With Balouzian on violin, Hope on keys and Lusk both singing and proffering baked goods to his new bandmates, they began to write together. “We started meeting up for a week or two every few months,” Lusk says. Lusk started working for a sunglasses brand, led a community choir where, he says, “I was just happy to sing”, and took on occasional starry backup gigs for the likes of Diana Ross and Beck to scratch the performer itch.īut after meeting Balouzian, a composer, and Hope, a DJ turned music video director, things began to change. “I knew I had to get a job or I’d be homeless. I tried for a couple of years and … it kinda went bad”, he says matter-of-factly. Various projects and record deals stalled in the years that followed. He has previously described his experience on the show as a difficult one, saying he felt that he had been made to feel “I wasn’t gay enough, I wasn’t straight enough, I wasn’t man enough, I wasn’t black enough”. Nate Dogg died while Lusk was on American Idol, “I didn’t know what to do when he first started to decline”, Lusk says. Photograph: Darren Gerrish/WireImage for Royal Academy of Arts Gabriels perform at the Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition. I did my vocals in around 20 minutes and was like ‘OK, nice to meet you … ’” “I wanted to get it over and done with as quickly as possible … I just did it because I love music. “Ryan and Ari showed up at my church kind of unannounced, looking for a choir for an advert they were making,” he explains. It’s the ideal get-up for our meeting in a London members’ club which he reckons “looks like something out of Kill Bill”.īut, back in 2016, life was somewhat different. Dressed in a black shirt with a pussy bow collar and glitter-flecked sunglasses, a super-wide-brimmed black hat beside him, the 36-year-old, speaking not far from where he is staying in north London, looks every inch the dramatic pop star. It was the beginnings of what would become their genre-defying trio, Gabriels – who have steadily gained ground by mixing doo-wop, soul, electronica and more – but Lusk initially had his reservations. “My friends were like, ‘Where are you going … and who are these white people?!’” Jacob Lusk mimics a startled face as he recalls his first trip to Palm Desert, California, to work with Ari Balouzian and Ryan Hope.
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