Photo of Jack Garratt shot by Laurent Chevalier for Okayplayer.
There is always something special when an artist from across the pond ventures his or her way to the U.S. for the first time. Even better when you’re on board to chronicle it for posterity. For Jack Garratt, the celebrated singer-songwriter from the village of Little Chalfont, Buckinghamshire, England — meeting with us in Park Slope, Brooklyn on a decent summer Saturday was a first to remember. The multi-instrumentalist who plays guitar, drums, piano, the harmonica, the mandolin, trombone and ukulele had never seen the beautiful Brownstones of Kings County, yet marveled in its gorgeousness.
The rest of the world is doing the same as Garrett’s R&B-friendly falsetto combined with his genre-defying, club-certified grooves is electrifying the airwaves. His first EP, Remnants, and its subsequent remix effort, Remnix was playlisted by BBC Radio 1. Songs such as “Worry” and “The Love You’re Given” helped him to venture from his village hometown to headlining the BBC Introducing stage at the Reading and Leeds Festival. In the years that have followed, Jack Garratt has been on the road with Mumford and Sons, earned awarded distinctions from the Brit Awards, BBC Sound Poll and MTV and proved that he is a true star on the rise.
With his debut studio album, Phase, still burning a hole in everyone’s playlists — Jack Garratt was excited to actually spend time with us instead of being trapped on a bus. Fueled by the same rugged energies he put into his drum-n-bass single, “Fire,” Jack Garratt proved to be one of our most charismatic First Look Friday subjects. As you all have continued to see, the boy is nice with the melodies and in our chat with him, we hope to show how he will continue to make waves on the Internet and the world around. We talk about how his upbringing and support from his parents inspired his experimentation, how Twenty Feet From Stardom found its way into his music and how he would love to work with Chance The Rapper and Kendrick Lamar on something truly special. Enjoy!
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Okayplayer: To music snobs like myself and us at Okayplayer are very much familiar with your work, but for the people in Buckinghamshire — what are they hearing and seeing that we here in the U.S. are missing out on?
Jack Garratt: I don’t know, y’know? I grew up in a small village just outside of London in the beautiful county of Buckinghamshire, yes, but I don’t know if it has a very strong relation to my music. The music [that] I make is very much, to me, a representation of London, which is where I spent a lot of my adolescence. As a kid growing up, being out in Bucks was great because it was as beautiful as being in a city, and as much as I love being in a city now as an adult, as a kid I had freedom to just explore the field next to my house, which was everything! I still spent most of my days inside the house getting fat and playing musical instruments, but I believe just having the freedom of having space was important. It is very wise to give children space to create and explore, you know, make mistakes, get hurt, do great things and be credited for it. I was just very lucky that the upbringing I had was one that encouraged all of those things.
OKP: While growing up who were some of your most cherished musical influences?
JG: My mom and dad played everything and anything to me, my brother and my sister. That is actually another really great thing about my childhood — my parents were enablers when it came to music. It was never a thing like I couldn’t listen to this or that. When I was a teenager I was figuring out who I was and who my friends were, and I remember hearing them say stuff about their mom and dad like, “They don’t let me listen to this band or that musician.” I didn’t have that growing up. I just remember freaking out about hearing that, thinking that just doesn’t make any sense. My upbringing was on Stevie Wonder and David Bowie. My mom got me into Earth, Wind and Fire as a kid and my dad ushered me into Paul Simon, Jackson Brown for songwriting and from that I found my way to people like Tom Waits, Rufus Wainwright and Stevie Ray Vaughn.
OKP: When you started hitting the professional circuits and began your career — how was it getting your first bits of press as an artist with notoriety?
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