Hear our full chat on my podcast “Beyond the Fame with Jason Fraley.”
Friday the 13th is usually an unlucky day, but if you need some killer tunes, it’s gonna be your lucky day. That’s because Andy Grammer will be rocking the Hollywood Casino at Charles Town Races in West Virginia this Friday.
“I’ve got a bunch of albums at this point, so a lot of songs,” Grammer told WTOP. “I remember when I started, when my first song ‘Keep Your Head Up’ came out and people pretty much [only] knew that one, it was like a long set to get to that one. … But now there’s a lot of stuff to choose from, my band is incredible, the shows have been amazing … It’s going to be a lot of fun.”
Born in Los Angeles in 1983, Grammer was more into sports than music growing up.
“I didn’t really care about music until high school. just a super jock basketball psycho. I was a shooting guard, that was my whole life,” he said.
“On the way to basketball practice, I woke up and heard on the same car ride the ‘Room for Squares’ album by John Mayer and ‘The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill,’ and both of those records were like, ‘This is unbelievable’. Then I became somewhat obsessed and just started writing songs after that.”
He recorded a couple of EPs, “The World is Yours” (2007) and “Soft Lights on Bright Colors” (2009), before signing with S-Curve Records for his first full-length album “Andy Grammer” (2011), featuring the hit single “Keep Your Head Up.”
“My mom passed away when I was 25 and I wrote myself a little pick-me-up song,” Grammer said. “It connected with everybody. She lives on in the music.”
After two more EPs, “Live from L.A.” (2012) and “Crazy Beautiful” (2013), Grammer released his second full-length album “Magazines or Novels” (2014), which exploded, thanks to the hit song “Honey, I’m Good.”
“There’s so much pressure on the second record,” Grammer said. “I was aware of it and tried to play it off like I didn’t care … but it’s definitely there. You’re fearful that, if you don’t deliver again, they won’t let you play music again. I had written 100 songs for the second record. Then we decided we still didn’t have it, so we went to write 101 — and 101 was ‘Honey, I’m Good.’ Sometimes you don’t even need to be talented, just be persistent.”
The album also included “Good to Be Alive (Hallelujah)” with the refrain, “It’s good to be alive right about now.”
“That one came after I wrote ‘Honey, I’m Good,’ … that was just being psyched about having a hit,” Grammer said. “We worked so hard, I’d been out on the street for four years with no one caring, then you get a little bit lucky. … So much of it is persistence and struggle and then there’s these little periods where everything’s going great, so you better appreciate it and enjoy it.”
After another EP in “Spotify Singles” (2017), Grammer dropped his third full-length album “The Good Parts” (2017) with the hit song “Fresh Eyes,” featuring the catchy chorus: “Now all I see is you with fresh eyes.”
“That is one of my favorite songs I’ve ever written because I didn’t know it was that good,” Grammer said. “We wrote the song and left for the day like, ‘Well, we missed today, but that’s OK, we’ll write another one tomorrow’
“But to know that you don’t always know, to stay open to the process, is really great. Now I’ll be writing something and have a sense it’s not amazing, but then I’ll go, ‘Well, ‘Fresh Eyes’ I didn’t know. Just finish it.'”
His fourth full-length studio album “Naive” (2019) featured the single “Don’t Give Up on Me,” which was used as the theme song for the romantic film “Five Feet Apart” starring Haley Lu Richardson and Cole Sprouse.
“I wrote that one with some friends of mine,” Grammer said. “We had written four songs already that day and we’d been writing and writing and writing. I was actually ready to just call it, and one of my good friends, Jake, who’s an incredible writer, was like, ‘Let’s just write a song about not giving up on writing songs,’ and that one rolled out.”
“If there’s anything you should get from this interview with me is that I’m actually not that good, I just don’t stop!”
During the pandemic, he delivered the introspective EP “The Art of Joy” (2022), featuring inspirational songs like “Damn it Feels Good to Be Me,” “Love Myself,” “Save My Life” and “Lease on Life.”
“I don’t know about you, but I had a rough pandemic,” Grammer said. “It was gnarly. You couldn’t go anywhere! I’m a super extrovert, I get filled up obviously by being around lots of people on a nightly basis, and that was very uncomfortable, so I had to write a bunch of songs about who am I when that’s not happening.
“There were some weird, dark times there that I pushed through. I didn’t really love the answer, to be honest. A lot of work to do.”
His latest singles include “Love is the New Money” and “Expensive,” the latter a collaboration with Grammy-winning group Pentatonix. In fact, Grammer recently unveiled the group’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
“The fuel these days is knowing how much service it can be to other people,” Grammer said. “I get all these stories like, ‘My mom is going through cancer and we listen to that song every day,’ just crazy, unbelievable stories. … Now I don’t want to stop before a song that helps people.
“Everybody needs what you have to bring, so you gotta keep going.”
Hear our full conversation on my podcast “Beyond the Fame” below:
