ERIC MARTIN TRIVIA
Trivia
Eric Martin has sung a Japanese song in Japanese, too: on a guest appearance on a Japanese show, according to the official site of the documentary KIZUNA, he performed a GLAY song in the original language. The film includes the episode as one of the stories that could only have happened in Japan, alongside the background to the birth of MR.VOCALIST.
Chicken George in Kobe is one of the places that bind Eric Martin to Japan. According to the official site of the documentary KIZUNA, Mr. Big played a charity concert there in 1996, the year after the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake, and that was where his charity work for Japan's disaster areas began: when the Great East Japan Earthquake struck in 2011, the site says, he reached the stricken areas faster than anyone else from abroad, to share music with the people there. The film follows him back onto the Chicken George stage in May 2026, thirty years on, and Chicken George is also the venue of the film's world premiere of 3 December 2026.
When Eric Martin decided in 2008 to make music again, Japan was where he wanted to begin. Sony Music Japan's profile says that he had stepped back to put his family first, and that he chose to return in 2008. According to BARKS in November 2008, the album started with a question he put to his Japanese team: was there something he could do, right then, for the fans there? Their answer was a record of the hits those fans had been listening to in Mr. Big's day, together with the Japanese hits of the four years he had been away, sung by him now as a gift, proof that the bond had held while he was gone. Every song chosen was a woman's. Hearing the originals, Martin found in Japanese ballads melodies and harmonies of their own, unlike American ballads, with as many colours as a rainbow.
For Eric Martin, Japan was never just another stop on the tour. When Mr. Big first went there, he told Songfacts in 2015, they played clubs and did every interview going, almost like an election campaign, and then they kept going back, roughly twice a year, for ten years and then twenty; in 2011 they played their hundredth show in the country. He told Metal Temple in 2022 that he had spent more time in Japan than in any other country, America included, and had in a sense grown up with the people there. What sets the audiences apart, he explained to Chaoszine in 2025, is the silence: the hall falls still and takes in everything he says.
The Eric Martin Band did not begin under that name. Eric Martin told Metal Temple in 2022 that he joined forces with friends from a band called Mile Hi in Hayward, California, that the name was changed to 415, and then to the Eric Martin Band. The biography on his official site dates 415's formation to late 1979 and says that when the band signed with Elektra/Asylum Records it was managed by Herbie Herbert, Ron Chiarottino and Sandy Einstein, the team that also looked after Journey. It was the management that renamed the band after its singer, because bands named that way were in fashion. Avalon, which issued 415's recordings in 2024, also notes that the change came before the major-label debut. Herbert, Martin says, went on to manage his solo work and Mr. Big too, for many years.
415 was a live draw long before anyone signed it. In Eric Martin's own account, quoted in the biography on his official site, the band worked through hundreds of club dates, beer parties and high-school and college dances until it was headlining the Old Waldorf, then San Francisco's leading nightclub. Support slots followed for acts such as Foreigner, Hall & Oates, Rick Springfield, Billy Squier, Molly Hatchet and the Marshall Tucker Band, and, still without a record deal, 415 played to 60,000 people at Oakland Stadium at one of Bill Graham's Days on the Green. As the Eric Martin Band it later appeared on American Bandstand and opened arena tours for ZZ Top, Night Ranger and Journey.
Sucker for a Pretty Face, the Eric Martin Band's debut of 1983, was a re-recording made for its major-label release. The album as the band had first meant it to be, with eight songs in their original versions and the sleeve the band had wanted, came out only on 11 December 2024, on the Japanese label Avalon, as Sucker For A Pretty Face -Original Sessions-. Avalon issued two more albums the same day, Area Code 415 and Boys Night Out, the first and second albums the band had made under its earlier name, 415, which had never been released; Eric Martin's own blog presented all three as unreleased albums. The drummer on the original sessions is Troy Luccketta, who later found success with Tesla, while Jimmy Hogland plays on Area Code 415, and guitarist John Nymann went on to Y&T.
