After 25 years in music, crooner Josh Groban has played shows in some of the most famous and bizarre venues in the world, from his current Las Vegas engagement to appearing on set with The Muppets, but now the singer is in search of space.
Groban has received five Grammy nominations during his long career, after releasing nine studio albums, and has achieved three hit singles in the UK along with one UK number one album.
But now, after seeing pop star Katy Perry’s short trip in April, during which she sang Louis Armstrong’s What A Wonderful World while in space, Groban himself is keen to explore opportunities outside of Earth.
The US singer tells PA: “I’d love to sing in space one day, I’d be very curious to hear how the voice sounds up there.
“But I guess if you’re in like a capsule kind of environment, then I guess the acoustics are probably set in stone, but there’s very few places I wouldn’t sing.
“Most of my best musical ideas happen in airplanes, or bathrooms, or really inconvenient places.
“I would probably inconveniently have a song that I would have to get down into my phone, when I have song ideas that I want to write, it’s always in a place that’s really inconvenient to write.
“I’m that crazy person next to somebody on an airplane where I’m just like, ‘yeah, that’s for me, that’s for later, don’t worry about it’.”
The 44-year-old performed one of his best known songs, You Raise Me Up, at Super Bowl XXXVIII in 2004, in a moving tribute to Nasa and the crew of the Space Shuttle Columbia, which disintegrated upon re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere on February 1 2003, killing all seven astronauts on board.
The event is just one of the many doors that Groban’s powerful voice has opened for him, with a more light-hearted moment seeing him join Kermit The Frog, Miss Piggy and the rest of The Muppets in their Muppets Most Wanted (2014) film.
Speaking about making the movie, Groban says: “It’s the best day at the office I’ve ever had, honestly.
“First of all, anytime you’ve got a childhood dream come true, that comes to fruition, that is an amazing thing, but also just the artistry of what they do too.
“As somebody who’s watched The Muppets my whole life, and I mean my whole life, to see how these incredible puppeteers do this work, to be on stage and to have to like block myself with what they’re doing, was really cool.
“There’s holes in the floor and all of a sudden I’m looking over here, and I’m singing with Oscar The Grouch and Kermit, I had a romantic ballad scene with Miss Piggy.
“It is truly one of the coolest things you could possibly do is to work with, or sing with them, I’m very, very lucky.
“They truly make them come to life, and they also have great voices. Like they’re down there, not to spill the secrets away, but they’re like cramped in these little corners, and they’re having to put their eye lines in the right places for the puppets.
“And I tell you, when they’re just sitting on their stations, they’re just puppets, but when they’re operating them, and you’re singing with them and talking to them, they become alive the way that they do this, and you’re not even looking down at who’s operating them.
“You’re looking right into the eyes of Kermit, because he’s real at that moment, and it’s a very cool experience.”
Throughout his career Groban has enjoyed performing songs in TV series and films such as A.I Artificial Intelligence (2001), Troy (2004) and The Polar Express (2004), but next he hopes one of his songs will appear in one of his favourite programmes, Apple TV+ thriller Severance.
He says: “I love that show, I think it’s so brilliant, and stylistically it’s so good, and for those who haven’t seen the season finale, I won’t spoil what happens or the scene, but there’s a Mel Torme performance of Windmills Of Your Mind that is this really great, very croony, like old school 70s kind of song.
“And I was like, ‘oh that’s a great vibe, I would like to record that song’, something like that would be amazing.
“To be the soundtrack to something that is a little bit suspenseful, but in a way that I don’t have to, like change too much would be really, really fun, because I’ve always kind of done the inspirational moments on TV.
“It would be cool to kind of juxtapose something that’s very smooth sounding with something that’s very tense happening on screen, or some good British television, honestly, my favourite television is British.
“I would love to sing on something over there.”
After a quarter of a century of music, Groban has now released Gems, a compilation of some of his favourite songs ahead of his engagement of five dates at The Colosseum At Caesars in Las Vegas in May, and two orchestral performances at LA’s Hollywood Bowl in September.
Speaking of the landmark release, Groban said: “Twenty-five years in was probably as good a time as any, I have a lot of songs, it’s been a crazy ride.
“I’m always thinking about what the next thing is going to be, so to be able to just kind of take a pause a quarter century in and say, ‘hey, let’s take a second to kind of celebrate this amazing trip that my listeners have allowed me to take over the last 25 years’, and put it together in one place, a lot of the songs have been important to me and important to them.”
Groban went on to credit Celine Dion’s residency at the same Las Vegas venue, which ran from 2003 to 2019, for opening up the entertainment hotspot to singers like him.
He sang a duet of The Prayer with the Canadian singer in the rehearsal for the 1999 Grammy Awards, after singer Andrea Bocelli could not make the warm-up, with Groban describing the moment as key in his career.
The Californian explains: “Vegas has has shifted since Celine, there has been an amazing amount of artistic and genre growth in Las Vegas.
“Where people used to come to Vegas for fun, just for the entertainment factor, the wow factor, and then kind of Cirque du Soleil kind of started to bring a really interesting new artistry to the kind of show that could be in Vegas.
“And then Celine. I mean if you go back and read those first articles, that was ground-breaking for artists like Celine to decide to do a residency in Las Vegas, she got both excitement and some scepticism at that time.
“And she kind of single-handedly transitioned what it meant to play Vegas for any long period of time, and now it’s a holy grail.”
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