“Hey, who recorded for Double Vision from China?” new bachata sensation Prince Royce asks his publicist. “Ah, yes, that’s right, it was Pitbull. He was on tour there when he recorded his verse.”
It used to be a big deal when 26-year old Prince Royce (born Geoffrey Rojas) and his band would pile into a beat-up van and drive up from the Bronx to a gig in Canada. Now, the baby-faced, lavishly quiffed singer has gone international. Seated in his record company offices, the lively, engaging Royce resembles velveteen portraits of the young Elvis. Until Double Vision, his first English-language album, which is released today, Prince Royce has been known for his take on the sensuous, rose-tinted guitar- and percussion-driven bachata sound, created in the Dominican Republic and propagated in Latin areas like Washington Heights in Manhattan and the Bronx, Prince Royce’s neighbourhood.
“There’s a reason why I decided to name the record Double Vision,” he says. “I have a double perspective, two different visions.”
Vision one is well-established. Royce’s eponymous 2010 bachata album, his first, went triple-platinum. It was born of songs he laid down with friends on equipment he bought using his wages working at a cellphone store after graduating from a local community college. A poet of local repute, he had planned to become an English teacher; he learned to play guitar by studying videos on YouTube. But academia lost out as his next two LPs, Phase II (2012) and Soy El Mismo (I Stay the Same) (2013) both topped the Latin/Tropical charts. Royce chalked up 11 Latin/Tropical No 1 hits, including creamy swooners like Corazón Sin Cara (Heart Without A Face), Mi Última Carta (My Last Letter) and the lilting reggae-tinged Darte un Beso (Give You A Kiss).
Bachata and its sister sound, the harder, faster reggaeton, pulse from speakers in largely Latin areas of American cities. You can hear its artists on New York’s La Mega 97.9 FM radio: Don Omar, the edgy Wisin & Yandel, and Romeo Santos, the co-founder of Aventura, the band which, as Royce likes to acknowledge, “opened the door so I could walk through”.
Of all of them, Royce is now the anointed one, poised to bridge the big fissure that separates the Latin and Tropical charts from the others. This gap is as deep as it is wide, despite the galloping browning of America, in part because it seems that many Americans don’t (want to?) speak Spanish; and they don’t have much interest in that “foreign” music when they have plenty of their own.
But the thing is, Prince Royce is their own, as the dazzling Double Vision shows. So now for vision two. Call it pan-American, perhaps, as the urban, R&B, Caribbean and electro-dance styles Royce distils with painstaking sophistication are all just as much him as the bachata he is known for. As he says, “I always sang in English. It’s just that nobody heard me.”
Serious about declaring himself the voice of a young trans-racial, trans-cultural American scene, in his liner notes he declares: “I hope this album launches a new generation of music, one that can cross many different musical genres and touch people from all different backgrounds.”
Striking the right balance is a sensitive process. “The Spanish language albums usually took me about 18 months to write, but I’ve been working on these English songs for three years. It took so long because I had to find myself in English; I knew who I was in Spanish. Did I want to do pop, R&B, or stay with a more Latin flavour? The way I think or sing about something is very different if it is in Spanish or English. Some songs are more American urban, some are very Latin and some are in between, because I represent a little bit of both.”
Underlining his superstar potential, his album has been produced by tried-and-tested dance, R&B, rap and pop talent including RedOne (Lady Gaga/Nicki Minaj), HardWork (Sean Paul, Damian Marley), and Toby Gad (Beyoncé, John Legend). The fresh tone is set from the first track, Stuck on a Feeling, with Snoop Dogg laconically intoning “Royyyccce …” – a self-referential trademark of Royce’s bachata tunes that usually sounds a lot sweeter.
Just as Latin telenovela soap operas are more extreme than their Anglo counterparts, so is bachata a genre of heightened emotions. Subtly, Royce retains elements of this tempestuous, romantic style on a well-calibrated mix of grooves. He offers opiated trip-hop/dance on Handcuffs, then full-on tropical funk in Lie to Me. Apart from beats, what Royce arguably brings from Latin music is his dizzying, dramatic sense of melody, replete with the arresting harmonies, arrangements and changes that surge through tracks like the tender There For You. Naturally, the heady cocktail also includes the very contemporary party-hearty Miami-Dancehall feel of Back it Up, featuring Jennifer Lopez and Pitbull.
“Before every session I would play the guys my bachata music; that’s how Back It Up came up,” says Royce. “I asked Lopez and Pitbull because I knew I wanted to bring a Latin flavour.” Royce is set to join them in crossing over – though neither Lopez nor Pitbull sprang from as fully Latin a base as Royce. It has been a decade since Ricky Martin and Shakira crossed over from the Spanish- to the English-language market.
For Prince Royce to become Latin music’s chief translator in his era is natural; it’s a role he has been playing since childhood. He’s one of four children of a hardscrabble immigrant Dominican family with a cabbie father and hairdresser mother. “I spoke only Spanish at home and English in school and with my friends. I would translate for my parents all the time, whenever we were out in the street. I would help out on the phone with customer service.” Musically, Royce was inspired by summer holidays with his family to visit his grandmother in the Dominican Republic. “That’s where I would hear a lot of Latin music.”
So what’s the difference between making Latin and Anglo music? Royce thinks carefully. The Anglo work ethic did impress him, he notes, but mainly, “in bachata, we always start with the piano, bass, guitar and bongo and work from there. I see it grow. Whereas on Double Vision, I got to say, it is a little less organic. The producer makes a beat, then you sing on top of it. That’s why it was important to me to bring in live guitars and percussion and bring the organic feel of Spanish music to this English album.” Meanwhile, Royce is already making his next bachata release. “Never stop working!”
