You know how it is. You’re sitting around at a bit of a loose end and suddenly think to yourself, ‘I might as well make an album with Rick Rubin’.
OK, we don’t know how that is, but then we’re not singer-songwriter Josh Groban, who’s told the iPaper that he started working with the legendary producer on the record that would become 2010’s Illumination because, creatively at least, he was “bored”.
“I wanted to learn again, get the good fear again,” he says, though Groban also admits that, coming off the back of a hugely successful Christmas album (2007’s Noël), his pivot to a slightly rootsier sound might have been too much for some of his audience to deal with.
“In hindsight, it was a bit of a whiplash for my fans,” he says. “But I don’t regret it. It was ballsy.”
Discussing his experience of working with Rubin in a previous interview with AXS TV, Groban described him as “an interesting, brilliant man”.
Off his thought process at the same, he explained: “The really antsy person in me, when everyone else was saying ‘Great, so, we’ll make Christmas album number 2 next, right?’ And I’m going ‘I don’t know… that did great, but I kind of want to veer left now. I kind of feel like that’s a chapter done and I want to try something else. And so, that was maybe a little naive on my part.”
Although it didn’t hit the commercial heights of some of his other albums, Illuminations still sold more than a million copies and received positive reviews.
“I think, artistically, it was exciting, it was fun,” Groban later reflected. “To have someone like Rick Rubin – I had just finished a Christmas album; he had just finished a Metallica album – be interested in my world, be interested in my voice, and that old-school way of approaching music… performing with the orchestra, performing in the room with everybody, finding great arrangements. He’s a lover of all different styles and he’s a real music historian.”
