Josh Groban is celebrating his album Closer in a huge way. He’s marking the milestone of it being officially two decades old by releasing a special 20th anniversary deluxe edition of the album out on November 17. You can pre-order/pre-save here.
Videos by American Songwriter
According to a press release, the revised edition of his second album features Closer remastered for the first time and also boasts six rare, never-before-heard bonus tracks. Among those tracks, there’s a newly recorded version of the classic song “Broken Vow (Vocal/Piano)” which features David Foster on piano.
The album will also feature new, never-before-heard versions of classic Groban tunes like “You Raise Me Up” and “Mi Amorena,” among others.
[RELATED: Josh Groban to Star as Fleet Street’s Demon Barber in ‘Sweeney Todd’ Broadway Revival]
Fans and listeners of Groban have a lot to look forward to with the new edition. Upon its initial release in 2003, the record hit No. 4 on the Billboard 200 chart and later hit No. 1, becoming the first of three entries on the charts.
Groban was busy on Broadway in 2023, starring in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street as the titular role. In an interview with NPR back in April, Groban chatted about how he never gave up his dream to play the character.
On Stephen Sondheim’s work, he said, “It’s a beast to sing each night. There’s not any moment in this show to coast. It requires an enormous amount of focus and an enormous amount of checking in, you know, really tuning in with yourself, with your cast. There’s so much that you have to kind of lift in this, emotionally and vocally, that it’s tiring. You feel it at the end of the show. And what I love about his writing, especially this role, some of his writing can be very staccato. The writing for Sweeney has such incredible line and such incredible fluidity. There’s this romanticism to the music for Sweeney in particular.”
“That was one of the first things I connected with because I felt like, ooh, that’s something I can really play upon that juxtaposition of the romantic nature of the music and also these horrific things that are happening, you know, by his hand,” he continued. “And I know that that was a juxtaposition that he did, you know, by design and something that he was very enthusiastic about playing with.”
“It’s such a feast,” he concluded, “It’s something that even though everybody in this cast has known it their whole lives, you keep finding and you keep finding and finding and finding. We’ve opened. We’re officially frozen, but we keep finding. And that’s the incredible thing about his work. You can keep peeling and peeling and never get to the center. So I can’t wait to see what we find by show 100.”
Photo by Jason Mendez/Getty Images
