate really digs into what he's feeling in his soul. He writes about issues like death, and dealing with the ugliest part of yourself or having to face really tough decisions instead of avoiding them. With this album, it's about taking those dark themes and saying, 'I want to enjoy and embrace life.' To do that in a way that's not too sugary or cheesy, that's what the best artists can do -- to really drop your guard and say, 'This is who I am.'"
Ruess notes that, whereas in the past he may have been too precious about his ideas, he has learned to let go and trust his instincts. You can hear what he means on tracks including "Nothing Without Love," the dramatic "Great Big Storm" and the album opening "AhHa," which Ruess initially demoed simply by freestyling the vocal melody over a loop of himself laughing maniacally. "There's a little bit of embracing oneself that has to happen with something like this," he says. "There's always been some theatrical aspect to my music. And I would love to bury it, but I can't. I'm not ready to embrace it 100%, but I'm ready to accept it." He continues: "I feel like, as a human being, I've grown so much in the process of making this album, and this needed to happen," he says. "I've never had a better time doing anything in my entire life."
Grand Romantic is due out June 16 via Fueled By Ramen.
Matchbox Twenty
North is a direction. It's a place. It's a marker of progress -- and an intended destination.
NORTH is also the title of Matchbox Twenty's fourth album, the quartet's first release in five years, and their first album to debut at #1 on the Billboard Top 200 album chart. It is also the band's first set of all-new material in a decade. And like other connotations of the word, the 12-song set represents a determined journey, a carefully considered path that combines earnest melodicism with sly and even snarky fun as well as a new internal world order that has made Matchbox Twenty a tighter and even more collaborative band than ever before in its 17-year career.
"We approached this record a lot differently," attests front man Rob Thomas. "Rather than me just writing a bunch of songs, bringing them to the band and then us arranging them together, this was a lot of collaboration. A lot of the songs we wrote together, especially me and Paul (Doucette) and Kyle (Cook). We needed a little time to figure out how that works, how that dynamic works with three people who are used to writing alone. How do we get in a room and not kill each other?"
Doucette has the answer: "Taking our time was exactly the point. We were like, 'Let's use that to our advantage -- take our time, not feel as much pressure or any pressure and just write a lot of songs and see what kind of record we want to make."
NORTH finds Matchbox Twenty--Rob Thomas, Paul Doucette, Kyle Cool and Brian Yale - honed and fine-tuned, from the roof-raising arena-sized anthem "Put Your Hands Up" to the kinetic beat of "Our Song" to the rich craft of "Overjoyed and "Parade." "English Town" and "I Will" are the group at its balladic best, while Thomas thinks "Like Sugar" "sounds almost like a Dr. Dre tracked mixed with our band, really fresh." And then there's "She's So Mean," NORTH's high-energy, harmony-laden first single which is already topping the charts.
"We're a band that's just always respected craft," explains Doucette. "We really value craft in songwriting and craft in record-making. We pursued that maybe a little bit more on this record. It was less about being a band that sounds like we're just playing songs we wrote based off riffs and more about developing as a group of songwriters or a group of musicians who are used to working within the context of pop songs. We wanted to pursue that and see how good our craft was now, in our late 30s and early 40s, compared to how it was when we were 23."
It was pretty good back then, too, mind you. Formed in Florida, Matchbox Twenty entered the world with a blockbuster -- 1996's YOURSELF OR SOMEONE LIKE YOU. The debut set spawned five hit singles -- "Push," "3 am," "Real World," "Long Day" and "Back 2 Good" and snagged an RIAA Diamond Award certification for U.S. sales exceeding more than 12 million to date. Thomas also raised the band's profile by co-writing and singing on Santana's Grammy Award-winning 1999 smash "Smooth." Matchbox Twenty maintained the momentum with MAD SEASON in 2000 and "MORE THAN YOU THINK YOU ARE in 2002, both of which went multi-platinum and continued to spit out hits such as "Bent," "Unwell," "If You're Gone," "Bright Lights" and "Disease."