MR.VOCALIST 2 had a second life in America. Released in Japan on 4 March 2009, it came out in Eric Martin's home country that November under a new title, Timeless, according to Sony Music Japan's profile. The Japanese album was a set of songs by women singers from around the world, chosen by a vote of his Japanese fans, because he wanted to make the record with them. Martin himself, talking to Metal Temple in 2022, described Timeless as a record of him singing songs by female artists from all over the world.
KIZUNA (2026) is the first official documentary about Eric Martin. Its official site describes a 106-minute Japanese film that traces his forty years in music since his 1985 solo debut, and his bond with Japan, through time spent following him and interviews with the people around him and with the fans he counts as friends. It was made by DRE JAPAN and is distributed by Uplink. Tak Matsumoto, his long-time partner in TMG, is among those interviewed, and the narrator is a broadcaster known as the face of the music show Best Hit USA. In the film Martin calls Japan "home" and its fans his friends. The theme song is a new Martin recording, "I'll Be There Just For You", with a digital release date of 18 November 2026.
MR.VOCALIST returned to the stage in 2024, fifteen years on. In April Eric Martin announced on his blog that he would be bringing the J-pop songs back as MR.VOCALIST, and in December he played the series' 15th-anniversary Japan tour at Billboard Live Osaka on the 20th and Billboard Live Tokyo on the 22nd. Ahead of it, in November, came MR. VOCALIST COMPLETE BEST, its songs picked from the whole series by fan request; Sony Music Japan says requests arrived for so many songs, in a window of only ten days, that the album was hurriedly split into two editions, a limited first pressing and a standard one. As for the look on stage, Martin told Chaoszine in 2025 that he sings those big ballads in a suit, with his Converse Chuck Taylors still on his feet.
Eric Martin has sung Mr. Big's hits with an orchestra behind him, in Germany. Rock Meets Classic, a show in which original rock legends perform their hits with a live band and a large classical orchestra, featured him in 2015, and his blog announced on 7 October 2025 that he was coming back, eleven years later, for its 2026 farewell tour, in Germany only, with "To Be With You" and "Wild World" among the band's hits he was to sing.
Eric Martin did not start out as a singer. As a boy he played drums, he told Metal Temple in 2022, because his father, a professional drummer, wanted his son to follow him. The change came when he was twelve, in a band of older boys called the Buzz: the singer failed to show up, so Martin offered to sing from behind the kit. The song was Rare Earth's "Get Ready"; singing it seated proved awkward, so he got to his feet. The band found a new drummer and Martin became its singer. The drums, he told Sunray Magazine the same year, have stayed in the closet ever since.
Eric Martin traces his voice back to his parents. It was his mother, who sang in glee clubs and choirs, who gave him the singing bug, he told Metal Temple in 2022, and her vibrato and her projection passed to him; so, he joked, did the growl, since she yelled at him a lot. From his father, a drummer who was also a bandleader and an MC, he took a love of the spotlight, a sense of timing and a gift for humour, he told Sunray Magazine the same year. The early influences he named there were Otis Redding, Sam Cooke, Wilson Pickett, Rod Stewart, Frankie Miller and Steve Marriott, and he called Paul Rodgers of Free and Bad Company his hero, moved by his gravel, his tone and his soul. In 2015 he told Songfacts that he had always been a rock singer, an R&B singer and a folk singer, "just a singer in general".
Before 415 and the Eric Martin Band there was Kid Courage, a San Francisco band and the first to put Eric Martin on the map. His father was in the army, he told Metal Temple in 2022, so the family moved from one posting to the next around the world before landing in Sacramento, California, when he was about fifteen. Later he answered an advertisement from a San Francisco rock band in need of a singer, and that band was Kid Courage, an act with its own songs that, as he describes it, sounded like the Rolling Stones crossed with Traffic. Its biggest claim to fame, in his telling, was opening for AC/DC at the Old Waldorf two nights running in 1978. His official biography also gives 1978 as the year his career in music began.
