Music

Active Child: Pat Grossi is walking in the air

John Rogers | Sunday 3 October, 2010 18:43

Active Child, aka pale skinned, strawberry-blonde LA resident Pat Grossi, seemed to come out of nowhere this year, but tracking back on music blog aggregator Hype Machine reveals that a handful of his songs have been creeping across the blogosphere since August 2009.

The influential Transparent blog first posted “She Was a Vision”, leading to coverage on everything from monolithic US tastemaker site Pitchfork to über-blogs Stereogum and RCRD-LBL to homegrown champions of all things indie The Line Of Best Fit, and culminating in an impressive internet-led word-of-mouth following.

“The power of the internet is amazing,” says a relaxed and amiable Grossi, perched on a bench out the Lexington just a few hours before a headline show. “Blogs start passing it around, people start adding it to their MySpace playlists, and then there’s a little bit of buzz and suddenly you get promoters asking you to play.”

Since then, things have happened fast. It’s hard to believe that Grossi only took Active Child from the bedroom the the stage a short while ago. “It’s been maybe 6 months since I started playing out,” he says, “but it’s been in development more like 2 years. I feel like it’s hard to put a finger on where you throw the moniker of Active Child on it, or when it was just a hobby.”

Born in Elizabethtown, New Jersey, and raised in nearby Moorestown, Grossi’s musical development began in his choirboy roots. “I was just singing in the elementary school choir in music class,” he recounts. “The director pulled me aside one day and said I should try out for the Philadelphia boys choir, which I’d never heard of. So I went home and talked to my mom about it. She gave me kind of a funny look like, ‘what, you can sing?’, but she ended up driving me to Philadelphia for an audition and sure enough, I got in. And it went from there.”

Aged 13, Grossi left the choir partly due to a family move to LA, but also for a much less circumstantial reason. “Puberty hits and, it’s like, you’re fucked,” he laughs. “My voice changed, and I didn’t sing for a really long time, ten years or more. I just didn’t do a lot of music.”

But the experience and practise of being in the choir stuck with Grossi, and he started exploring his parents’ record collection, absorbing 80s pop compilations his father was helping release in his music industry dayjob. “There was a lot of music lying around,” he remembers. “I was listening to Nirvana’s Unplugged and the Beatles, and discovered a lot of 80s stuff not from the original release or from an MTV video, but from ‘Best of the 80s part 17’ or whatever.”

The combination of Grossi’s choral upbringing and the influence of electronic pop and power ballads lies at the heart of his “Curtis Lane” EP. “I have a real soft spot for romantic ballads and real big drum hits so that stuff inspires me as a songwriter,” he muses. “When I hear that drum beat or that real simple Vangelis progression and it makes me want to sing over it. And naturally, I absorbed the choir stuff because I had to memorise it and had it ingrained a little bit. We practised a couple times a week for hours at a time, so it’s become inherently stuck in there.”

And it’s a combination that really works. At the time of the interview, Grossi was mulling over a couple of album offers from interested labels, but a recent tweet from his @activechild account suggests a deal has since been inked; it seems that Active Child’s rapid ascent is still just beginning.

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