But after three albums of hard work and equally hard touring, Matchbox Twenty was ready for a break. Thomas released a pair of Top 5 solo albums which contained several #1 singles, Doucette worked with his band The Break and Repair Method and wrote film music, while Cook led the New Left. The hiatus not only renewed Matchbox Twenty as a band but also seasoned the individual members even further as they came back together for 2007's EXILE ON MAINSTREAM, a greatest hits collection that sported six inspired new tracks which were co-written by the band for the first time ever and included their biggest selling single to date "How Far We've Come".
In addition to more than 30 million records sold worldwide, Matchbox Twenty has also earned countless accolades, including five Grammy nominations, four American Music Award nods, the 2004 People's Choice Award for "Favorite Musical Group, and they were named "Best New Band" in the 1997 Rolling Stone Readers Poll. What's more, Rob Thomas has proven one of the most highly decorated artists of recent years, receiving three Grammy Awards, 11 BMI Awards, and two Billboard "Songwriter of the Year" honors for both his chart-topping solo work as well as collaborations with such legends as Santana, Mick Jagger, Willie Nelson and Big Boi. Thomas' collaboration with Carlos Santana on "Smooth" was also named the #2 Most Popular Song Ever on Billboard's List of the 100 Most Popular songs behind "The Twist." He was also named to Billboard's Top 20 List of Hot 100 Songwriters 2000-2011 at #5 and was the top ranking artist/songwriter on the list.
"Matchbox Twenty existed a lot as a vehicle for Rob's songwriting in the beginning," Doucette explains. "Through the years Kyle and I have slowly started to write more and more songs. When we got back together we wanted to reflect that within the band."
Thomas acknowledges that the more collaborative method was "weird" for him at first. But the quality of the jointly written material made it easy to embrace the new path.
"You just have to leave your ego at the door," he says. "When you're in the room together it's just everybody throwing out their ideas at each other. You have to dare to suck, dare to say something stupid and dare to take things in a wrong direction, and everyone in the room has to follow that and let it go along until it becomes something. It's a little nerve-wracking but pretty damn exciting."
After EXILE ON MAINSTREAM's Top 5 success, Matchbox Twenty continued the collaborative process as it headed towards NORTH. Thomas, Doucette and Cook traveled between each other's residences to put ideas together, then the entire group headed to Nashville to hunker down together in a cabin/studio -- a kind of songwriter's survivalist camp where Thomas says "you could wake up and you had the whole house wired for sound. You'd walk out of your room and there's a piano in the living room all mic'd up and ready to go." The music kept flowing, and before long Matchbox Twenty had more than 40 songs in various states of completion, which Thomas laughingly admits "got us even deeper into this hole of not really knowing what the hell we were doing! We could have made three or four distinctly different albums."
Enter Matt Serletic, the band's trusted friend and longtime producer who worked with Matchbox Twenty on their first three albums. The group brought him to Nashville to help sort through the material and make his suggestions; before long, and perhaps not surprisingly, all concerned decided Serletic should once again take the producer's chair. The band then decamped for his Emblem Studios in Calabasas, California.
"Originally it wasn't going to be Matt producing the record," Thomas says. "He just came in as our friend to try to figure out what songs were really worth it. By the end of that night, at like three in the morning going through his copious notes, we were like, 'Hell, you should just produce this record.' "Doucette adds that, "Matt's basically family at this point, a really big part of our organization. We have a shorthand with Matt that we don't have with other producers...and he didn't want to go places we'd already been, either. Everything kind of took off once we made that decision."
Thanks to all the preparation in Nashville, the sessions at Emblem went smoothly and quickly, with a determined sense of how the songs should sound. The romantic "Overjoyed," according to both Thomas and Doucette, was "the first time we felt like we had something special,". Kyle Cook took lead vocals on the incredible ballad "The Way," which he and Doucette penned together. "She's So Mean," meanwhile, represents a "storytelling exercise" during which Thomas, Doucette and Cook sat around a microphone free styling lyrics that they eventually sculpted into the cautionary tale about a hard-to-handle woman who Doucette promises bears no similarity to anyone in the group members' real lives.
"No, not even remotely," he says. "The original lyrics weren't even about that, but once we came across 'she's so mean' it was like, 'OK, now we know what the song can be about.' We were just trying to write something fun, really." And the group has been both pleased by the out-of-the-gate positive reaction to the song.
