If you happened to be one of the 2,000 people at Stage AE on Halloween night 2014, you got an early look at a budding star in rather raw form.
In the summer of that year, Meghan Trainor slipped into the Billboard Hot 100 at No. 84 with a little thing called “All About That Bass,” and while it was slowly creeping up the charts, the folks at 96.1 Kiss were all about that song.
“We got her for our Halloween party as soon as we heard ‘All About That Bass,’ ” says Morning Freak Show host Mikey Dougherty, “and knew it was the kind of song that maybe blows up and she ends up performing on ‘Ellen.’ Sure enough, it blew up and she performed on ‘Ellen’ and it was a No. 1 song before the party.”
On Halloween, opening for Fifth Harmony, a 20-year-old Trainor did one of those mall-type sets, singing live over the tape with a couple of dancers bouncing around her.
“She was extremely nice at the party and even kept going back on stage with all of us from the station even after her set was done,” Mr. Dougherty says. “She even went out on stage to personally wish Big Bob’s wife, Rebecca, happy birthday that night. Simply being nice in the music business sometimes goes a long way and she was extremely nice that night and has been with our station ever since.”
By February 2015, the singer-songwriter from Nantucket, Mass., had a full production assembled for a 17-city That Bass tour, Pittsburgh not being among them. A second U.S. leg, interrupted that July when she underwent surgery for a vocal cord hemorrhage, didn’t stop here either, so Pittsburgh’s first chance to see her in her full glory is at the Petersen Events Center Sunday.
By now, we know that she’s an artist with some range. Back in late 2014, people may have thought that Ms. Trainor was just about that “Bass” and only about that “Bass” — if they hadn’t seen her bio. For starters, she was one of those church-singing kids, with a father who played organ. She also has one degree of separation from beloved roots-rock band NRBQ because her great uncle had been in a band with NRBQ’s Al Anderson. That led to Ms. Trainor, at 15, taking lessons from former NRBQ guitarist Johnny Spampinato. Throw in an aunt and Trinidadian uncle who were soca performers and now you have some extra rhythm.
She took matters into her own hands writing on GarageBand at 11, around the time she started singing Bob Marley songs in a family party band called Island Fusion. By 17 she had released three albums of original material she recorded herself. That led to local airplay and a win at the John Lennon Love Song Songwriting Contest, among others, and when Mr. Anderson hooked her up with his publisher, she turned down a scholarship to the Berklee College of Music to pursue songwriting with the Nashville-based Big Yellow Dog Music.
In her 2012 single “Who I Wanna Be,” she dreams of being the next Britney, Beyonce or Taylor, but, really, she feared she didn’t have the looks or body for pop stardom. That changed when she and Nashville producer Kevin Kadish wrote “All About That Bass” in 2013. After it was rejected by various labels as a song for other artists, she recorded it and performed it on ukulele for Epic Records chairman Antonio “L.A.” Reid.
By December 2014, it was No. 1 in 58 countries, on its way to becoming one of the best-selling singles of all time. She followed that with second single, “Lips Are Movin,” going to No. 4, in her favored mode of retro-pop/R&B.
“At the time of the [Halloween] party, when ‘Bass’ was No. 1, she had released ‘Lips Are Movin’ but hadn’t even rehearsed it yet so the song played as her ‘open’ before she was even on the stage,” Mr. Dougherty says. “Crazy looking back on it how many hits she’s had now in such a short time.”
Her debut album, “Title,” topping the charts in January 2015, also came with the bouncy retro hit “Dear Future Husband” and “Like I’m Gonna Lose You,” an acoustic ballad with John Legend. Along the way, she also wrote songs recorded by Jennifer Lopez, Rascal Flatts, Fifth Harmony and Hunter Hayes.
“I’ve never met anyone so prolific,” Mr. Reid told Billboard. “People know that she’s a hitmaker and that she’s cut from a different cloth. But the depth of her talent runs deeper than most.”
With second album “Thank You,” debuting at No. 3, she avoided the sophomore slump, hitting the Top 5 again with the modern dance-pop track “No” and following with funky “Me Too.” (When the video came out in May, she noticed that her figure had been altered to look thinner and she briefly pulled it, generating more press for the song.) The album moves further into her influences of rap, dance and Caribbean music.
“Pushing boundaries,” she told Rolling Stone. “I’m allowing myself to go places that I was scared. The doo-wop thing happened on accident, really. Like that was just one of the genres that I did.”
Her early accomplishments were rewarded in February when she won the Grammy for best new artist. Now, she’s reaching bigger crowds on the Untouchable Tour and instead of just running around with dancers, she’s playing piano, guitar, ukulele, percussion and, yes, trumpet.
“I’m not good at trumpet,” she told Billboard, “but I played it from third grade to senior year!” Trainor added that the tour will be “really about showing me off as a musician. I just said, 'Put me on every instrument you can find and make it look cool.’ ”
Scott Mervis: smervis@post-gazette.com; 412-263-2576. Twitter: @scottmervis_pg.
First Published: September 8, 2016, 4:00 a.m.
