Nashville-based singer/songwriter Ben Rector makes passionate and melodic, piano-driven, adult alternative contemporary pop. Born in Tulsa, OK in 1986, he studied piano while he was growing up and, by his teens, he was also singing, playing guitar and writing his own music. However, it wasn't until he studied at the University of Arkansas that he began recording his songs. A self-titled EP that Rector released during his freshman year caught on locally and soon he was playing live shows. By the time he graduated in 2009, he'd released two full-length albums, 2007's Twenty Tomorrow and 2008's Songs That Duke Wrote. In 2010, he released his third studio album, Into the Morning, which reached number 11 on the Billboard Heatseekers chart. In 2011, he returned with Something Like This, which also received positive attention and climbed to number 41 on the album chart. In 2013, Rector released his fifth studio album, The Walking in Between, and easily cracked the Top 40. The concert album Live in Denver appeared in 2014. In 2016, Rector returned with Brand New, which debuted in the Top Ten of the Billboard 200, due in large part to the success of the hook-driven title track. Magic, Rector's seventh studio effort, followed in 2018 and made another strong chart showing. Reworking three songs from Magic into alternate versions, Rector issued the MPLS Magic EP in January 2019.