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August 19, 2009
E-mail a friendYOUNG VOICES
Getting into Josh Groban
When I was in college I had a roommate who was a huge Josh Groban fan. She'd crank it up on the stereo when she was alone at home, and I'd return from class to find her doing dishes, wailing along to something in Italian to which she didn't know the words. Sensing she was no longer alone, she'd sheepishly turn around and say something defensive like, "He's a really good vocalist," before returning, quietly, to her dishwater. She sensed my distaste for the music. It didn't do it for me. In her mind, though, she was right, I was wrong, and she had nothing to be embarrassed about, except perhaps her singing.
Groban, the 27-year-old Grammy-nominated sensation, and tonight's guest, elicits a lot of reactions from a lot of people along the same lines. To Grobanites, as many of his millions of fans call themselves, he is the greatest thing to happen to popular music since Sinatra. To others (by which I mean me), he certainly seems like a genuinely nice fellow, and he does have a remarkably clear voice, but we probably wouldn't find ourselves listening to him unless he happened to come over the radio while we were at the dentist's office or something.
For the most part, Groban's fans are far more vocal (so to speak) than his detractors. Volumes could be filled with the praise heaped upon the wunderkind in the many online forums devoted to him. His velvety voice gets most of the attention, but a good portion also pay homage to his Mediterranean good looks, his humility, and his unassuming, slant-eyed smile. Whenever a young man of average to good looks does something impressive in the public eye, one can expect this type of reaction. Comparisons will be made to legends of earlier days and he will be called the next big something. But Groban, who has sold millions upon millions of albums in the six years since his self-titled debut, appears to be something different. His work with vocalists like Barbara Streisand, Celine Dion, and Sarah McLaughlan, not to mention his ever-growing fan base, suggests that his celebrity is more than a passing fancy, that he has something more than your average backstreet boy.
Years after my roommate introduced me to Groban's warbling arias, I'm still really not all that into it. Here I am at my computer, turning down the volume to Groban's "You Raise Me Up" so no one will hear what I'm listening to. I wonder if I'm missing something, if my appreciation for fine music is lacking in some vital respect. But then I wonder if it was 1942 and my bobby-soxer friend had put on a record of her new favourite singer, a clean-cut Italian kid with big ears and a voice as smooth as olive oil, would I have liked it? I'm guessing maybe not. But he would have been Sinatra, and I would have been a fool.