"One day I heard music - maybe it was 'When Doves Cry' or 'Mary Jane,' something I really loved - and it opened a whole other world for me," says Van Hunt. "As a kid, the road is wide open, and that excitement is what I want from a record. That's who I make music for, that same kid in me."
Hunt credits his diverse tastes to a mother who supported his early interest in music, to his "part-time painter/part-time pimp" father, and to the Southern Ohio soil where he was raised. The Cincinnati-Dayton axis - truly a unique spot on the American map where north meets south, east meets Midwest, urban meets rural - has produced such funkateers as Bootsy Collins, the Isley Brothers, Slave, Zapp, and Hunt's favorites, the Ohio Players. "They really are the backbone of it," he says. "They had a jazz approach, brought along a fusion feel and also a blues thing."
He took that eclectic sensibility to Atlanta to attend Morehouse College, and began writing and producing for a new breed of soul artists including Joi, Raphael Saadiq, and Dionne Farris. Hunt was working with super-producer Dallas Austin until his manager, a pre-"American Idol" Randy Jackson, encouraged him to step forward as an artist, and brought him to Capitol Records. The result was the VAN HUNT album, followed by an extensive tour - both as a headliner and appearing alongside such artists as The Roots, Seal, and Angie Stone, Coldplay and Kanye West - that received rave reviews. No less than Alicia Keys stepped up to call Hunt "one of the most incredible musicians I know."
In conversation, Hunt returns over and over to the idea that his job is to serve the songs. He considers himself a "singer/songwriter at heart," and acknowledges the challenges of following an unconventional muse in the contemporary marketplace. "I'm pioneering new territory," he says. "I come up as a young black artist and I'm not rapping - I know it's a hard sell." Recalling the less-titillating part of his father's work, he frequently compares the recording process to painting, and concludes that, in the end, "people just want you to excite them for three and a half minutes."
