Sometimes one song will click. This happened to me
with Boys in the Street; the voice, the melody, the lyrics, they all worked for
me - and made me tear up. So I changed the schedule, which means that today I'm
presenting Greg Holden.
We usually go about it in a chronological way, but
today we'll make an exception and begin with the song in question, from 2015.
Time magazine's Nolan Feeney had a very good presentation/interview with the
artist, so I thought you'd like to read it:
It’s a song that regularly makes people cry. It’s a
song Tom Hanks called “perfect.” But it’s also a song that had the potential to
rub a lot of people the wrong way. Greg Holden’s Boys in the Street is an
emotional account of a father coming to accept his gay son, but over lunch in
New York a few weeks before the premiere of its music video, Holden sounds a
little nervous about how it will be received. “I think the radio folk want to
push it quite fast,” he says. “I’m not really too keen on doing that. I don’t
want to ram it down anyone’s throat. I don’t want to be announcing it from the
rooftops: ‘This is my new single!’”
It’s easy to understand why. The song, which Holden
says he wrote in just 20 minutes and which was instrumental in getting his
record deal, could be the big breakout track from his album Chase the Sun. But
Holden, who is straight, has seen how pop culture sometimes criticizes artists
who write about LGBTQI acceptance. Some critics said Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’
advocacy on Same Lovev - it was the first song in Top 40 to explicitly endorse
marriage equality - crossed the line into self-appointed spokesmanship;
detractors felt that it took an oversimplified, even condescending approach to
issues of sexuality and race. And Lady Gaga, even though she identifies as
bisexual, faced backlash for her 2011 song Born This Way, which many dismissed
as pandering.
“Sometimes people can use the message,” says
Holden, who heard from a fan who said Boys in the Street helped him through a
period of suicidal thoughts. “My concern with the song is people might hear it
and think, ‘Well, what does he know?’ I didn’t want it to just be advertising
for Greg Holden. If it’s going to have a message, it has to follow through all
the way.”
Holden wrote Boys in the Street after Kristin Russo
and Dannielle Owens-Reid, the co-founders of Everyone Is Gay, an organization
that supports LGBTQI youth, asked him to contribute to their 2014 fundraiser
compilation, The Gayest Compilation Ever Made II. There were no instructions,
only that the song touch upon sexuality or gender identity in some way. “I have
all these musicians who are close to me who have told me, ‘I want to stand up
for equality but I’m afraid my audience will turn around and say, ‘You can’t
talk about that stuff because you aren’t queer,’’” Russo says. “It’s a really
fine line, and for Greg, he’s a really respectful and very aware person, and
that makes all the difference when you’re tackling a project or topic like
this.”
Here’s what Holden did right:
Write what you know
Much of the song was inspired by Holden’s
relationship with his stepfather. “He was constantly telling me that I wasn’t
going to achieve anything and would never amount to anything,” he says. “It was
easy for me to say those things - it was coming from a genuine point of
respect.”
“I don’t think he was trying to tell a story that
he didn’t know about,” Russo adds. “What works is that those emotions that he
was feeling are very similar to the emotions that somebody feels when they are
coming from a place of, ‘I’m gay, I’m queer, I’m trans, and I don’t want to
tell my father because my father disapproves.’”
But still do your homework
Having knowledge about the community you’re writing
about is paramount, says Russo, who is married to singer-songwriter Jenny Owen
Youngs. “[When Youngs] has written songs about historic events and things like
that, she doesn’t think, ‘I kind of know what happened, I’m going to write a
song about it,’” she says. “She spends time learning and gathering
information.”
Russo says it’s the same lesson that guided the
production of Amazon’s original series Transparent, which extensively consulted
with and employed many members of the transgender community. “You have to be in
a dialogue with the reality that’s happening with those communities,” she says.
Had she raised an objection to something in Holden’s song, she says: “Without
batting an eye he would have had a conversation with us, we would have been
able to have a dialogue about what he learned, and he would have gone back to
that lyric or that verse and amended it.”
Get involved
“I think
it’s important [to] put my money where my mouth is,” Holden says. Because it
was included on the Everyone Is Gay compilation, Boys in the Street directly
supported an organization working with LGBTQI youth, and he says he’d like to
record more songs like The Lost Boy, his 2012 charity single that was inspired
by the story of a Sudanese refugee and raised money for the Red Cross.
But being responsible doesn’t always have to be
about money. Whether it’s giving other artists who are LGBTQI a platform or
advocating politically - Macklemore released Same Love to raise awareness about
Referendum 74 in Washington and donated some profits to a marriage-equality
group - the important thing is to make “sure the work you do is empowering the
communities that you’re speaking about,” Russo says.
