Music: Gran Day Out

The standard template for music industry success is to establish a local and regional presence, create a buzz, get noticed, endure the speculation and subsequent bidding war, sign a fat label contract, make music and make millions.

Pop/Rock singer/songwriter Gran Bel Fisher has clearly never heard this formula. The Sabina, Ohio, native and one-time Cincinnati resident is taking something of a backward approach to his career, having already experienced national success out of Nashville and Los Angeles and now returning home for a March artist residency at the Southgate House with tons of experience, a major label contract and a highly acclaimed debut album, Full Moon Cigarette, in hand.

“Everybody always asks me, ‘Why’d you do it this way?’ ” says Fisher with a laugh. “I tell them, ‘Because I went to Rock & Roll college.’ ”

Well before Rock & Roll college, which will be explained shortly, Fisher began his musical education at age 7 when his parents insisted that all four of their children take piano for a minimum of six years. During his formative teenage years, Fisher discovered guitar, taught himself how to play and began seriously writing songs, revealing his incredible musical aptitude.

“Through the years, I played Jazz, Classical and different things you usually get taught,” Fisher says. “In junior high, I started going off on my own.

I wrote my first songs in the fifth grade for a school project, and that was the spark that lit the fire that’s still roaring. From there, I started putting stories to the music, and slowly but surely became a songwriter. As time went on, I got more comfortable with the stories I was telling.”

For his last two years of high school, Fisher transferred from Sabina to Cincinnati, where he enrolled at the School for the Creative and Performing Arts and rented a Clifton apartment. He considers his time here as one of the turning points in his life.

“I moved to Cincinnati my junior year, on my own, in an apartment above Virginia Bakery,” Fisher says. “I had my piano and my guitars, and I would just sit up in my apartment and play. Living on your own at that age is kind of a surreal thing, and that’s when I realized that I sacrificed my friends and my old school for music. The moment I moved down there I realized that this feels right and I was ready to keep taking steps like this. It was a big step, especially coming from Sabina, which is a small town of about 2,000. The best part for me was that I went from a real white-bread community and school to going to SCPA and becoming a minority in every aspect, and I hadn’t gotten to experience that. It literally changed my life forever, and it was great.”

Right after his 2000 graduation, Fisher moved to Nashville and was almost immediately offered a position in a Country/Pop vocal group called Marshall Dillon. The group cut an album and toured the world, giving Fisher an invaluable firsthand education in the music business.

“I did some songwriting and then was part of Marshall Dillon for Kenny Rogers’ label,” he says. “I did that for about two years. It was someone else’s gig, and I was kind of a part of it. I wasn’t really doing any songwriting. That was my Rock & Roll college.”

During his Marshall Dillon stint, Fisher continued to write songs on his own for himself. Once the group dissolved, he made tentative steps toward playing his own music in Nashville clubs, then moved back and forth between Ohio and New York for about a year before heading west to Los Angeles in 2005. Once there, Fisher met producer/guitarist Dave Bassett and the pair began collaborating on songs, recording demos and sending them around, garnering label interest immediately.

“Friends of friends knew some people at Hollywood Records, and they said, ‘They’re playing a big show at the Viper Room, full band, if you want to check it out,’ ” Fisher recalls. “They brought everybody from the label. I was opening for The Fray right before they hit big. The next day I played in a conference room setting, just me and a guitar and a piano with the bigwigs sitting in front of me. It was a big pressure situation, but I tell everyone I’ve been playing living rooms all my life.”

With the contract signed, Fisher went into the studio with Bassett as well as bassist Justin Meldal and drummer Lenny Waronker, on loan from Beck’s band, and recorded his debut CD, Full Moon Cigarette. Although the album was essentially an under-the-radar release, Fisher gained some support at radio — former Cincinnatian Dan Reed, now program director at Philadelphia’s WXPN-FM, was an early and fervent believer — and the Associated Press cited Full Moon Cigarette as one of the “Notable CDs Overlooked in 2006.”

Perhaps the most important outlet for Fisher recently has been television. He’ll be performing his first single, “Crash and Burn,” on an upcoming episode of NBC’s Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip (likely the first episode when the show returns from hiatus), and his second single, “Bound by Love,” will appear on a Grey’s Anatomy soundtrack CD and be featured in an episode.

“It’s yet to appear in an episode, and we’re not sure when and they won’t tell us because they say it gives away the story,” Fisher says with a laugh.

Fisher’s Southgate House residency became possible when he made the decision to move back to Ohio — he’s looking to buy a farm north of the city — and got the urge to establish the local profile he’d never had while he was here.

“Now that I’m back, it was ‘Let’s get local,’ ” Fisher says. “It’s something we haven’t gotten to do because the tours took us to other cities and other places. One of the first places on the list was for sure the Southgate, and agents hooked it all up and now we’re jamming.”

Although Fisher wasn’t able to do a full slate of Wednesday shows at the Southgate in March because of last week’s quick Southern swing, the first show on March 7 was a big success by Fisher’s estimation.

“There were probably about 60 people packed into Junie’s Lounge, and that’s a lot of people to fit in there,” he says. “I had a blast. I’ve been wanting to play there for a long time. It’s a great venue, one of my favorites actually.”

With the success of the first show fresh on his mind, Fisher is anxious to repeat it the next two Wednesdays. Although he doesn’t have any specific goals for his Southgate stint, he’s excited to be back in the area and playing for, what feels like to him, a hometown crowd.

“Really, since we’ve been doing this we haven’t gotten to focus on the Midwest and the idea now is to let people know what we’re about,” he says. “I’m being backed by a trio from Ohio called the Josh Krajvik Band. The goal is to let people in Cincinnati know that we’re going to be around, and we love Rock & Roll, we give it 110 percent energy. If you want to party and have a good time and see some Rock & Roll, come on out.”

This article appears in Mar 21-27, 2007.