“MY QUEEN I’M SO PROUD OF YOU WHEN I WENT TO GO SEE YOU THERE I CRIED YOUR PERFECTION,” read a tweet received by Tori Kelly the day after she played a sold-out show at the Tabernacle, west London, in September. “All in capitals,” she notes kindly. Kelly is new to adulation, which is still at a manageable level – despite 87m YouTube views and 1.6m Instagram followers, there are no fans outside her hotel and no recognition from diners in its sunny restaurant. But those around her are confident that the Los Angeles-based singer and guitarist will quickly ascend the pop ladder.
If her name is unfamiliar, it’s because her breakthrough only came in August, when she sang Should’ve Been Us, from her debut album Unbreakable Smile, at the MTV Video Music Awards. Her performance – a barnstorming display of Whitney Houstonesque vocal virtuosity – got more hits on the music-identification app Shazam than any other artist that night, as viewers tried to find out who she was.
The short answer: she’s a 22-year-old Californian whose octave-scaling voice attracted the attention of Scooter Braun, manager of Justin Bieber, Carly Rae Jepsen and Ariana Grande, a man skilled at taking a germ of talent and turning it into ruthlessly targeted commercial gold. Braun got her a record deal and brought in producer and songwriter Max Martin, whose opulent, chromium sound has informed pop for 15 years, to oversee Unbreakable Smile. Released at the start of the summer, it entered the Billboard chart at No 2 and comes out in the UK this month. “While I was making it, I’d forgotten about the whole concept of charting – I forgot people would actually buy this,” Kelly says, moving on to a small dessert plate of miniature Bounty bars. Successful as Unbreakable Smile has been, however, it sold mainly to people who already knew her from when she was self-releasing EPs through iTunes, or as the featured artist on Professor Green’s 2014 hit Lullaby; the threshold between fanbase act and likely star was only crossed at the VMAs.
Kelly fits some of the typical pop-singer criteria: she invests her songs with retro R&B lushness and has not fans but “a fandom”, who call themselves the Toraays, after Kelly’s childhood nickname. Yet she considers herself as much a musician as a pop singer. Perhaps uniquely for a Braun artist, she’s happy playing solo acoustic gigs, accompanying herself on guitar, as she did at Bush Hall in London last month. The guitar was there in the years before Braun, too, when she was uploading Katy Perry and Beyoncé covers to YouTube – it was a point of difference from the hundreds of other hopefuls. She would have stood out anyway; she has perfect pitch and uses her voice as the young Houston did: burnishing every syllable and occasionally spiralling off into melismatic melodrama.
“I feel really comfortable when it’s just me and a guitar. It’s special and more vulnerable to strip it down,” she says. “It can be scary, but it’s also empowering.” I tell her I saw the Bush Hall show, and wasn’t expecting her to be – she interrupts and finishes the sentence for me: “A musician? I’ve never seen myself as a pop singer. I grew up listening to gospel, soul and rock. My approach to pop is that, when I was doing my album, I wanted to have raw, genuine lyrics, but wanted it to be easy to process. So that’s where Max Martin came in.” Lest anyone assume that Martin ran the entire show, she adds: “I was part of the whole process. I [co-wrote] lyrics, a bit of production – I tried to be a sponge.”
Kelly was unusually confident from early on: at 11 she won a TV competition called America’s Most Talented Kids – her preternaturally mature version of Christina Aguilera’s Keep on Singin’ My Song is worth seeking out – and by 13 had a deal with Interscope Records. The label never released any of her music, however, and Kelly was relieved when the contract ended: “I went to the [label] office and there were music videos playing with female singers wearing hardly any clothes and, as a 13-year-old, I was confused because it didn’t feel right. I want to send a message to people that they don’t have to do that.”
The “message” – which boils down to: “Believe in yourself and don’t be bullied” – is something she takes seriously enough for the Toraays to echo it. As the Tori Kelly Updates account on Twitter (a news feed run by fans) declares: “Why do we invest so much time into this page without getting paid? We believe in Tori and the message she desires to relay to the world.” The message is very much rooted in her faith; Kelly refuses to call herself religious, terming it “a relationship with God”. Her Twitter biography refers to Psalm 91:4, which she quotes to me, looking it up on her phone to check the wording: “He will cover you with his feathers and under his wings you will find refuge.”
In her teens she auditioned for more talent shows, almost reaching the final 24 of the 2010 series of American Idol. She might have got further if Simon Cowell hadn’t found her voice “almost annoying” – another knockback that failed to quell her determination. “I didn’t even really hear what he said,” she maintains. “I had three yeses from the other judges, so I was pretty much overwhelmed.”
Braun, who rarely discusses his clients, gives an insight into why Kelly is finally connecting with the public. “In today’s world, it’s so easy to pirate music, and the only reason to buy music is if you believe in people,” he says. “You have to be a storyteller. With Justin, I needed a story to tell, with Ariana, I needed a story to tell. With Tori, the story is that she’s very authentic. She’s one of the best singer-songwriters on the planet, and she’s good and warm and talented and extraordinary. She was on Interscope and they never put out one song of hers. This girl had every knock-down – people said to me: ‘She’s been around for years and never made it.’ I said: ‘Are you kidding?’”
She is undeniably warm – interviews conclude with a hug – but there’s a well of bitterness in the music. The single Unbreakable Smile is ridden with it: “Call me boring, call me cookie cutter, call me what you want … Who knows, maybe I can sell out shows without taking off my clothes.”
That lyric pertains to her initial struggle to write songs for the album. To nudge her, Braun read out the negative criticism she had received at a gig, with “cookie cutter” and “vanilla” topping the list. Incensed, Kelly went home and “spilled it all out on paper, and the album came from there”.
“That’s what young artists need: patience and someone who won’t tell them ‘yes’ all the time and is honest,” says Braun. Between his honesty and her message, Kelly could be en route to something something big – albeit suitably chaste.
Unbreakable Smile is released on 16 October on Virgin/EMI