Watch your message
By just telling a simple story on Boys in the
Street, Holden avoids making sweeping generalizations or assumptions about life
as an LGBTQI person. And though Russo says she’s never challenged material
submitted for her organization’s compilations, there are certain messages she
cautions straight artists against. “If you say it’s not a choice, it implies
that if you could choose it for you, you would not,” Russo explains. “It
automatically makes the inference negative. [Many people] had never considered
the larger implication.” That doesn’t mean you won’t hear LGBTQI artists
themselves use that language, as Mary Lambert did on the chorus of Same Love.
“That’s her experience and her story,” Russo says.
Watch your
visuals, too
In the music
video for Boys in the Street, you won’t see another human being besides
performance shots of Holden, who hates starring in his videos - the entire
story is told through simply dressed mannequins. “We didn’t want to stereotype
the dad, we didn’t want to stereotype the child,” Holden says. “I just wanted
to make it as completely neutral to tell the story through the body language.”
Don’t speak up
only when it's convenient
A few weeks
after Holden and I speak, I learn from his label that he's no longer doing
interviews about the song and video, preferring to let the music speak for
itself. That said, he won't shy away from playing it live. “The places where
you’d think [Boys in the Street] would go down badly, I get more excited about
playing them,” Holden says. “The applause got less and less as I traveled south
through the U.S. That gave me a rush. I’m really inspired by the artists who
are trying to say something important in their songs. That always gave me
chills. I want to try and do that, you know? If I think it’s going to make
anybody uncomfortable, I get excited.”
Here's the song
in question:
Now, let's go
back to the beginning: Holden was born in Aberdeen, Scotland in 1983, and lived
in Methlick in Aberdeenshire until he was three. The family then moved to
Lancashire in England, and he was raised in Morecambe and then Leyland. He went
to St Patrick's Primary School, Heysham near Morecambe, then attended Leyland
St. Mary's Catholic Technology College and the University of Central
Lancashire. Holden started learning to play the guitar when he was 18.
That's when he
wrote his first song called You Go Left, I'll Go Right. In 2005 he won the
Lancashire Evening Post Battle of the Bands. After graduating in 2005, he went
to Brighton with his band. He then moved to London in 2007 to attempt a career,
before moving to New York City in 2009. He relocated to Los Angeles in July
2016.
Greg Holden's
debut album, A Word in Edgeways, was released in 2009. The Art Of Falling is
from this album:
As well as The
Chase:
And finally, Choking
On The Concrete:
In 2010 he
released the EP Sing for the City. It
opened with She's Got Something:
It also
included Serendipity:
... As well as Thinking
of You:
Greg Holden's
second album, I Don't Believe You, was funded by fan donations using
Kickstarter in 2010 which raised $30,000. The album was released in May 2011.
Here's the title track:
Here's As Far
As I Can:
... And here's Hell
and Back:
The Lost Boy
was written by Holden in 2011 and was inspired by the book What is the What by
American writer Dave Eggers about Sudanese refugees. Holden recorded it and released as a charity single
on 20 December 2011, and it became a hit for him in the Netherlands, topping
the Dutch iTunes singles chart on Christmas Day and reaching #2 on the Dutch
Top 40. The song was also prominently featured in the popular TV show Sons Of
Anarchy.
An acoustic
version of I Don't Believe You was released in March 2012, including 2 bonus
tracks, one of which is The Lost Boy.
Holden's single
I Need An Energy, which was released on 26 October 2012, was used on the
soundtrack of the film, Chasing Mavericks.
Holden has
toured throughout Europe and the United States as a headliner. The Dutch leg of
his 2012 European tour sold out months in advance. He has also toured with A
Great Big World, BOY, The Lone Bellow, and Jukebox the Ghost.
His biggest
break also came in 2012: Home, a song he co-wrote with Drew Pearson, was picked
by American Idol mentor Jimmy Iovine for Phillip Phillips as his coronation
song for the final of the show's season 11. The song quickly topped the US
iTunes singles chart and became the best-selling song by an American Idol alum
with over 5 million copies sold. In 2014, Home was named one of the most
performed pop songs of 2013 by ASCAP, and Holden performed Home at the 2014
ASCAP Award Ceremony.
Here's Phillip
Phillips' version:
... And here's Holden's
version:
In 2014, Holden
worked with Greg Wells to record a new album. He signed a record deal with
Warner Brothers, and the new album, Chase the Sun, was released on 14 April
2015. It was preceded by the single Hold On Tight:
Boys In The
Street also appeares on this album. (this was the album that I've been
listening to yesterday.) Also on this album is Save Yourself:
... As well as It'll
All Come Out:
Holden co-wrote
three songs on A Great Big World's sophomore album When The Morning Comes
(2015). First came the opening track All I Want Is Love:
... As well as
the album's title track:
Greg Holden's
narrative is a work in progress. I feel that we'll hear a lot more of him in
the future.
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