When Colbie Caillat is asked to name some of the more unusual places she’s heard her song “Bubbly” blasting from speakers, she smiles, then says shyly: “I haven’t heard it that many times.”
She’s in the minority. The dreamy acoustic guitar groove that started off as a sleeper hit was a radio fixture, and her latest single, “Realize,” sits at No. 20 after three months on the charts.
Months after a friend started a page for Caillat on MySpace, she had more than 100,000 friends on the networking site - and the ear of labels. By the time her debut album, “Coco,” was released, buzz was already strong.
Caillat, 22, plays the Madison Theater in Covington on Monday.
Question: Before you got your page on MySpace, were you sending your music to labels?
Answer: I never sent anything to the record labels. I had just started songwriting and performing, so I would write new songs every month with my friend, Jason Reeves, and each time we’d get a new song, we’d go in the studio and record it, so we never finished a demo CD. I would update my site with all my songs, the new ones that we wrote, and I would ask my fans their opinion on the songs, if they liked it or not.
Q: Did you ever get negative criticism?
A: I encouraged that - I was like, ‘OK, tell me if it’s good or if it’s bad, or what you don’t like about it,’ and everyone would. They ranked my songs - like what ones they liked the most, and what ones they would want played at their wedding … That’s what made my decision on what songs to put on the album.
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