Listening deeper to NORTH, meanwhile, reveals even more different nuances, approaches and feels because of the group-writing dynamic. "When I first played this record for my wife, she had a hard time figuring out which ones Paul wrote, which ones I wrote and which ones we all wrote because we all stepped into each other's skins," Thomas says. "That's really important because I didn't want it to feel like these songs were written by different people. I wanted them to just sound like the band."
NORTH will be sending Matchbox Twenty, back out on the road for the first time since EXILE ON MAINSTREAM, which saw the band playing SRO shows to their biggest crowds ever around the globe. The group once again hit the road this fall touring Australia, with North America in early 2013 and other territories after that. It's been awhile, but Matchbox Twenty has every intention to make it worth the wait.
"Matchbox Twenty is pretty all-encompassing," Doucette says. "Once it gets rolling, we just devote all our time and energy to that. I can speak for everybody on this; it's the thing we hold the most dear because it's the thing we built the longest, so we want to give it its due. We don't make records that often anymore, so when we do we want to devote our time and energy to not only doing it; but also bringing that music to the fans."
fun
Following the Format's breakup in 2008, frontman Nate Ruess took his songwriting skills to Steel Train's Jack Antonoff and Anathallo's Andrew Dost, both of whom shared a similar affinity for vintage pop music and quirky, melodic hooks. The trio began a series for collaborations in Antonoff's parents' living room and soon enlisted the help of producer Steven McDonald, who recorded their work and handled bass duties. After enlisting the help of former Jellyfish keyboardist Robert Joseph Manning, Jr., who arranged several tracks, the bandmates completed work on their first record. Dubbing themselves Fun., the group introduced their sprightly sound in 2009 with the debut album Aim and Ignite.
George Ezra
At 21, George Ezra has seemingly sailed in to his position as one of pop's most talked about new artists. Even he seems unsure how it happened. The hype around the Hertford-born singer with the booming, bluesy voice certainly hasn't gone to his head. Of his transition from umpteen One To Watch 2014 lists to top ten staple, he remains refreshingly non-plussed.
"I keep being told that this is my year," says Ezra. "Which is nice, but problematic because I'm planning to be around in 2015 and long beyond."
Early proof of this longevity came in June when - a year after his debut festival performance on Glastonbury's BBC Introducing Stage - Ezra returned to the festival to headline the same tent to a capacity crowd, before a set on the John Peel Stage the following day which, according to festival organisers, saw the biggest crowd that stage has ever seen. His debut album Wanted On Voyage was released the following day and remains in the top ten today.
This impressive statistic hasn't seem to have distracted Ezra, who has continued to do as he has since moving to Bristol aged 17 to study songwriting – get on with making music.
"The way I approach songwriting is to tell myself to just shut up and do it," shrugs the singer. "It's the same with performing. I don't get nervous; I just get on stage and sing. I have no airs about being a musician. I make clear that I'm a bloke with a guitar, nothing more. Then if anything goes wrong, I look like less of a knob."
In January, Ezra took off on a completely sold out UK tour that lasted almost two months, with barely a day off. When it finished, he headed for Europe, where his song Budapest was rapidly becoming a hit, reaching the top 10 in no less than nine countries on the continent. In Italy he stepped out of a radio station to find fans holding up photos of himself to sign.
"It was weird," says Ezra. "A couple were in their 30s and it was a Tuesday afternoon. All I could think was, Don't you folk have jobs to be at?"
There was never a plan to make music a career, nor does it feel like a job. That Ezra landed a record deal while in his first year at college was entirely unexpected. Of the performance on internet channel Bristol Couch that got him noticed, Ezra mostly remembers the couch.
"It was inflatable, so they could carry it around," he recalls. "But when it was blown up, it looked like leather. If you actually required a sofa, it would probably be a good buy."
By the time he signed to Columbia aged 18 he had, he says "only four or five songs – and I'd done twice that number of gigs. It was really early doors. I'd just met my manager and we'd decided to leave it a year before trying to contact anyone."
But Ezra's gloriously gutsy and ridiculously catchy blues, country and folk-infused pop was already making waves. BBC Introducing had fallen for Angry Hill, a song Ezra had uploaded to its website in early 2012 and which later appeared on his debut Did You Hear The Rain? EP. In autumn, Budapest - from that debut EP - was put online as a free download and picked up and played by a host of DJ fans at Radio 1, long before his record label had even sent them a copy.
