— by Brandee J. Tecson
The first time Johnathan Rice went to meet with record executives in a New York hotel room, they mistook the youthful-looking 21-year-old for a room-service staffer. "I guess I do look younger than my voice, but I can't help it," he said.
Indeed, Rice, who first picked up a guitar at 8, looks so young that it's almost unnerving to hear him sing, because what comes out is a raw, husky blend of old-school influences like Johnny Cash and the Beatles, infused with modern touches of Wilco's Jeff Tweedy and alt-country rock.
The Virginia-born songwriter grew up in Glasgow, Scotland, but spent a large part of his childhood in the backseat of his family's car as he was shuttled back and forth and around Europe and the States. He vividly recalls "flashes of light," when certain songs would take him out of his element.
"When you travel around so much as a child, music is a good place to spend your time if you don't know anyone else," said Rice, who often lost himself in the sounds of the Ramones, Nirvana, Van Morrison and Bob Dylan. "A really great record can be like a little universe unto itself. No matter where you are, you can go there and take comfort in it."
After graduating from a preparatory high school in Washington, D.C., Rice informed his parents that he was deferring college to pursue music full-time, news that was met with a mixture of panic and outrage. "I grew up in the kind of environment where college isn't an option, it's a requirement — 'You will go to college,' " he recalled. "So when you're the only kid who doesn't go, I was looked down on, for sure. No one believed that I would do anything with [music]."
He was given a year to fulfill his dream before being packed onto a bus to college, but that sharp skepticism drove Rice straight to the Big Apple, where he suffered through 11 different jobs in order to pay the rent on a shoebox apartment while managing evening gigs at the Living Room on New York's Lower East Side. Almost exactly a year later, in July of 2002, just as he was about to throw in the towel, Rice was signed by Warner Bros. Records A&R man Perry Watts-Russell (Radiohead, Everclear), who had gotten the EP the aspiring musician had recorded two years earlier.
Rice then began the arduous process of recording the tunes he had been writing over the preceding year. Captivated by the sounds flowing out of Saddle Creek Records in Nebraska, he recruited producer Mike Mogis, who had mixed, engineered and produced tracks for Bright Eyes, the Faint and Rilo Kiley. Mogis produced the singer's forthcoming LP, Trouble Is Real, which comes out April 26.
The end result is a captivating 16-track debut that recounts a young man falling in love with ... well, a lot of things. "I was in love with moving out on my own for the first time. I fell in love with New York. I fell in love with Los Angeles. I fell in love with all sorts of different places and people," he said. "The thing about being a songwriter is that I reserve the right to lie and tell the truth in the space of one verse. I can make something up and mix it with the truth, and that to me is what makes it interesting."
As a result of witnessing the devastation that came from the 9-11 attacks firsthand, Rice penned three tracks on the record — "Put Me in Your Holy War," "Salvation Day" and "Stay at Home" — which he calls his "political piece" (or maybe "peace"). "I wanted to have my say all at once, and then get back to the love songs," he said, adding that he didn't want to deflect too much from the record's true nature. "I think you've got to be really careful as a musician, especially as a boy with a guitar and blue eyes, because it's like, how much do people really want to hear from me?"
Fans of the young crooner can also see him make his big-screen debut this fall in the Johnny Cash biopic "Walk the Line," where Rice, who has had no prior acting experience, will play the role of a young Roy Orbison. Until then, the singer will be traveling around the globe promoting the new album until the end of May. His first U.S. single will be the pop-driven love anthem, "Kiss Me Goodbye." But perhaps the most daunting task lined up for this young man is opening for his idols R.E.M. later this summer in London's Hyde Park, in front of approximately 80,000 screaming fans.
With such vast, uncharted territory yet to be discovered, Rice still remains reticent about the future legacy he will leave on the musical landscape. "In the end, I would just like to be remembered as someone who never conformed to the hairstyle of the day," he laughed.
###
 What do you think of this story? You Tell Us...
E-Mail this story to a friend
|
