Stomping around a rehearsal in an untucked t-shirt, jeans and work boots, the mike wire in his back pocket suggesting a wallet chain, Josh Groban looks even younger than his twenty-two years. In a sense, he's just started to grow up -- it's been less than six months since he moved out of his parents' house. His biggest vices are his plasma TV and True Crime: Streets of L.A., a first-person-shooter video game that allowed Groban to find the house he grew up in and riddle it with bullets. He drives a spanking-new silver Porsche; he dates a starlet (January Jones, one of Ashton Kutcher's exes, who was in American Wedding); his favorite restaurant is IHOP.

Groban, who's heading out on his first solo tour, is two months younger than Christina Aguilera, one month younger than Justin Timberlake, nine months older than Britney Spears -- that's his generation, and like each of them he's landed himself a Number One album, Closer. But Groban is more I Pagliacci than "Rock Your Body," and his fans discovered his stately classical pop on Oprah rather than on TRL.

"Number One is not something I thought I'd ever see," Groban says later as he settles into dinner at an Italian restaurant in L.A.'s Hancock Park neighborhood, where he grew up. His million-dollar throat is swathed in a heavy scarf against the chilly -- for L.A., anyway -- sixty-degree weather. "I was happy at Number Ten. I was happy the day my dad walked into my room and said, 'You're at Number 149. Congratulations.' "

Groban is sort of a stealth Number One: Closer's first single, "You Raise Me Up," squeaked into the Top Ten on Billboard's Adult Contemporary chart but still hasn't hit the Hot 100, and the video has gotten just a smattering of spins on VH1. "Radio has been irrelevant to this record," says producer David Foster, who has worked with everyone from Aretha Franklin to Chicago, not to mention composing the St. Elmo's Fire theme. "I'd love to have a Number One single and sell 10 million copies, but we're doing just fine without it."

With its operatic overtones and more than half of its songs in foreign languages, Closer is about as far against the grain of today's pop as you can get -- yet there it is at Number One. "It's a big F.U. to the American public," Groban says, then laughs. Not that his tastes are far from those of others his age: He lists the White Stripes, Tool and Radiohead among his favorite acts. Groban even recorded Linkin Park's "My December" for Closer, then dropped it from the CD when early reports invariably mentioned it. "I didn't want that to be the story of the album," he says. But "My December," in a booming, trance-y arrangement with an orchestra, is one of the highlights of the live show.

Groban's first love wasn't rock & roll but show tunes -- especially those by Stephen Sondheim. He played keyboards and drums as a child and never thought of himself as a singer until seventh grade, when a music teacher asked the class if anyone knew what scat singing was. Josh was surprised to discover he could actually do it. Soon he was scatting in a school talent show, which he kept secret from his mother. "I was sitting outside the school, and I heard this great voice coming from inside," Lindy Groban says. "I opened the door, and I was like, 'That's Josh?'"

Groban went on to L.A.'s High School for the Arts and then to Carnegie Mellon to study theater for six months, but when the opportunity came to make an album with Foster, he dropped out. His big break came at seventeen, when Foster asked him to sub at the Grammy rehearsals for the ailing Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli, to whom Groban is often compared. Rosie O'Donnell, that year's Grammy host, invited Groban on to her talk show, which led to a role on Ally McBeal and Josh Groban, which sold more than 3 million copies.

During a break in rehearsal, Groban launches into a version of a-ha's "Take On Me," a classic for the first group of kids raised on MTV. When he reaches the falsetto, Groban's enormous voice nails it flawlessly, and he chuckles. He sounds sturdy, orotund, more powerful than his records reveal. This isn't just Groban's first tour but his first-ever full-length concert, yet he seems totally at home onstage. He has more goals -- Broadway, songwriting -- but to come this far at twenty-two, doing everything contrary to the way the music business runs, is good enough for now.

"I'll always be able to say I did this," he says. "I stayed true to myself and did what I want to do, and still reached Number One."

(January 28, 2004)