A couple of songs on Wanted On Voyage date back to Ezra's college days. A lot of the album was inspired by a solo trip around Europe last summer. Budapest is, in part, about not making it to Budapest, but equally a surreal subverted take on the age-old notion of making sacrifices for a girl. Cassy O' is about wishing the trip wouldn't end.
"I went to Paris, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Malmo, Vienna, Milan and Barcelona," says Ezra. "It's the first time I've ever done anything for a long period of time entirely by myself. And I loved it. It turns out that I quite like myself."
Ezra took a guitar and occasionally busked, but mostly he travelled, saw the sights and filled journals with his experiences – what he'd seen, conversations he'd overheard, what was going on in his head.
"It was my way of dealing with the pressure of having signed a record deal," he says. "I panicked a little. The problem was I was living in Bristol, traveling to London or supporting other artists on tour and not seeing anything new. It would have been fine if anyone had wanted songs about First Great Western trains and how expensive their sandwiches are. Otherwise, something needed to happen."
Back in Bristol, reading the journals, songs began pouring out.
"When I read what I'd written, it felt like someone had handed me lyrics that were already almost finished," he recalls. "Suddenly, writing the album was easy."
Wanted On Voyage was recorded between early November 2013 and mid January 2014 in Clapham, south London with producer Cam Blackwood. With its 'What are you waiting for?' refrain, album opener (and latest top ten single) Blame It On Me, set to a skiffle shuffle, sums up the singer's mantra of just getting on with the job, while Listen To The Man is a woozy, bluesy, summery-sounding lesson in self belief. Sonically, Wanted
On Voyage's most surprising song is the perky, electronica-driven Stand By Your Gun, which could be The Blue Nile doing disco. The funniest lyrics – and there are plenty to choose from – are probably on Drawing Board, a fantasy retaliation aimed at an ex when a relationship goes sour.
"It's definitely a fun sounding album," says Ezra. "Probably because it was such fun to make. I don't like to say what my songs are about, but on quite a few, I take the piss out of myself, including Cassy O', which is me laughing at myself for having such clichéd thoughts. Listen To The Man is just a daft song that's great to play live. On Leaving It Up To You, I sing falsetto in the chorus, which isn't that easy for someone with such a deep voice. On stage, I say I got girls to sing it for me, which is bollocks, but sounds pretty cool."
All of the songs on Wanted On Voyage have been played live for months. Ezra plays guitar, bass and keyboards on the album, but didn't attempt the drums. Blame It On Me boasts the album's only strings – a single cello note.
"The best thing we did in the studio was use two '80s keyboards to make lots of strange sounds," says Ezra. "What could be a weird beat on Did You Hear The Rain? is actually three loops we found and mixed together – someone beat boxing, someone playing didgeridoo, and another I can't remember. We fed loops through distortion, then made beats out of it. There's tons of that going on in the songs, which was fun in the studio, but now that I've got a band, is a ball ache to try to recreate live.
So it's not all been plain sailing, and Ezra is aware there will be more challenges to overcome, but he's keeping a relaxed attitude to it all - he's got his head screwed on right, this one.
"Still, if it all goes wrong, I'll be laughing as much as everyone else."
Elle King
Frank and fearless, tender and rowdy, Elle King's debut album, "LOVE STUFF" marks the true arrival of the young singer/songwriter/guitarist/banjoist as a pop force to be reckoned with. "I always thought I knew who I was," says King, "but now I'm really learning what kind of person I want to be. And with that comes who I am as an artist, because the songs come from who I am and what I go through."
She recorded these twelve songs with such remarkable producers as Jeff Bhasker (Fun., Kanye West), Eg White (Adele, Sam Smith), and Jacknife Lee (R.E.M., U2), and guest musicians including Mark Ronson and Patrick Carney of the Black Keys. The first single from "LOVE STUFF," "Ex's & Oh's," was #1 Most Added at AAA radio upon release; Billboard called the track "catchy and clever."
