Tori Kelly

When singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Tori Kelly first played her new single “Nobody Love” for her friends, their initial reaction to the rhythmic, big-sounding pop track was, “Oh, this is really different for you.” “That was interesting to me because in my head, this is the style of music I always envisioned myself doing: urban pop with a hip-hop type of Lauryn Hill twist on it,” says Kelly, who first rose to attention with her intimate, acoustic guitar-driven EPs Handmade Songs and Foreword. “I was always a singer first, then the guitar made its way in on its own. A song like ‘Nobody Love’ was always the vision. This is where I knew I would end up.”

Kelly co-wrote “Nobody Love” alongside Rickard Goransson and Max Martin, the Swedish songwriter and producer who has ruled the Billboard Hot 100 for over a decade with a string of No. 1 singles for Britney Spears, Katy Perry, P!nk, and Taylor Swift, to name a few. Martin says, “After hearing Tori sing, we felt so inspired that we had no choice but to get involved. It’s been such a pleasure to be a part of her journey.”

Martin serves as executive producer on Kelly’s upcoming full-length debut album, which Capitol Records will release this spring. She also co-wrote with such vets as Savan Kotecha, Toby Gad, Claude.Kelly, Chuck Harmony, Wolf Cousins, and Ed Sheeran, whose show at Madison Square Garden Kelly opened in November 2013. The album, she says, does not depart from her soulful roots. “It’s like a marriage between that soulful urban thing and a mainstream pop vibe. It was hard to get to that place, but once we had ‘Nobody Love,’ I knew we’d cracked the code. It felt seamless.”