“Once I was seven years old, my mama told me go get yourself some friends or you’ll be lonely,” Lukas Graham’s soul-drenched voice begins on his hit “7 Years.” “Once, I was seven years old.”
The breakout star responsible for one of 2016’s most interesting pop hits took his mother’s advice. Onstage with him at Nashville’s sold out 3rd & Lindsley Friday night are companions he seems to have known forever – drummer Mark “Lovestick” Falgren, bassist Magnús “Magnúm” Larsson, and keyboardist Kasper Daugaard. His photographer, whom Graham mentions during his set, has been a friend of his for 26 years. “We are Lukas Graham,” he says by way of an introduction.
The group, who took the stage after rapper Daye’s opening set, have a chemistry that’s undeniable. The energy and proficiency are high and the performance is perfectly tight in delivery and loose in demeanor. Early in the set, they launch into the beginning notes of “Mama Said,” a song about growing up poor in Christiania, a neighborhood of Copenhagen, Denmark, and ignoring the pressure to have nice things, because love and basic necessities are all that truly matter. The crowd takes over, singing the entire intro to the song, which has never been pushed as a single in the United States. Graham is beaming – he and Larsson fist bump. He joins the crowd for the first verse, just barely louder than they are.
The scenario is the rule, not the exception, of the evening. Graham delivers with clever uptempos like “Strip No More,” a Cee-Lo-esque tongue-in-cheek that pairs comically with Graham’s tale of its appearance in the Atlanta strip club they visited the night before, as well as the lighters-in-the-air anthem “What Happened To Perfect.” His performance of “Funeral” is dynamic and soul-shattering, with the crowd providing backing as his gospel choir.
He doesn’t play any covers; he doesn’t need to. He performs songs about being a son who would make his father, who recently passed away, proud, to addressing a friend who’s been locked up in “Better Than Yourself (Criminal Mind, Pt. 2)” – “they tried to give you angel wings but you refused to fly.” The crowd knows every word, and Graham doesn’t have to encourage them to sing along. Their screams between each are cause in themselves for attendees’ fair share of the evening’s tinnitus, evidence in itself that there’s a phenomenon building in these rooms, and it’s still at the beginning.
To those unfamiliar with Graham, the fervor might need some explaining. Physically, Graham isn’t exactly what a record label would call marketable – he’s pale and not particularly toned, and the 27-year-old’s shaggy brown hair frames a kind-eyed babyface. He’s not suave and polished, and doesn’t move about the stage with the swagger of someone who knows his crowd would feel lucky to receive even a quick glance from him. He tells long-winded and humorous stories about Cinco de Mayo tequila and its role in Larsson’s need for a new pair of jeans. At one point in the set, he cracks a joke, then stops, laughing at himself. “That was a very bad joke,” he said, his voice accented with energy and his Danish upbringing. “At least I admitted it!”
By all counts, Graham feels more like your friend up on stage than your idol. It’s an ethos that took artists like Taylor Swift to the top at an early stage, an honesty that brought writers like Ed Sheeran to the spotlight. Fans aren’t drawn by hopes to brush shoulders with the glitter or feel the glamour; they want to stay up all night talking with Graham, and they feel like, maybe, he actually would. It’s not just admiration – it’s pride.
Graham knows this. “People think that the audience shows cause you’re someone on the stage, that’s not the case,” he tells Nashville, going on to say that without them, he and his band wouldn’t have jobs. Graham kicked off the tour in March in Los Angeles, and this stop is late in the routing, with just a week left before the tour’s conclusion. “I’m not good at lying,” Graham says. “This is the best show we’ve played.”
Perhaps the Music City crowd is primed to connect with honest songwriting. Graham’s songs are painstakingly raw, the labors of an artist not necessarily looking for the most poetic or tattoo-able phrasing but simply the most true way to express how they feel. If you want to feel like a baller at the club, look elsewhere; Graham’s here to tell you what he’s learned from his mom. “I know it’s a lot of songs about my family, but I don’t want to talk about money and popping bottles,” he says.
“I wanna tell my stories,” he shares in a video documentary of their 2012 trip to the U.S. in search of a record deal. “I could say I want to be the biggest and the baddest and the richest and the most famous but that would be a lie. I want to tell my stories, I wanna tell people real stories about real people, about life, and not just talk about bitches in the club, diamonds on my arm… shut the fuck up and start crying while you’re singing so we want to listen to you.”
Graham doesn’t come to this by accident. His un-polish is a choice – he’d rather have a moment with his fans than for them. For Graham, his success with “7 Years” is hardly the beginning; he’s been a celebrity in Denmark for some time, performing songs like the quadruple-platinum debut album’s “Drunk In The Morning” to crowds of thousands and being honored at numerous awards shows.
Even that wasn’t exactly the beginning; Graham, born Lukas Graham Forchhammer, was a child actor in Denmark, appearing in several family films and voicing Toy Story’s Andy and The Lion King‘s young Simba in the Danish dubs. Graham joined the Copenhagen Boys’ Choir as a professional singer at 8 years old. Though breaking in the United States was always a goal for Graham and the band, signing their current record deal with Warner Bros. Records in 2013 was as much a return to square one as it was a chance at increased stardom.
“I’m not going to a fancy club and buying champagne,” Graham says in a statement. “That’s not to say I haven’t done that, because I have. I maxed out my credit cards, and I was stupid with the money that followed the fame. I was lucky to quickly realize that wasn’t the goal.”
It’s that mentality that leads Graham’s energy as they command the stage for the almost-two-hour set. He doesn’t need you to know he is, to some, a superstar. It’s only evident if you look closely – he’ll flip the microphone in his hand between lines of a song, never looking, always catching it. He’s a bit of a ham, as well; running onstage for the encore, he grabs his beer, shares a toast – “to the worst and the best in me, to the man standing next to me…” – takes a sip, and says, “Now the question is, can we do an encore?” Smile, microphone flip. “You mean it? You’re not just saying that?”
He launches into “7 Years,” a song which he has taken to #1 in Australia, Canada, Denmark, and the States, to name just a few, and the video for which currently boasts over 138 million views. The song highlights Graham’s unique voice – a rich, expressive tone that drips with soul through emotive lows and falsetto highs. Lyrically, it’s about age: who he is at seven, eleven, 20, 30, 60. It’s about being a good son, about being the kind of father his father was.
“I’m gonna be a father in September so all of these songs I’m writing are coming true,” he shares, and begins “Happy Home.” “Now my family comes first before everyone / I had the perfect dad, I wanna be the perfect son / Though I really feel sometimes I am on my own / I know I got a lot of love and a happy home.”