The album is the follow-up to 2012's acclaimed "The Elle King EP," which was praised by such outlets as Esquire, Vanity Fair, and Entertainment Weekly and included the single "Playing For Keeps," which was featured as the theme song for VH1's "Mob Wives Chicago" and chosen for the national TV ad campaign for "Mad Men." Following the EP's release, King toured extensively with the likes of Ed Sheeran, Train, and Of Monsters and Men, pushing back her work on new music.
"In my mind, I was going to just go make an album a few months later," says King. "I had super-high expectations and was putting so much pressure on myself. But the EP happened so fast -- I never expected how quickly you can get music on TV, I went on 'David Letterman' for the first time, which was insane and incredible and something I'll never forget. And then opportunities kept coming up, so I toured pretty straight for a year, and if I had a few days off, I'd get into the studio with somebody."
Those periodic sessions took her around the world, from London to Malibu, Memphis to New York City. "I have so many influences, I wake up in different moods and want to play different music, and in some wacky way, we tied it all in," says King. "We found the people that got me, that believed in me and wanted to be a part of it -- after we did one song together, they wanted to do another."
Asked what she learned from working with such a wide and accomplished range of producers and musicians, she has an instant answer. "Never shut out an idea -- you always have to try anything, twice! I kept an open mind and then not only got to work with geniuses and get incredible songs, but I also got great role models and friends. And through laughing, jumping for joy, kicking, screaming, I feel like I finally found my sound."
The results, as heard on "LOVE STUFF," display King's grounding in rock, blues, country, and pop styles, and a sweeping emotional road map -- the stomp of "Where the Devil Don't Go," the sexy sweetness of "Make You Smile," the swagger of "America's Sweetheart." She notes "Sweetheart" as a breakthrough, saying that producer/co-writer Martin Johnson (who she calls "an insane pop genius") pushed her harder than any other collaborator. "Faster, higher, louder -- I was singing so hard I had to sit down between takes. That's the fastest I've ever played banjo; I have no idea how I'll do that onstage."
Raised in rural Ohio, King pinpoints the day her life changed to her ninth birthday, when her stepdad refused to get her the album by the pop-reggae star that she wanted and instead gave her the first album by hard-rocker girls the Donnas. "I put that on and that was it," she says. "I wanted to play rock and roll and be a girl and do it. I started listening to the Runaways and Blondie -- all the rad chicks."
She moved to New York City at age 10; after getting kicked out of school, she headed to California, then returned to New York, and then to Philadelphia for art college. In the midst of her far-flung and hell-raising travels, King started playing guitar at age 13 ("a friend of my stepdad's taught me, and I learned stuff by, like, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Otis Redding") and then later picked up a banjo, inspired by the Hank Williams and Earl Scruggs records her family listened to.
It was during her time in Philadelphia that her music took a different turn, and her songwriting got more serious. "I was living on my own, getting into way too much trouble, and really getting my heart broken for the first time," she says. "I've never been shy, but that's when I started singing in parks and busking."
King also had an epiphany about her approach to her instruments. "When I picked up the banjo, I would play country music," she says. "But I saw a band in the park one day, and these guys played the banjo just as an instrument, not stylized in any kind of mold, and I got it -- just play it because it's beautiful."
The songs that started emerging got her noticed and led to the making of "The Elle King EP." But even after relocating to Brooklyn and pursuing a music career in earnest, King was no more able to settle down. "I haven't been able to sit still since I could walk," she says. "I followed a country singer to Nashville, got my heart broken again but decided to stay there and try to figure it out. I took a year to really think, and then left and I haven't stopped -- I drove 30 thousand miles in the first six weeks. But if you can't handle that, you're not gonna make it. I want to put my feet in every country, I just want to go out and play. I'm a gypsy."
With this outlook, she singles out the "LOVE STUFF" track "Song of Sorrow" as an especially personal and meaningful statement; "I can't seem to find my way back home," she sings. "It's been a hundred years/I've no idea which direction to go."
"That's about where I'm from and the journey of finding yourself," says King. "Since I'm constantly moving, home is a state of mind, not a place. I'm always searching for where I feel at home.
"That's why I have such a sense of pride about this album," she continues. "I worked my ass off and kept trying my hardest. I feel unbelievably lucky. I still can't believe I'm getting away with it."
Venue Information
Petersen Events Center
3719 Terrace Street
Pittsburgh, PA 15261
http://web-smg.athletics.pitt.edu/