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With his debut album, Van Hunt has established himself as a leading voice within the new old-school -- young R&B singers who play up their hip-hop-friendly savviness while paying homage to their Seventies forebears. Although he's pegged as a crooning loverman, the handsome twenty-six-year-old also plays a mean rhythm guitar, loves the Stooges and the White Stripes, claims he has dreamlike "visions" of the way his career will unfold and considers himself a "journalist" chronicling the drama he sees in pool halls around Atlanta.
"I go to this twenty-four-hour pool hall where anything can happen," says Hunt. "It's great. I love watching the old dudes tell stories about their wives."
Hunt was born in Dayton, Ohio, where he took an early interest in performing, learning saxophone and drums, and writing lyrics to match the melodies he heard on his favorite cartoons. Though raised by his single mother, Hunt was attracted to the mix of sleaze and class he saw in his father, a part-time pimp who introduced the young Van to his pot-smoking, girl-chasing friends, as well as to the world of art. "He worked at a factory, but he did whatever he needed to take care of himself," Hunt says. "He was also a painter. [His art was] beautiful, man, a lot like van Gogh."
After a semester at Atlanta's Morehouse College, in 1996, Hunt began producing hip-hop demos for Atlanta rappers. That led him to TLC producer Dallas Austin, who hooked him up with Capitol Records. Hunt says the label was slow to embrace him because of his messy, guitar-heavy "punk" approach, but eventually he settled on a smooth yet funky sound that he credits to his backing band, which specializes in "a real Southern kind of skank that I'm always looking for," he says. Down the line, Hunt hopes to further blur the line between his eclectic tastes. "There's a whole lot of James Brown in Iggy Pop and the Stooges," Hunt says. "Especially their drums and their rhythm. Neil Young, Sly Stone, it's all the same to me."