Eric Martin's band was named best club band of 1983 at the Bay Area Music Awards. Looking back in a 2022 interview with Metal Temple on the years in which 415 became the Eric Martin Band, Martin said they had played so many shows that they became, quite literally, the best club band in the San Francisco Bay Area, and that the trophy still sits on his desk at home.
It took one phone call to put Eric Martin in Mr. Big. In 1988, he told Metal Temple in 2022, with his time at Capitol Records drawing to a close, he heard out of the blue from Mike Varney, the Shrapnel Records producer and a friend since the 1970s: Billy Sheehan was looking for a singer and had called Varney. Before long the three of them were on one line, hatching a band. Martin had spent his solo years touring America with a seven-piece band, opening for just about everyone, one of his heroes, Eddie Money, among them, and he says he was more into rock and soul back then. To Chaoszine in 2025 he recalled the day they auditioned Paul Gilbert, who turned up with four or five amps painted in day-glo colours and played so loud that Martin could not feel his fingers. In the car afterwards Martin told Sheehan that writing songs was how they would make it; Sheehan's answer was that Martin could write the songs and the rest of them would rock out.
Mr. Big's "To Be With You" goes back to Eric Martin's teens. He wrote it at sixteen or seventeen, he told Songfacts in 2015, about a close friend he wished had been more than a friend, and partly, he admits, to impress his sister's friends. Then it sat on a demo. Shortly before he joined Mr. Big (around 1988, as he remembers it) his publisher paired him with another songwriter, and when he was asked whether he had anything else, he reached into his bag of cassettes and pulled this one out. Even in Mr. Big he held it back. At the end of one of the band's first tours, he told Chaoszine in 2025, he worried that the others would tell him they were a rock band, until Paul Gilbert came in with "Green-Tinted Sixties Mind" and he saw his opening.
Eric Martin also sang a Power Rangers theme. When producer Ron Nevison was handed the project, Martin told Phoenix New Times in 2011, he picked Martin's name out of a hat. Martin took part as a member of the Power Rangers Orchestra, alongside Matt Sorum of Guns N' Roses. Martin and Sorum would share a band again on TMG II in 2024.
The name MR.VOCALIST was not Eric Martin's idea. As he told Chaoszine in 2025, Sony Music came to him with the plan, a man's reading of songs made famous by Japanese pop singers who had sold millions, and once the recordings were done the label settled on the name. His first reaction was dismay at being a "Mr." again after Mr. Big, and he could already picture what his peers would make of it. The sales changed his mind: from then on, he says, people could call him MR.VOCALIST, and he wore the name like a badge of honour. Released on 26 November 2008, the first album reached number one among international releases and number seven overall on Oricon's daily chart and sold more than 100,000 copies, according to Sony Music Japan's profile. By 2024 his own blog was calling MR.VOCALIST his alter ego.
The MR.VOCALIST records put Japanese songs into English, and that was the hard part. Writing English lyrics to a synopsis of the Japanese words was, Eric Martin told Metal Temple in 2022, "tough as hell". Putting his own spin on songs that famous Japanese women singers had made popular, on the other hand, was a lot of fun, and he says Sony's Japanese company hired him precisely to give those songs a male spin. That was the label staff's aim too, BARKS reported in 2008: a covers album that only a singer with his range and his husky voice could have made.
Next to "To Be With You", the vocal Eric Martin is proudest of among his own is "Superstar", from MR.VOCALIST 2. He named it with no hesitation when Metal Temple asked in 2022, introducing it as a song first sung by Bonnie Bramlett. The album, its songs picked by a vote of his Japanese fans, also includes "Hero", "My Heart Will Go On" and "I Will Always Love You". Telling Chaoszine about it in 2025, he sounded amused that the vote had him recording a Celine Dion song and even taking on Mariah Carey's "Hero", and he said that he sang "I Will Always Love You" in the Dolly Parton version.
