The musician Jack Black always wanted to be: “I was obsessed with him”
With music and movies taking up an equal amount of space in both his heart and his schedule, Jack Black would probably start sweating bullets if he were asked to choose just one vocation to dedicate the rest of his life.
Acting might have made him a star when he burst onto the scene with High Fidelity before perfecting his distinctive brand of wide-eyed mania and unstoppable enthusiasm, but music was always his first love. It may not have brought him to stardom, but he wasn’t going to miss the opportunity to balance the best of both worlds.
Tenacious D were formed in the mid-1990s when Black was little more than a jobbing thespian desperately hunting that breakthrough role that would take his career to the next level, but it’s no coincidence that when he cracked the A-list, his band exploded in popularity and put him in a position to live out his other dream by recording and releasing records, all while touring the world and rubbing shoulders with many of the icons he’d grown up listening to.
Rock and roll will always be the genre most people associate with Black first and foremost, but his personal tastes are much broader. He’s a fan of punk, pop, electronica, and even the smooth stylings of Billy Joel, and the singer he wanted to model his entire performative style on is about as far away from the skintight leather trousers and sequins of the 1970s rock scene as it gets.
There can’t be many folks who’d look at the endless ball of energy that is Black and immediately spot the towering influence of Bobby McFerrin, but he was the benchmark. “I was obsessed with him,” the star admitted to NPR. “Because I had always imagined going out on stage by myself and blowing people’s minds with just the power of my singing voice.”
Black is far from being a terrible singer; some would even suggest that he’s one of the more underrated rock vocalists who doesn’t get the credit he deserves because it’s not his full-time gig, and Tenacious D have a tendency to lean into the comedic side of music. Still, it wouldn’t be unfair to say that he doesn’t carry many shades of McFerrin.
Best known for ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy’, the soulful singer and songwriter has range for days, and it was the sheer power and versatility of his voice that made him the benchmark for what Black wanted to be as not only a vocalist but a musician and stage presence. Of course, this being the self-proclaimed Beatles superfan, there was inevitably a connection to the Fab Four that needed to be made.
Black recalled McFerrin “blowing people’s minds with incredible covers of Beatles songs” long before his signature track was released in 1988, where he was capable of making his voice “sound like all of the different instruments.” With that in mind, as a top-tier vocalist with a fondness for performing remarkable versions of songs by his favourite-ever band, it was almost inevitable that McFerrin would influence Black in one way or another.
