Colbie Caillat biography

A great song, says Colbie
Caillat, should lift your heart, warm the soul and make you feel good.
Taking her own sound advice, “Coco”, the debut album by the 22 year-old
Californian singer-songwriter is simply crammed full of them.

In an age when marketing
has been elevated above
content and so many songs are written and
produced to a pre-ordained formula, Caillat
comes as a welcome breath of fresh air.
Records these days seem to fall into tw categories.
The vas majority tend to contain one or tw good
tracks which you
download to your computer so that you
never have to listen to the
rest of the album again.

Far more rare are those that demand to be
listened to from start to finish, with every song in perfect symmetry. Think
of the kind of vintage, organically-crafted albums
that Carole King or Joni Mitchell used to make.
Thankfully, it’s a tradition that is being kept alive
today by the likes of Norah Jones, Jack Johnson – and now Colbie Caillat.

“If you listen to an album
like Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, every song has
its place,” she says. “If you took one away you’d spoil the balance of the
entire record. That’s the kind of album I wanted to make. It wouldn’t feel
right to have my name on a record that was just a few good tracks and then
lots of filler.”

The reference to
Fleetwood Mac is revealing. Caillat grew up
in the idyllic clime of Malibu, California with
music all around her.
Her father, Ken Caillat, co-produce Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumours” and
“Tusk” albums and later ran his own record label.

As a child she recalls the likes of Mick Fleetwood
and John McVie being around. “Of course I’ve
learned a lot from them.
You’d be a fool not to,” she says. Yet she is totally
her own woman.
She began singing with
serious intent at the age of 11 after hearing Lauryn Hill’s version of Killing Me Softly.
“I think her voice is absolutely beautiful and it
made me want to start singing so I entered a
talent show and of course I sang a Lauryn Hill song.”

As she grew older, however, her father
offered one crucial piece
of advice. It was all very well having a great voice, he pointed out, the
people who command
real respect in the music
business are the
songwriters.
“I thought about that for a long
time”, she says.
In truth, it took some time
coming – but when it did, the floodgates opened. “I
needed to play an instrument to write songs and although I had piano lessons as a kid, it never
went anywhere because I was never in the right state of mind to practice,”
she recalls.

Surprisingly, it
wasn’t until she was 19 – little more than two years ago -that she eventually
took up the acoustic guitar. “I wrote my fist
song after my very first guitar lesson and then it just all flowed out,” she recalls. “If something’s
biting me I hold it in because that’s the kind of person I am. Then it comes out in songs.
Things builds up inside of me and I’ll write three
songs in a weekend. It’s a
release. I don’t choose what to write about. It’s
just there.”

Along the way, she found two key collaborators in
Mikal Blue, who hired her when she was 15 to sing some songs he’d written
for a fashion show, and singer/songwriter Jason
Reeves. Together, they
helped to craft the songs on “Coco,” which Blue also produced.
“The songs always start put with me,” she explains of the collaborative
process. “I’ll be sitting around at home getting
bored and something will
come out. Then if I get
stuck, I can take it to
Mikal or Jason. Having
people you trust to bounce ideas around keeps the creativity
flowing.”

Once she had a bunch of
songs, she put a few of them on MySpace, more
in hope than expectation.
“Nothing much happened for a few months,” she remembers.

“Then I wrote
this song called Bubbly, and put it up there and it
got this huge reaction.
I mean thousands and
thousands of hits every day.”
In the end, she became the number one unsigned artist on MySpace for four successive months,
garnering an almost
unbelievable 10 million plays. Record labels
started courting her and she signed with Universal
Republic because, she
says, they offered her
total creative freedom.
“The great thing about
MySpace is that you can
build up an army of fans
and then when you go to
a record company, there’s no point in them trying to
change what you do,
because it’s already been
tried and tested,” she
points out.
Quite what it is about Bubbly that struck such a chord, she’s still not entirely sure. “I guess it’s
the simplicity of the lyrics
and the melody,” she
says. “It’s meant to make
you feel good and
everybody can relate to it.” And “Coco” – the album is named after a childhood nickname which
stuck – is full of similarly
memorable songs imbued
with a irresistible warmth which draw on a rich array of influences. “I love all
kinds of music and I’ve
been influenced by all of it,” she says. “Classic rock like Fleetwood Mac and the Steve Miller Band.

Original soul like Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder.
Lauryn Hill. Bob Marley and reggae, John Mayer.
Anything that makes you
feel good.”
And from the sunny, upbeat promise of songs
such as Bubbly and Oxygen to the gentle,
semi-r & b groove of The
Little Things and the lilting
reggae of Tied Down,
“Coco” is one of those
classic albums that simply
makes you feel glad to be
alive. “You make me
smile, please stay for a
while,” she sings on Bubbly. It really ought to
be her mantra.

@donibar
Source: http://
http://www.colbiecaillatmusic.com