Entertainment, Music - Navy Times

Jesse McCartney departs into a grittier R&B world

Poster boy Jesse McCartney wasn’t kidding when he called his third album “Departure,” taking his sound in a grittier R&B direction. He even worked with collaborators who tapped into that culture, including Sean Garrett (Usher’s “Yeah!,” Ciara’s “Goodies”), Tricky and The-Dream (Rihanna’s “Umbrella”) and The Clutch (Timbaland’s “The Way I Are”).

“Growing up as a kid,” McCartney says, “I was raised on a daily diet of soulful music. I would listen to Aretha Franklin, James Brown and Ray Charles as a kid. That’s really what made up my parents’ 45 collection. I think Elvis was the first time I saw a white boy singing soul and that really kind of did it for me.”

He may have drifted a bit from that sound in his days as the dreamiest member of Dream Street and into his Disney-compatible platinum breakthrough “Beautiful Soul.”

But those were different times, and he was doing what he felt was right for his career, which meant poppier albums.

“It’s nothing against the other albums,” he says. “I think those albums had to be made — for that place in time and that point in my life. But with this album, I would say ‘Departure’ kind of hits it on the nose. I landed on that title because musically I’m leaning more toward R&B and I hope to keep going more in that direction. It’s a process.”

Having come up through the tween-pop ranks, McCartney may have left some younger fans out in the cold with this one. But he wasn’t too concerned.

“I think where I maybe fell short with the second album is that it was sort of an in-between stage musically where I wanted to sound a little more mature but didn’t quite hit the mark,” he says. “And I feel like my fans are really ready for an album like ‘Departure.’ I feel like they’ve grown up with me. The content is definitely a little more mature. And I think once they get used to the new sound, I think that’s where the shock value is. That’s really Jesse? It doesn’t add up at first. But I think people have adjusted really well.”

He learned a lot, McCartney says, by opening the writing process up to people like Sean Garrett and The Clutch.

“I’ve been writing for years and I wrote the last album entirely,” he says. “And I think where I may have closed myself off a little bit is by writing the whole album. When you have really talented writers and producers working with you that want the same thing for you, they look at you and kind of bring a fresh perspective to the table. They can sort of stand outside your world and bring something new to the table that you never would have thought of on your own. And that’s really what I enjoyed most about working with these writers and producers, especially because they’re known in this genre of music that I’m very new to in the professional world.”

Of course, McCartney’s own track record as a writer’s looking pretty strong at this point, thanks to “Bleeding Love,” a soulful pop ballad he wrote with One Republic’s Ryan Tedder. As recorded by Leona Lewis, it became the biggest-selling UK single of 2007 and spent nine weeks in the top spot on the U.S. pop charts.

Asked if he ever regrets not recording the single himself, McCartney laughs and says, “I tell everyone, it may not necessarily have been a hit for me if I had put it out. It’s really hard to say. I think it was a great song, and one of the better songs I’ve written, certainly, but after writing it, even then, Ryan and I said ‘You know, this would sound really good with a female vocalist.’ ”

The success of that single has “opened a lot of doors,” he says. “I’ve been approached now with ‘Hey, can you write us another Bleeding Love?’ or ‘Can you write us anything?’ So I’ve been at my house. I’ve got a little home studio set up in my house where I can record and I’m definitely now writing with other people in my mind. Who knows? In 10 years, I might be on a whole ’nother plane that I can’t even think of right now.”