Talking to me by phone from her home near Nashville, Kandace Springs is looking out the window trying to determine which of the six classic cars in her collection she’s going to take out for an afternoon ride (she’s leaning toward the 1952 MG-TD). It’s readily apparent that she’s not your standard-issue chanteuse, even though she has a voice that her one-time booster, Prince, said “could melt snow.”
“I’m a country girl,” she says with a chuckle. When we spoke, the on-the-rise singer, keyboardist and songwriter was on a weekend break from her tour opening for Hall & Oates and Train. The previous night, Springs had played Madison Square Garden. If she was awed she doesn’t show it. “There’s so much history there,” she says offhandedly. After the gig, she rode home on John Oates’ chartered jet.
“He lives in Nashville and we’d see each other at the airport sometimes,” Springs says. “This time he said, ‘Why don’t you ride with me?’”
There’s an inherent disconnect between Springs’ self-effacing, down-home demeanor and her music, which is an elegant hybrid of jazz, silky R&B and sophisticated pop. You’d have to scratch really hard to find any diva in there. Despite her rural roots, Springs grew up on old-school urban R&B and jazz, mostly due to the influence of her father, Nashville session singer Scat Springs.
“I’m such an old soul,” the 29-year-old states with a laugh. “I don’t listen much to new artists. I’m stuck in the past. My dad had me listening to Major Harris, all the old R&B acts.”
She started playing piano at age 10 and, at 13, was captivated by three women singers. “I heard Norah Jones, Eva Cassidy and Diana Krall, and they inspired me to sing,” Springs says, then proceeds to rattle off other influences: Shirley Horne, Roberta Flack, Nina Simone, Lauryn Hill (not a Rihanna or Katy Perry among them).
Important people have been drawn to Springs’ voice. She caught Prince’s ear in 2014 with an ad hoc cover of Sam Smith’s “Stay With Me” that she posted online. The legendarily reclusive and impulsive superstar summoned her to his Paisley Park complex in Minneapolis to perform with him for the 30th anniversary of Purple Rain.
Other press accounts have characterized Prince as Springs’ mentor, which struck me as a tad overstated. “We had a cool relationship,” she explains. “We became good friends. We’d keep in touch. He’d email; sometimes he’d just text me and ask me how my day was going.”
Did he offer any career advice?
“He would repeatedly say, ‘You can be the Robert Flack of your generation if you keep the music organic,’” she recalls. “He told me to stay away from the hip-hop-type stuff; it didn’t suit me. He said the production could be very distracting, to stick to my voice and the songs, with minimal production.”
Springs did just that, more or less, on Soul Eyes, her 2016 debut album for Blue Note. The title track is a sumptuous remake of a 1957 jazz ballad written by pianist Mal Waldron. That’s about as vintage as it gets. The remainder includes co-written originals, two songs from Shelby Lynne’s under-appreciated 2000 disc, I Am Shelby Lynne — “Thought It Would Be Easier” and “Leavin’” — as well as a smoldering rendition of War’s 1972 hit “The World is a Ghetto.”
Springs returned to early ‘70s socially conscious soul music on her new three-song EP, Black Orchid, with a flat-out terrific cover of The Stylistics’ “People Make the World Go Round.” She has a knack for jazzifying these kinds of tunes while staying true to the spirit of the originals.
Black Orchid is an amuse-bouche for her second Blue Note full-length, Indigo, due out in September.
For now, Springs is focusing on her slot on the Hall & Oates/Train tour. These “opening opening act” gigs can be tough, what with people talking and filing into their seats, perhaps wondering who this woman on stage is, and why she’s keeping them from the acts they came to see. Again, Springs is unfazed.
“I just be myself and try to engage the audience,” she says of her 25-minute sets. “I sing from the heart, include some classic covers so that they can relate.”
Her showstopper is none other than Flack’s hushed ballad “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.” “They get real quiet listening to it,” Springs says with a hint of pride. “And you can tell some of them are crying.”
Kandace Springs performs at 7 p.m. Friday at Amalie Arena in Tampa as the opening act for Hall & Oates and Train. Read our interview with Daryl Hall here.
This article appears in Jun 21-28, 2018.