On 4 March 2009, the day MR.VOCALIST 2 came out, Eric Martin played a one-night-only MR.VOCALIST show at Shibuya duo, and Ayaka walked on unannounced. BARKS told the story: Martin had found out from a live DVD that she had covered "To Be With You", and since he had covered her "I believe", he decided it had to be fate and asked her to sing with him. She said yes, and they sang "I believe" together. It was his first show in Japan under his own name in five years. The 250 people in the room had won their places in a draw among 5,000 applicants. A song of hers would appear on MR.VOCALIST 3 the following year.
In November 2010, when MR.VOCALIST 3 came out, Debbie Gibson released an album called MS.VOCALIST. As BARKS described it, the two records mirrored each other: Eric Martin's series sang songs by Japanese women, and Gibson's album covered hits by Japanese men. Her project grew out of her interest in his series. Because the albums came out together, the two of them also recorded a duet, one Japanese song in two different versions, one for each album. MR.VOCALIST 3 itself was billed as the closing part of his trilogy of women's songs.
Eric Martin's "Love Is Alive" became the theme song of a Japanese feature film released in September 2010, BARKS reported. The song also gave its title to the best-of released that same month, Love Is Alive ~Works of 1985-2010~, which came out on 8 September 2010 to mark twenty-five years of his solo career.
MR. ROCK VOCALIST came out of what the fans kept asking for. As BARKS reported in July 2012, the request heard most often after the MR.VOCALIST albums was for rock covers, and this album answered it with a selection of Japanese rock classics by male artists, from B'z to BOΦWY and LUNA SEA, as BARKS put it. Among them is "ALONE", written by Koshi Inaba and Tak Matsumoto of B'z, Eric Martin's partner in TMG, with Stevie Salas on guitar. The original singles of the songs chosen had sold more than eight million copies between them, BARKS added. In 2025 Martin told Chaoszine that the album featured some serious guitar players: John 5, Richie Kotzen and Marty Friedman.
Jack Blades is in TMG partly on Eric Martin's recommendation. As Martin told Chaoszine in 2025, Tak Matsumoto was already a friend who used to come to Mr. Big shows, and one day he got in touch to say he would be in San Francisco with B'z and invited Martin along; B'z were playing the Fillmore five nights running, every one of them sold out. Matsumoto then said he had a rock band with a more American sound in mind, and wondered whether Martin knew the right players. A big Night Ranger fan who had grown up around some of its members, Martin thought of Blades first and told Matsumoto he would be perfect: a great singer, an amazing bass player, and an underrated one. To Martin, Blades is a rock 'n' roll Paul McCartney.
Eric Martin joined Tobias Sammet's Avantasia in 2013: Nuclear Blast announced then that he was singing a role on The Mystery of Time and would be on stage on the Mystery World Tour from April. Metal, he admits, was not originally in his blood. In his early days with the band, he told Chaoszine in 2025, he could feel people wondering what on earth he was doing there, and he asked Sammet whether he was just some kind of mascot. Sammet told him that neither rock and roll nor metal has rules, and that Martin was "the soul incarnate" the band needed. Metal is in his blood now, Martin says, thanks to Avantasia.
In 2026 Eric Martin became one of four Masters of Voices. Rolling Stone Brasil reported on 11 February 2026 that the project brought together Martin, Jeff Scott Soto, Edu Falaschi of Angra and Tim "Ripper" Owens, formerly of Judas Priest, with Angra's Felipe Andreoli on bass, Marcelo Barbosa and Leo Mancini on guitars and Edu Cominato on drums, and that its first shows, seven of them across South America, were announced for July 2026, from Santiago on 5 July through Belo Horizonte on 17 July and Sao Paulo on 18 July to Medellin on 23 July. In his own message Martin promised a show full of hits, the best of each singer. His blog reposted the report.