Exclusive Interview: Pop Culturalist Chats with Marty Thomas

Marty Thomas has been making a name for himself since he was a child. He famously won Ed McMahon’s Junior Star Search over then-unknown Britney Spears and made his Broadway debut at the age of eleven. He’s graced the stage and screen in productions of Wicked, The Secret Garden, and TV’s Grace and Frankie.

This December, Marty Thomas takes his place alongside the vocal icons that have inspired him with his sophomore release Slow Dancing With a Boy. The album is a celebration of love, hope, and healing, and finds Marty exploring his own coming-of-age memories and dares to question the possibility of having lived those memories honestly and openly.

Pop Culturalist caught up with Marty to chat with Slow Dancing With a Boy.

PC: How did you discover your passion for the arts?
Marty: I was a child performer. I’m from a really small farm town. I found that performing and singing got me the attention that I craved and deserved. [laughs] But when it started taking me out of town and traveling around the world, that’s when I got really passionate about honing my craft and seeing what my limits were.

PC: You’ve had a ton of success already in your career. When you look back, is there a particular moment that stands out?
Marty: Oh, well, thank you. I would say making my Broadway debut as a child. Like I said, I grew up in the Midwest in a small farm town. To have the opportunity to even be able to audition for a Broadway musical, much less be chosen and have the family support from my mom to move to New York with me, it’s felt like the stars aligning. It’s an opportunity that very few people get. It was life-changing and life-altering for me to see those possibilities open up for me.

PC: Who or what has had the biggest influence on your career?
Marty: I had a teacher in middle school named Aziza Miller. She wrote the song that I sang on Star Search when I first debuted on the show. She was the first teacher to test my limits and show me possibilities beyond what I had learned in choir and in school. She taught me musicianship. I think she was probably the most influential music teacher in my life.

PC: Like you stated earlier, you made your Broadway debut at eleven. What’s one thing you know now that you wish you knew when you started your career?
Marty: Keep receipts and write things down. Try to remember things you learn and try to remember people you’ve met because boy, oh boy, everybody comes back around. It’s just a matter of time.

PC: Can you tell us about Marty Thomas: Slow Dancing With a Boy and the inspiration behind the album?
Marty: I’d love to! The short version is I came across a Huffington Post-style story about a boy going to prom with another boy. I opened it, having grown up in the nineties in the Midwest, expecting something horrible to have happened to the boy for having the audacity to take another boy to the prom. When I opened it, I realized it was just a slice-of-life article—wasn’t even a pride issue or anything. It was just highlighting the fact that a kid went to prom, and this was his experience, and his parents were proud of this coming-of-age experience, and his friends couldn’t care less.

The article hit me in an unexpected way that ticked me off. I let it marinate, and it made me realize that I had been robbed of my coming-of-age experience. I attributed it to my upbringing in the church and my family. I was convinced that I wasn’t worthy of that honest and organic love. I kept it bottled up and hidden so that everyone around me was comfortable.

When I realized how many experiences I chalked up to not feeling like I deserved it, it hurt me in such a tangible way. I started looking at individual dances and coming-of-age moments that I had gone to with a girl or hadn’t gone through at all because I didn’t feel like that was for me. I started looking at the music that was popular at the time and the possibilities of what it would’ve been like to look across the dance floor and have a crush on somebody organically and not have a fear of having somebody see me dance with him more or flirt with him and what a fantastic world that could have been. While I was marinating on this, I would hear songs from my middle school, high school, and college years. When they brought up a specific memory of feeling excluded or less than, I would squirrel that song away and categorize it. I started rearranging them and writing my own arrangements of them and claiming them as a healing process. During that process, I realized how therapeutic it became for me. It was a collection of art that I needed to try and capture.

PC: PC: What was the process like reimagining these classics? Which was the most challenging to reinterpret?
Marty: This collection is all music that I’m passionate about. The reimagining was actually the easiest part. It was dealing with why that song gave me a feeling of hurt to begin with. Until I started to delve into this set of emotions, I would never have even thought of those songs as having a negative connotation to them. Take, for example, Vanessa Williams’s “Save the Best for Last.” I remember being at my middle school music camp dance and trying to hide away in the corner. I was convinced everyone knew I had a crush on a boy across the room. As the song came on, I was planning my route like a football tactic to get across the room to talk to him without anybody knowing or seeing.

Then the dance was over, and camp was over. I regret not having taken the opportunity and feeling like that opportunity will never come again. Obviously, we know it does, but at the time it was pretty devastating. In picking the songs, it was more difficult narrowing down the list because when you aren’t able to express yourself fully, you find a way to express yourself. Like Jurassic Park, life always finds a way, and I would always find a way to express myself through music. I feel like songs and mixtapes have become very important for LGBTQ youth because that’s a way that we could express ourselves at some level without giving ourselves away.

PC: If you could choose one song off the album that encompasses you as an artist and your journey, what would it be and why?
Marty: That’s a hard one. There are so many styles and emotions on the album. The song that comes to mind is probably unexpected once you hear the album, but it’s a country two-step arrangement of Mariah Carey’s “Dreamlover”. The reason was multifold, but we would always have a school dance called the Barn Dance, which was literally in a barn. It was country western-themed, and it was the one dance of the year that made me feel the most challenged to hide away and feel less than. So I took a song that was really popular while I was in high school and gave it the country two-step beat to reclaim it and reclaim that experience. Part of me wished I had taken the floor, been bolder, more confident, and taken more risks. But I didn’t have enough faith in the people around me.

Maybe I expected too little of them or something, but the arrangement of it is clever. I got to do it with my two best friends, Jamie Ray, who produced the album, and Rachel Potter, Broadway actress and X Factor country singer, and we were able to sing it together. And to have two of my best friends on a record and to write such a creative arrangement of a song that I love so much definitely makes me feel like an artist.

PC: With this being such a personal album, what’s been the biggest takeaway?
Marty: I think it was realizing that many of my coming-of-age experiences were traded. I willingly gave up opportunities to be a human and to be real. I spent a lot of years manipulating the truth to make myself feel good enough and feel smart enough and attractive enough. In my coming-of-age experience and years, I was made to feel and allowed myself to feel like I wasn’t enough. I think that set the groundwork for me never feeling like I could be enough. I think in creating this album, I’m at a level of honesty and vulnerability in my personal life that I’ve never achieved.

PC: Love that answer! You’re having your album release party on January 5. What can fans expect?
Marty: I’m so excited about the album release. We’re trying a second-chance prom, mostly for myself, but anybody who wants to come. We’re inviting people to get dolled up in any way that they see fit, any way that they would like to go to their prom if they could do it again. I hired a prom photographer and a party band and a DJ. We’re opening the room at 7:00 p.m. for people to come and hang out. They’ll get to check out my album, get their promo photos taken, and then I’ll start my set at 8:00 p.m. There’ll be some special guests that I’m going to announce in the coming weeks. Then at 9:00 p.m., we’re going to open up the floor for dancing. We’ll party, dance, and have ourselves a little prom.

To keep up with Marty, follow him on Instagram. Pick up or download your copy of Slow Dancing With a Boy.