Josh Groban: "There Are Times Where I'm The One Who Gets In My Own Way"

“Who is Josh Groban?”

This is the question that a teacher makes the mistake of asking in the third episode of the cult musical-comedy TV series Glee.

“Who is Josh Groban?! Kill yourself!” his outraged coworker replies.

Such is the fervour the best-selling artist - with over thirty-five million record sales to his name - inspires. From wowing audiences on Broadway to garnering Grammy, Tony, and Emmy nominations, he is renowned worldwide for his powerhouse vocals, his range as a performer, and his charming sense of humour.

He first burst onto the scene as a baby-faced teenager when producer and composer David Foster called him to stand in for Andrea Bocelli to sing a duet with Celine Dion at the rehearsal for the 1999 Grammy Awards. He was then offered a contract at Warner Bros. Records and released his first album, which went double platinum. The rest is history.

“I was very lucky that I actually had good people around me,” he says of his sudden, meteoric rise to fame. “The music business on a good day can be not the healthiest.” But the adults around him were not interested in exploiting him; they were interested in developing him as an artist. “I was so grateful that I had the team that I had with David and my label Warner, still my label twenty-five years later. They knew that I was really green.”

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The journey was not always smooth-sailing. “I was an anxious kid. I was not ready emotionally for the magnifying glass. So, I took things to heart. I was very sensitive. Putting myself out there and getting praise in one ear and really harsh criticism in the other ear… Your ego is not built for that at that age,” he says.

“Your emotional sense of self, your own sense of worth, has not yet blossomed in the way that it needs to. Everything at that age was tainted by my own insecurities. And I would tell that kid, all these years later, you can worry and have anxiety attacks all you want, it’s not going to change your course. So, you might as well enjoy what you’ve been given to do,” he smiles. “But that’s easier said than done.”

Groban boasts versatility as an artist: he writes, releases, and performs his own music, and is also a beacon of the Broadway Stage, playing iconic roles such as Sweeney Todd.

“My background before I got signed to a record deal as a solo artist was theatre. And so my first dream was to interpret a character’s story and sing from their perspective. The combination of acting and singing was something that really appealed to me as an introverted kid.”

He explains, “The idea that I could disappear into a role and be something different from the super shy kid I was at school was like a portal to a new world.”

When he was signed at seventeen, he was still that “shy” and “nervous” kid. “But then I realised I could tap into that love of storytelling with my own voice. Whether I’m portraying a character or singing as myself, I try to just find the truth in it.”

Groban possesses a dramatic, virtuosic voice that allows him to make songs entirely his own. The average person would probably associate a song like the epic power ballad You Raise Me Up with Groban, for example, even though it was originally recorded by Norwegian-Irish band Secret Garden (who Groban describes as “wonderful”).

“I think I was lucky that I was only the second person ever to sing it, and not, like, the hundred-and-fiftieth,” he laughs. The song has, indeed, been covered more than 125 times, according to a quick Wikipedia search. “When I brought [You Raise Me Up] to America, I didn’t expect it to become a hit song at all. I just loved the song.

“I was excited to sing it because I thought it was beautiful. I had no idea that the label would choose it as a song to run with. And it was a good lesson for everything that I’ve chosen since then, because you don’t know what’s going to hit and what’s not, you’ve just got to go with your heart.”

It can be daunting to attempt to put one’s own spin on a revered track - and even Josh Groban suffers from frayed self-esteem. “There are times where I’m the one who gets in my own way, and I’m like, nobody needs to hear my version of this. A lot of times I have to be convinced, I need to be pushed.”

The powerhouse vocalist is now about to tour Down Under for the first time in a decade. The GEMS World Tour kicks off in February - and he can’t wait to connect to audiences across the globe.

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“I have an interpretive heart. I love being a vocal vessel for great music, and it has always been a joy for me to be able to connect through music,” he says.

Though his primary vocation is music, Josh Groban also has a noticeable penchant for comedy. His operatic voice characterises him as a Serious Musician, but he frequently opts to be involved in projects that showcase his humorous side.

He plays ridiculous versions of himself on Glee and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, he plays a pathetic douchebag in Crazy Stupid Love, he once challenged Michael Bublé to a battle of the voices, and he’s been known to put TripAdvisor Reviews and Kanye West tweets to music on late-night talk shows.

“It was always in me,” he says of his comic leanings. “It was always something that I was super happy that I was able to get the opportunity to do.”

He is well aware that the voice he has is not a “casual” one. “I knew that the songs I was going to sing were going to have a certain gravitas to them, no matter how casual a person I am when I’m not onstage.” So, he jumped at opportunities to scratch that comedic itch.

“It gave me a chance to show a side of myself that was me when I came off the stage. And it also allowed me to punch back at anyone who might have thought, ‘Oh, this guy can’t hang.’ I wanted to challenge people who thought that, because my music is serious, I must take myself that seriously.”

Comedy gave him an outlet. “And the cool thing about having that outlet was that it showed me that my fans are cool with both. And now I can really ride the emotional arc of an evening with the stuff that makes me cry, and the stuff that is loose and silly and fun. Because we are all of those things.”

Josh Groban has built an enduring, multifaceted career in an industry that is famously fickle and ever-changing. Amidst what is arguably a challenging time for the arts world - from political uncertainty and division, to the rapid rise of artificial intelligence, to the debilitating cost of living - what advice would he have for young people who still want to pursue music?

He exhales explosively. “That is a big one. These things are developing so rapidly, I think we’re all playing catch-up to what’s in front of us. The business that I was signed into is so night and day from the business that is currently around.”

He adds, “I would say that some things remain the same, though. The thing about filters on your TikTok and AI and everything else is [that] we are drifting toward a new generation that is hyper-focused on perfection, hyper-focused on things being the same as the person to their left and the same as the person to their right. And my advice is that that is incredibly boring.

“I had a director on Broadway once who told me, ‘Josh, perfect is for assholes.’ And I kind of agree. The thing that is going to set young artists apart is the thing that gives them fringe, the thing that is nuanced. Go toward the unique rather than the perfection that all of these new emerging trends and technologies are making everybody feel like they need to jump onto.

“At the end of the day, people want to feel like they’ve been connected with something that is unique, otherworldly, different from the thing they get from swiping a million times a night on their phone. And that can take bravery. It can take some loneliness to feel like you’re not jumping on those trends. But ultimately I think it will make you a more interesting artist, and a more interesting person.”

Josh Groban will tour Australia and New Zealand in early 2026. You can find tickets on the Frontier Touring website.