Jason Derulo hopes to gain “legendary status” with his Las Vegas residency.
The ‘Talk Dirty’ hitmaker will play 10 dates at The Venetian hotel in Sin City from 17 May and he’s promised the shows will be “theatrical and very personal”, with a team of dancers and “the best band” behind him.
He told The Sun newspaper’s Bizarre column: “In America this is where you get legendary status. It is the most beautiful venue. I shot the ‘Spicy Margarita’ video there.
“I’m so looking forward to it. I’m a musical theatre kid so it’ll be theatrical and very personal.
“I have the best band and the best dancers on the planet.
“They’ll be there with me.”
The 34-year-old singer has turned his fortunes around in recent years after leaving his record label Warner in early 2020 because he felt overlooked, but it wasn’t plain sailing as the offers he expected to come flooding in initially failed to materialise.
He said: “It was a tough situation.
“Every year there were brand new staff and they go about finding new artists and I’m there going, ‘Hi, it’s me’. Like, I’m keeping the lights on here.
“I got out of that deal and I thought I’d have my pick of what label they wanted me to go to.
But all I could hear were crickets. I couldn’t believe it.
“I sold 250million records, I was like, ‘What is going on right now?’
“Then yeah, everything happens for a reason.”
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Jason’s song ‘Savage Love’ went viral and it hit number one when he released it as an independent artist, prompting record labels to reach out and he signed with Atlantic Records the following year.
He released his album, ‘Nu King’, last month and he explained the epic 27-song tracklisting is an indicator of his strong work ethic.
He said: “The 27 songs is a big cut from what it was before, but ‘Nu King’ has songs like ‘Swalla’ and ‘Take You Dancing’, which didn’t have a home.
“I was born with a crazy work ethic.
“Like when I was trying to play basketball and I didn’t make my team.
“I put all the work into that and never left home without a basketball.
“I went on to become one of their star players and we were the 14th team in the country. It’s all about the work ethic.”