Colbie Caillat: A MySpace Star on the Rise

By Richard Harrington
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 17, 2007

Colbie Caillat's "Bubbly" illustrates the difference between bubbling under and bubbling over.

A year ago, the now 22-year-old Caillat (pronounced "kah-LAY") was working at the front desk of a Malibu, Calif., tanning salon checking customers in and out, and, in her spare time, writing songs with singer-songwriter pal Jason Reeves. One of their first efforts was "Bubbly," a sunny, upbeat infatuation anthem with a sweetly innocent outlook ("Every time I see your bubbly face / I get the tinglies in a silly place / It starts in my toes and I crinkle my nose / Wherever it goes, I always know.")

Caillat recorded a demo of "Bubbly" in September, and eventually, albeit circuitously, it landed on the behemoth social networking Web site MySpace, where Caillat had been "talking" to her friends for a year or so.

"I never really understood the whole thing, thought it was really weird," she says. "Then one of my good friends said people make music pages on MySpace where other people can hear your music. He created the page and uploaded my song and showed me how to use it, and one day I started getting friends on there, started getting responses to the music.

"That's when I started seeing where things could go, but I didn't know I was going to get a career out of it," Caillat adds with a hearty laugh. "I just thought it was a good place to hear other people's input on my music, if they liked it or not."

They liked: Dozens of friends became hundreds, became thousands. In October, soon after Caillat passed the 6,000-friend mark, Rolling Stone hailed her as one of the music scene's most promising unsigned artists and noted that the singer "may not stay unsigned for long."

Long enough, though, to be the No. 1 unsigned artist on MySpace for four successive months, during which Caillat garnered an impressive 10 million plays and kept signing up friends. As of press time, the total surpassed 166,000, with total plays of more than 16 million.

Record labels can count, and they started courting Caillat, who signed with Universal in March. The numbers remained impressive after Caillat's debut album was released July 17: Within hours of its release, "Coco" debuted at No. 1 on iTunes' albums chart. (Don't dismiss that: The online store is now among the top five music retailers in the country.) With sales of 51,000 albums, "Coco" opened at No. 5 on Billboard's Top Albums chart.

"It's really exciting," Caillat said during a recent call from Florida, where she was ending a stateside tour and getting ready for a quick trip to Germany. "A lot of work but a lot of fun."

"Coco's" success is also a good illustration of knowing when you're ready and when you're not. After all, Caillat was just 15 when she started working with producer Mikal Blue, singing songs he wrote as runway music for St. John Knits fashion shows.

And she did have the environment thing going for her, growing up in Malibu, surrounded by music. Her father, Ken Caillat, is a record producer, probably best known for producing and engineering Fleetwood Mac's gigantic "Rumours" and "Tusk" albums in the late '70s, and in the '90s remastering dozens of classic albums for the 5.1 DVD audio format. Plus he had his own record label, Immergent.

In fact, Ken Caillat may have been the biggest help to his daughter by not catering to her understandable but unfocused desires.

"When I was younger, my friends would always ask, 'How come your dad doesn't help you out?' " Caillat recalls. "But he didn't want me to just be an artist, a singer that had people write songs for her. My parents talked to me about playing an instrument forever so that I could write songs and have a career out of it."

And, Caillat admits, as a teenager, "I wasn't ready at all. I wasn't really confident in myself -- I loved to sing, but I never sang in front of people because I was so shy. I didn't have stage presence, I didn't know how to play guitar, I hadn't even written a song at that time! I wouldn't have been ready, and a career would not have happened. If anything had happened, it would have been really short, and not really respected, I guess."

Not that Colbie didn't try to talk her father into something.

" Totally!" she laughs. "I'm still not ready, still learning as I go, but at that point there would have been no way. . . . Once I got to the right age and realized I needed to focus on some things, then it was good."

That age was 18, when Caillat began voice lessons, and 20, when she started taking guitar lessons and writing songs. That was also when she teamed with Reeves, a singer-songwriter transplanted from Iowa City, while continuing to work with Blue, who produced "Coco." Blue, who recorded on the Immergent label, has his own recording studio, Revolver Recordings, and has worked with such bands as Five for Fighting and Augustana.

Those collaborations, Caillat says, have allowed her writing to blossom.

"Mikal is a very pop-oriented guy and Jason is very folk, and I have the whole R&B side," she explains, "and maybe if we were all just individuals, it would be too much of one thing. But since we all blend into our style of music in every song, it's something really special, and I think that's why so many people can relate to it."

"Coco" has a naturally sunny disposition, not unlike Caillat herself. She comes across as the quintessential California girl -- not the Valley Girl variety, but the healthy, beach-bred kind who has spent a lot of vacation time in Hawaii (a twice-a-year family affair). Caillat has the laid-back vibe of island boy Jack Johnson and the natural glow of Jessica Biel, though she seems more comfortable with the first comparison than with the second.

"My album's a little more produced than [Johnson's] albums, which is where I don't see the comparisons, but I do, because we both have a laid-back feel and write simple songs. I would say it's more a John Mayer/Jack Johnson/Nick Drake comparison."

Caillat's success is an intriguing corollary to Universal's other break-out female artist this year, Amy Winehouse ("Rehab"), beneficiary of more traditional mainstream media hype, with a train-wreck personality that probably makes for more interesting copy. Caillat is a better example -- albeit still one of the few genuine breakthroughs -- of a talent pool of self-launched artists using an online social networking site. With about 200 million members worldwide, MySpace is the new, populist A&R Central, though many of its successes have been assisted in their online promotion by the conventional record companies that signed the artists.

Interestingly, Universal almost had MySpace's biggest star, Tila Tequila, with her nearly 2 million friends, a popularity that never translated into iTunes sales or a major label deal. Tequila said she turned down two record deals to prove she could make it big on her own, which didn't happen. The first star of MySpace fell quietly to Earth, albeit landing recently on the covers of Penthouse and Black Men magazines. Oh, she did recently open her own online poker room, TilaCasino.com.

Caillat obviously knows the music business is a gamble whether one is with a major label or an independent.

"My dad had a record label, signed a bunch of bands," she says; none were particularly successful. Plus, Caillat says, "I'd seen so many other bands get a record deal and seen how short they lasted, so I went into this not expecting too much, knowing that anything could happen and that I have to keep working hard if I wanted to achieve anything."

You can see it in YouTube videos where the contrast between early performances and more recent ones is palpable enough for Caillat herself to notice.

"I see that I have improved, because before I wouldn't even want to go out on stage in front of so many people. Now I just have to learn to be comfortable and interact with the crowd more; I kinda get into my own world because I get so nervous and shut everyone out. I need to act out more on stage!"

Thankfully, she has a lot of friends.

Colbie Caillat Appearing Saturday with Jason Reeves at the Birchmere Flush with friends: When Caillat first signed up on MySpace, she actually screened her "friends," then numbering in the dozens, and soon, the hundreds. "I wouldn't just add anyone," she says. "Then I learned you should just add everyone for that [music] page, not my [personal] one." Now that her friends number more than 166,000, she says, "I feel bad because I don't ever go on there -- I get a lot of messages, and there's just no time to respond to any of them."