Response to @joshgroban "Granted"

Josh was an extraordinary child. He saw musical theater when he was small and decided he wanted to do musical theater. 

That in and of itself is not unusual. What is unusual is that his determination to achieve that goal never wavered. 

He got into arts schools, arts camps, lessons, an arts college. Even after he booked a multimillion dollar music contact, he never let go of that dream, for thirty years, until he actually managed to get on a Broadway stage. 

Who has that kind of determination and focus? Certainly not me. I never even had any idea what I wanted to be, career wise, when I grew up until I was 57, when I decided I wanted to act. And now my determination to do that is wavering some. Before that, I was doing intellectual property law, mostly to please my dad. 

He also has some extraordinary gifts. He reports that he could come home and play at least the melody of all the songs from a musical on the piano after seeing the musical once. When Kat was dating him, she reported that he still does this, that he can play any song that he's heard. 

So he writes this song, "Granted," which promotes pursuing a dream. Josh had a dream. He pursued it. He got it. 

What about the rest of us? We don't have that kind of determination and focus. We don't have those natural gifts. We might not even have a dream, or not a realistic one. I have fantasized about marrying a number of celebrities. Is that going to happen? Probably not. And look what happened with Katie Holmes. She had a dream to marry Tom Cruise, as I also once did. She achieved her dream, but it apparently didn't turn out the way she hoped. That's often the case for me. Things aren't what I hoped they would be. 

So Josh got his dream and apparently loved it as much as he dreamed he would. That's also not so typical of dreams. 

I dreamed of a lifelong successful career. That failed. I dreamed of a happy marriage. My ex dumped me. I dreamed of brilliant children. I got disabled ones. I worked hard to stay fit and lose weight, in the hopes of having a healthy active lifestyle as an older person. Then I got cancer. 

Dreams. 

Sigh. 

@joshgroban Bridges album -- updated

This has a more upbeat feel than prior albums. The songs about romance are especially positive -- about being willing to commit rather than being predominantly about breakup or communications failures as was Josh's previous wont. This isn't a bad thing at all.  Illuminations was enough to break your heart if you cared about Josh at all, because he sounded so utterly miserable.  Songs that feel more comfortable with commitment include More of You, 99 years, and Won't Look Back. Run is more in the prior vein.

The arrangements are fairly uninteresting -- less complex, less intellectual than I would like to hear.  Also the instrumentals are mixed to be more quiet than previously.  The emphasis is on Josh's voice -- improved since new voice coach; and always extraordinarily very expressive.  Josh's voice is great, of course, but still I miss the prior intellectual focus of his music.

To my ear, Josh's expressiveness is most on show in "More of You," which is incredibly intense and feels very sexual.  Josh hasn't always been willing to show us that much of himself in terms of desire and connection.  I wonder if he'll be willing to sing it in concert. He had a previous very emotional and personal song, which sounded suicidal, called Love Only Knows.  So far as I know, that was never performed live.

But Josh has changed.  He used to be known for summarily deleting threads on the fora on his website that speculated about his personal life -- and never showing skin.  The most we'd get would be a couple of buttons undone around the neck and cuffs rolled up slightly above the wrist.  He went down a water slide fully clothed once, when he knew fans were around, apparently to avoid being photographed in a swimsuit.  But, then, very recently he tweeted a photo of himself in a swimsuit.  Given his prior behavior, that was a shock to me.

Also, he's attended more public events with his girlfriend of the moment.  He's dated a lot of women -- mostly in secret.  People who follow him closely have noticed things on twitter and talked about them on special gossip websites, so we suspect that there have been A LOT of women.  He didn't seem to feel comfortable being photographed with someone who he might only be seeing briefly, especially if he was seeing more than one at a time, which some of us suspected.  That seems to be changing, or maybe, given the songs about commitment on this album, he's more confident that he's closer to getting into something more permanent.

But I think he's feeling more comfortable with himself, in general. I think you see that in public appearances.  He used to speak in a high, anxious voice that made people speculate that he was gay.  Now he speaks in a lower voice. Even when he walks, to me, he looks more comfortable, more grounded, more in charge.

"More of You," could be an indication of that -- feeling more comfortable with letting us know that side of him.

I'm a huge Modern Classical fan.  Josh's modern classical/pop fusion stuff has been very exciting for me.  When I think of what sounds modern classical to me, I think of songs like Let Me Fall, Now or Never, Voce Existe en Mim, False Alarms, and Hollow Talk. There are hints of it too in Oceano and February Song.  Lucia's Kashmir on the Awake DVD was another example, tho perhaps more modern classical/metal fusion.  I was thrilled with the complex and varied music of Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812.  I like the more complicated arrangements like "Canto Alla Vita."

This whole album is much less musically intellectual than those examples. A touch of Josh's characteristic intervals/jumps and modern classical feel are somewhat apparent in Granted and Symphony, and a bit in River, but much more toned down than they used to be.  That disappoints me.

I guess the most complex arrangement is the last one -- Bigger than Us -- which is also back in the frustrated romance category.  Also Run -- Does frustration make him crave complex music? The duet with Andrea has a moderately complex classical arrangement -- but, while lovely, is not tremendously original to my ear.

Josh has had some fascinating world music influences on his albums, such as Lullaby and Weeping, which were related to his trip to South Africa.   Of course, many of his songs have been in romance languages, and one in Japanese, but I'm not sure I would call that world music, because they don't necessarily have arrangements that feel specific to another culture -- at least they don't feel that way to me.  I guess I'm used to Italian and French music.  I'm still waiting for Russian, German, Arabic, Chinese, and Swahili.  I love that world music feeling. Josh said in or thereabouts 2010 that he was working on a piano/zhonghu duet.  A couple of years ago he tweeted me that he was still working on it.  I was hoping we'd get that.

In the world music category on this album: Musica del Corazon, which has a very HIspanic feel -- but here in the USA there is so much Spanish language radio that this doesn't seem very exotic.  I don't feel that the Italian or French song sound like world music, even though they're not in English.  The duet with Andrea (We Will Meet Again) is the most canonically classical piece on the album, imho.

Duets with women on Bridges are mixed so that when Josh is singing  together with Jennifer or Sarah, you can't hear the women.  On the other hand the duet with Andrea is mixed so that you can hear both singers well when they're singing together. Why?

River is growing on me.  I really didn't like it the first time I heard it.  It sounded like a country song to me and Josh's voice sounds more thin and strained than on the other songs. But hearing it frequently has made it more palatable to me.  It certainly doesn't seem like a country song now.  I don't know why I thought so at first.

Remember: I edit blogs for a while after I write them, so if you read this early on you might want to come back and look at it again later.

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It was sometime after I wrote this blog that I really listened to the lyrics of "Run," and realized that it was likely about the singer standing by the bedside of a recently deceased loved one, in a hospital. Whoosh.  Very, very sad indeed.  Now that I've listened to the words of that song, it really knocks me for a loop.