An Evening With John Splithoff

John Splithoff was at a crossroads. The singer/songwriter had been living in New York City for ten years, scrapping and hustling on the local music scene. His 2018 single “Sing to You” was a Top Ten hit on the Adult Contemporary charts and helped him score a deal with a major label, but he had to figure out what came next.

“I just hit a wall,” he says. “I was stressing out in a lot of ways and feeling the city bearing down on me.”

So Splithoff made a big decision—actually, a series of big decisions. He traveled around the country, opening for various acts including Andy Grammer, Gabrielle Aplin, Ben Rector, MAX, QUINN XCII, Fletcher, and Toro y Moi, playing at Lollapalooza and Bonnaroo in 2018, recording his album All In throughout Covid lockdown in NYC. Then he got engaged and married his high school sweetheart in 2021 before he eventually moved to Los Angeles a few months later in 2022. He has continued touring non-stop since then, playing his own headlining shows and joining other acts as a guest, bringing his soulful genre bending style to high profile shows, domestically and internationally.

And from all of this change, exploration, confusion, and excitement came a rush of inspiration, which became the backbone of Splithoff’s new album Far From Here. “A lot of these songs are associated with a time and place that hold a lot of meaning to me,” he says. “I also noticed, within all that change, how my relationships ebbed and flowed—I felt closer to people I didn’t know as well, and I felt distant from people who I considered my best friends and family. So it’s been an eye opening path.”

The first song he wrote for the project was the last to be recorded—and then became the single selected to introduce the album. “I wrote ‘Tangled’ in Nashville, a week before moving to LA,” he explains. “I wrote it as I was packing things into moving boxes and my life just felt really messy. It has somewhat of an island feel, but it’s about intimacy and being wrapped up in the infatuation of somebody and how they make you feel.”

Concurrent with “Tangled,” though, Splithoff is also released “Magenta,” which he describes as “more personal, vulnerable, more complex lyrically—recounting memories and the passage of time within a relationship.” He notes that the eclectic sounds and emotional range that fill out the canvas of Far From Here—the sensibility captured in the album title—were intentional and important. “As I started to write, the overarching theme for the album came with it,” he says. “I felt the desire to write something that felt cohesive conceptually and resonated with all the movement and change I had been experiencing in my life.”

The breadth and ambition come as no surprise when Splithoff rattles off some of the artists who have influenced his sound. He grew up in a musical family in the suburbs of Chicago, listening to classics like Marvin Gaye, Pink Floyd, Earth Wind and Fire, and Fleetwood Mac. He started playing along at age 13, teaching himself piano and guitar through obsessively exploring the music of the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s. When he didn’t make the baseball team in high school, he joined a vocal group, which led to writing songs and playing in bands, and eventually receiving a degree in Jazz performance at the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music. He moved to New York City after crafting a 5-track EP in Chicago, not so subtly entitled The Move. Playing his first gigs around the city, he wrote and recorded a first crop of singles while teaching private lessons, performing at weddings, and singing commercial jingles. This led to the eventual release of his breakout single, “Sing to You”, which changed his life.

“I love Sade, Michael McDonald, I love Christopher Cross,” he says. “Call it yacht rock if you want, but the music associated with that is important to me.” But Splithoff is quick to cite younger artists he admires, including Benny Sings, Clairo, Men I Trust, and Mac DeMarco. “I think they’ve brought unique musicality into popular music,” he says, “hearing people play some tasteful keyboards or write a song with a bridge that goes to different places.”

One early song written for Far From Here was “Plateau,” born directly from the atmospheric sounds of Splithoff favorites The War on Drugs and Khruangbin. Elsewhere on the album, “Same Page” has what he calls “the smallest bit of twang,” an echo of a camping trip in the desert of Arizona, while “Kyoto Snow” evokes his unforgettable, first-ever journey to Japan.

Since relocating to LA, Splithoff and his classic, laid-back vocal style have been welcomed into sessions and performances with a variety of A-List collaborators, including Sting, producer David Foster, an opening slot for Teddy Swims, and an ongoing working and touring relationship with jazz trumpet legend Chris Botti (who guests on the Far From Here track “City Days”).

“How I am with music is how I was growing up,” he says. “I bounced around between different friend groups, but it was never, ‘This is me and my four best friends, and it’s us and nobody else.’ That’s how I feel about music; I’m inspired by so many different things that it’s very difficult for me to tether myself to one sound or one style.”

For listeners who are new to John Splithoff and those who discovered him as a live performer or as part of the 150 million streams for “Sing to You,” what Far From Here presents is an artist reborn. Out of the turmoil and disruption, the uncertainty, the ups and downs of the last few years, Splithoff emerged with a transformation in his attitude and his approach.

“The biggest thing was writing some songs that brought me peace,” he says. I felt like my writing had become a whole lot of checking boxes for other people. With these songs, though, it was just sitting down and getting back to the genuine joy of creating and writing music.”