Francesco Yates has something he wants us to know: “Fran’s coming back and with a whole new type of sauce!”
The 26-year-old Toronto singer told iHeartRadio.ca that pandemic lockdowns inspired him to get creative. “I’ve just been writing kind of constantly. I’ve been in a wave like I’ve never been before,” said Yates. “It’s kind of crazy.
“I found in the first year of the pandemic I didn’t really do anything but then after, when everything started to come back, I saw things clearly. Like, who I was and how I wanted to put it out there. It all kind of clicked.”
When Yates was signed to a major label a decade ago, he was hyped as the “next big thing” to come out of Canada. The pillow-lipped cutie with the natural curls was pitched as an old soul who evoked the likes of Prince and Michael Jackson.
In a 2013 interview with The Globe and Mail, music mogul Pharrell Williams gushed: “He’s absolutely gonna be just a huge, huge pop star but not in the way people have been thinking of pop music in the past 10 years. He plays guitar and has one of the most incredible vocal ranges ever. He’s definitely a pop-chart threat.”
While Yates had two of his singles make it onto the Canadian Hot 100 chart (“Better To Be Loved” and “Call”), his biggest success came from German DJ-producer Robin Schulz’s 2015 track “Sugar,” on which he is the featured vocalist. It was a global hit and was certified 3x Platinum in Canada, representing sales of at least 240,000.
“It’s not my song but it is my song,” Yates said, “so that’s a strange one. ‘Sugar’ was always a strange one. It took on a life of its own.”
Yates has the musical chops and certainly put in the work but never became the “huge, huge pop star” Williams predicted.
“I wanted to go to a place but it was just where I was at the time versus what the songs were,” he explained. “It wasn’t matching. Like, I wanted to do a lot of heavy duty R&B but I was 16 so…”
His debut EP included a song titled “Honey I’m Home,” in which Yates sings: “Been at work, 9 to 5 and I can feel your devotion / Come downstairs, let's put this in motion / When we play, we play hard / No more talking, let's get it on, babe.”
Yates laughs about it now. “Honey I’m home? The record label was, ‘Wait a minute, where is he going? He’s living with his parents.’”
The disconnect can be partially blamed on a lack of control. “I mean, I guess, how much control can a 16-year-old have over their circumstances? In your mind, you can’t grasp what’s happening to you,” Yates reflected. “You’re a deer in headlights, just happy to be there, so how could you, right?”
Yates credits his parents for keeping his head on straight. “The music industry takes no prisoners so it’s all about… you really have to know exactly who you are,” he said. “That’s why you see a lot of people who start young in the business really kind of lose their mind because you can go with the excess. It’s a circus in that way.
“To survive it you have to learn yourself really well. It’s hard to do and you can’t really do that when you’re young.”
Yates said he applies those early lessons to what he’s doing now. “I’m catching up with myself,” he explained. “All the areas, I believe, it seems as though they’re matching now so it’s a different thing now.”
Yates has released “Jimi,” an infectious track in which he confesses that he may love a woman as much as his guitar. He sings: “You say you love me baby / You just like famous men / And I’m a pop star / I don’t mind if you flex / You can leave me and then love me and be on to the next.”
He said he was poking fun at himself. “The musical stuff and the sensibilities around it are really fast and peppy but there’s a dark meaning behind all of that,” Yates explained. “Pop music encapsulates now both R&B and rock so I’m kind of taking the seriousness out of it.”
The song’s title begs the question: Who are Yates’ guitar gods?
“Obviously Jimi Hendrix and a lot of the ones from the ‘60s and ‘70s,” he replied. “Eddie Van Halen. But then there’s the heavy duty ‘80s shredders… [Mr. Big’s] Paul Gilbert, [Extreme’s] Nuno Bettencourt – all the guys who are acrobatics on the fretboard.
“I try to think, ‘OK how I can inject even 10 per cent of that into something that would be considered a pop song?’ That’s something I had never fully tapped into.”
“Jimi” is only a taste of the new music Yates is anxious to share. “There’s a body work I just feel great about right now,” he said, hinting that – seven years after his first EP – we may get a full-length album.
“I’m still about the body of work. You want to write and have singles but for me it’s still about having something cohesive and something that has an identity that does it’s own thing,” said Yates. “Because I’ve written so much, I have enough for about two or three full albums.”
An energetic live performer, Yates was back on stage in March for the first time in three years.
“It felt great to be in front of people,” he said. “To be back at it just refreshed me. Now I’ve got to really go for it.
“That’s kind of it right there. I missed it.”
Francesco Yates will perform at the kick-off of the 10th season of Play The Parks at Toronto's Yonge-Dundas Square on June 22.