Описание
His producer, RedOne (Lady Gaga, Enrique Iglesias, Jennifer Lopez, Usher), has described Zander Bleck “as a mixture of Jim Morrison, Bono, and Queen’s Freddie Mercury.” Big shoes to fill indeed, but take one look at this guy and it doesn’t seem like such a stretch. Zander is skyscraper tall, with shoulder-length hair and intense blue eyes, and a rangy frame shoehorned into skinny jeans and draped with jewelry. Then he opens up his mouth to sing and there’s The Voice — a soaring tenor that brims with thrilling theatricality and carnal masculinity. Suddenly, RedOne’s comparisons to those three rock frontmen make sense. This kid from humble beginnings in rural New Jersey has got the goods.
“I love singers who show a piece of their soul when they sing,” Zander says. “Guys like Roger Daltrey, Bono, and Robert Plant. I want my music to capture that soul of rock and roll and fuse it with modern technology to create something entirely new.” With RedOne as his producer, Zander seems to have pulled it off. The songs he has written for his debut album, Monument, which will be released this year on Interscope Records, combine pure pop melodies and authentic rock energy with pulsating progressive beats. It’s a cosmopolitan sound, which guarantees the songs will work whether they’re performed live by Zander backed by a full band or booming from the speakers of any nightclub in the world.
“The songs are basically a journal of my life,” Zander says. “I’ve had a lot of adventures, from growing up with a big extended family in farm country, to moving to New York City when I was a teenager, to working as a model and traveling the world, to forming my own rock band and watching it fall apart. So this album is really a coming-of-age story; everything that I am is encapsulated in these songs.”
A self-taught vocalist, Zander grew up in Hunterdon County, NJ, where his grandmother owned a farm in the 1920’s and where both his parents were born and raised. Zander’s father was a singer-songwriter and musician who was signed to RCA Records in 1980 with a band called Long Branch. His mother is a schoolteacher. “We didn’t have a lot of money, but my parents really valued the arts, travel and culture, so they would rent out our house for the summer and take us backpacking through Europe,” Zander says. “My father had a jazz and world music radio show while I was growing up, so I was exposed to all different kinds of sounds. I also got a major education in classic rock from my older cousins.” When Zander was nine, he fell in love with rock and roll while watching a video of The Who perform at Woodstock.
At 16, Zander was approached by a modeling agent who encouraged him to try his luck in New York City. By his senior year of high school, Zander had signed with an agency and began commuting into Manhattan. After graduating, he moved there full-time with $400 in his pocket, and eventually found himself traveling the world. “I went to Paris, Los Angeles, Miami, and Milan,” he says. “I lived in Italy and Germany for a while. It was an amazing time, but I honestly never wanted to be a male model. I never took it seriously, ever. It was just a great way to travel and make money.” Upon returning from his travels in Europe, he returned to his true passion of music and started his first rock band, Monument. “The first time singing on a mic, I was madly in love with it,” he says. He began to write songs and was able to get Monument gigs all over the city. “I wrote the songs, I coordinated the shows, I produced and arranged the songs. It was a tremendous learning experience,” he says.
But as it often goes with bands, things fell apart after their break didn’t materialize. “The whole thing blew up,” Zander says. “I lost my band, I had no money because I had stopped modeling. I got completely knocked out of the ring. It was a really low point in my life.” The experience only made him more determined. “I had nothing, but I picked