John Splithoff

Chicago, Miami, and a New York apprenticeship

John Robert Splithoff was born in Chicago on 5 June 1990. He left Glenbrook South High School in 2009 for the Frost School of Music at the University of Miami, taking a degree in 2013 in jazz performance, songwriting and production — a background that accounts for the harmonic movement underneath music that is otherwise filed under pop and soul.

He recorded his first EP, The Move, in Chicago and released it in November 2013, then relocated to New York the same year. The apprenticeship that followed was the standard downtown circuit: The Bitter End, Rockwood Music Hall, Mercury Lounge, playing originals to rooms that had to be won one at a time. He sings, and plays guitar and piano, and the influences he has named in interviews run from Marvin Gaye and Prince through D'Angelo and John Mayer to Pat Metheny — soul phrasing over chords that do not always go where a pop song expects them to.

"Sing to You", and the major-label detour

The song that changed the arithmetic was "Sing to You", released in 2016. It moved slowly rather than explosively, built on streaming and adult contemporary radio, and eventually reached the top ten of Billboard's Adult Contemporary chart, peaking at No. 8. By the time his current booking material was written, the track had passed 100 million streams. He later cut an acoustic version and filmed a solo performance of it under a train overpass in Chicago's West Loop, which is closer to the truth of the song than the studio version.

A follow-up, "Show Me", arrived in 2017 as a duet with Madison Ryann Ward and pushed the production towards the dancefloor. That was the moment the industry moved in: Splithoff signed to East West Records in 2017 and put out the Make It Happen EP through Asylum in 2018. The arrangement did not hold. He departed the label over what he has described as a creative mismatch, and the exit turned out to be the more consequential career decision than the signing.

Building it back independently

What followed was a deliberate rebuild on his own imprint, Pleasant Lane Music, distributed through Virgin Music Group. "Proud" arrived in 2019, then two EPs in 2020, Go Somewhere and Good to See You. The debut album proper, All In, landed in 2021 — written largely in isolation through 2019 and recorded before the pandemic shut studios, so it reached listeners a good deal later than it was made. PopMatters gave it 8 out of 10. An acoustic companion EP, All In (Acoustic), followed in July 2021, establishing a pattern he has kept: release the record, then release it again with the production taken away.

A Blue Christmas EP of holiday covers came in 2023 and the single "Way Back" in 2024. In parallel he built a working relationship with the trumpeter Chris Botti, co-writing "Paris" for Botti's 2023 album Vol. 1, produced by David Foster, and touring as part of Botti's live band in 2024 — a sideman education that has since fed back into his own shows, where "Paris" now turns up in the set.

Far From Here

Splithoff's second album, Far From Here, was released on 21 March 2025 through Pleasant Lane Music and Virgin Records. Twelve tracks, trailed by two double-A-side singles — "Tangled" with "Magenta (Days Go By)", and "Plateau" with "Same Page", the latter pair announced in February 2025. The record is framed around a move from New York to Los Angeles, where he is now based, and the songs work as vignettes rather than as a single narrative: change, distance, and the business of arriving somewhere without much idea of what it will be like.

It is the most exposed writing he has released, and the arrangements follow suit — the soul and jazz inheritance is still there but the production sits further back than it did on All In. The album gave him his largest touring cycle to date, running through 2025 and, in modified form, into 2026.

Where things stand, September 2026

The 2026 release schedule has been about revisiting rather than adding. The Value (Stripped) EP came out on 20 March 2026 on Pleasant Lane Music, and a four-track Sing to You (10th Anniversary) EP followed on 13 May 2026, marking a decade since the song that made the rest of it possible. His venue biography states that he is at work on the next studio album while touring reworked versions of the existing catalogue.

Live, the year began a long way from home: Australia and New Zealand in June 2026, including the Oxford Art Factory in Sydney on 20 June and two nights at The Tuning Fork in Auckland on 21 and 23 June. The autumn splits cleanly in two. From 29 September he is on the road with Lake Street Dive across Europe — Grosse Freiheit 36 in Hamburg on 29 September, Carlswerk Victoria in Cologne on 30 September, Huxleys Neue Welt in Berlin on 2 October, the Palladium in Warsaw on 3 October, Dürer Kert in Budapest on 6 October, Muffathalle in Munich on 7 October and Im Wizemann in Stuttgart on 8 October, with Ancienne Belgique in Brussels on 17 October. He plays Oslo in Hackney, London, on 19 October under his own name.

The American leg is billed as the Stripped Tour and is built almost entirely from seated listening rooms: City Winery in Nashville on 27 October, the Booth Playhouse in Charlotte on 28 October, two nights at Eddie's Attic in Decatur on 30 and 31 October, The Ark in Ann Arbor on 2 November, The Bur Oak in Madison on 4 November, Colony in Woodstock on 6 November, The Stone Church in Brattleboro on 7 November, StageOne in Fairfield on 11 November, two nights at Jimmy's Jazz and Blues Club in Portsmouth on 13 and 14 November, the Katharine Hepburn Cultural Arts Center in Old Saybrook on 16 November, Natick on 18 November, The Tin Pan in Richmond on 20 November, and Rams Head On Stage in Annapolis on 21 November, where the added show is a matinee with doors at 1pm and music at 2pm.

The band, the room, the encore

The touring unit has been small — a three-piece behind him at The Ark in Ann Arbor in April 2025, with Splithoff moving between guitars and keyboard, solo space handed to the drummer and the keyboard player, and backing vocals from the bassist. Evann McIntosh opened that run, playing mostly unreleased material with a single guitarist.

Setlist.fm holds 152 documented setlists for him stretching from 2014 to 2026; "Raye", "Show Me" and "Sing to You" appear most often, and covers are a recurring feature rather than a one-off gimmick — Louis Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World" has been played repeatedly, alongside Fleetwood Mac's "Dreams" and Bob Marley's "Waiting in Vain". He has also played Lollapalooza and Bonnaroo, though the current booking pattern points firmly towards rooms in the hundreds rather than festival fields.