A.J. Croce was only two years old when his father, the legendary singer-songwriter Jim Croce, died tragically in a plane crash at the age of thirty, but he still grew up surrounded by music.
“My father’s record collection was really a huge influence on me,” says the Nashville-based musician, fifty-three, who started playing the piano before he could walk. “It was so deep. There was great old blues and jazz and rock and roll, soul, country, folk, and gospel.” When the younger Croce lost his eyesight at the age of four after suffering physical abuse at the hands of one of his mother’s boyfriends, it was the blind musicians in the collection that spoke to him the loudest. “Ray Charles was my gateway drug. Then there was Stevie Wonder and Lemon Jefferson and Blind Blake and Blind Willie McTell. Listening to them made me feel like I could do it too.”
It wasn’t long before these icons became more than just lodestars but living, breathing characters in his own arc: When Croce was seventeen, he filled in for Jerry Lee Lewis, playing with Elvis Presley’s former band. At eighteen he went on tour with B.B. King. Before he was twenty-one, he was playing piano with Ray Charles. He’s since collaborated with Willie Nelson, the Neville Brothers, and Béla Fleck, among other luminaries.
His new album, Heart of the Eternal, out tomorrow, pulls from that wide array of influences, spanning time and genres to create a sound wholly his own. There are haunting piano melodies, for instance, in “The Finest Line,” a moody duet with Margo Price; the swing of gospel shows up in “Reunion,” which he wrote with John Oates; blues-inflected rock kicks it up a notch on “Hey Margarita,” which G&G is proud to premiere today.
“I was sitting on the music for ‘Hey Margarita’ for probably six months during lockdown,” Croce says. “At the end of lockdown, I met with [songwriter and producer] Gary Nicholson on his back porch and played it for him. He told me he heard a name in the song, and I had just reread The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. So I said, How about a blues song about this character from a Russian novel? I would love for it to have been about a margarita that you might drink, but it’s about another Margarita.”
He recorded the eleven tracks for Heart of the Eternal while on a break from his Croce Plays Croce tour, in which the set list sprinkles in some of his favorite songs—written by himself and others—with his father’s hits, like “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown,” “Walkin’ Back to Georgia,” and “Time in a Bottle,” which the elder Croce wrote for A.J. just before he was born.
“I did not play my father’s music for the first twenty-five or so years of my touring,” Croce says. “I felt like I wasn’t going to have any integrity as an artist if I didn’t pursue my own thing. I don’t have the hang-ups that I had as a younger person, though. Those hits have become part of my identity in a way they never were before. Plus, there’s a part of doing that show that’s a lot easier than playing original music, because everyone’s heard these songs, and they’re really pulling for you. I walk on stage and I become the three-dimensional personification of what they’ve heard for most of their lives.”
In his audience, it’s not just baby boomers or the Yacht Rock crowd reliving their Croce-tinted glory days, but their kids and grandkids, too, singing along with every word. Croce had a large hand in making that happen, getting his father’s songs into some of the biggest pop-culture franchises of the last two decades, including X-Men, The Hangover, and Stranger Things. But in equal measure, that lasting appeal feels organic. “My dad’s music was playing in their homes,” Croce says of his younger generation of fans. “It was passed down from their grandparents or parents. It was part of road trips. It was part of families being together.”
That sense of connection is something Croce strives for in his own songs, too, and it’s why he keeps reaching into the past as he makes music for the future. “I feel like you can’t really create something truly original until you understand where it came from,” he says. “Once you have a sense of that guiding light and where the roots of it are, then it gives you a sense of where to go.”
Listen to “Hey Margarita” now. Heart of the Eternal is out tomorrow.
