Over a decade into his career, singer-songwriter and guitarist James Bay is steadfast in his commitment to constantly pushing his boundaries.
In many ways, English musician James Bay is the quintessential example of a hard-working songwriter done good. In 2013, the artist released his debut EP The Dark of The Morning and within two years, Bay bagged his first BRIT Award in 2015 for Critic’s Choice and released his debut LP, Chaos and the Calm. Undoubtedly, it was a record that smashed sales expectations, earning Bay his first No.1 on the UK charts. More importantly, it introduced him to the mainstream masses. Listeners were drawn in by his soulful tones, passionate lyricism, and melodies that effortlessly traverse indie, pop, blues, rock, and soul. Album tracks like “Hold Back The River” and “Let It Go” have understandably become global hits. From there, the rest is history, he’s earned two top-five records with 2018’s sublime Electric Light and the gorgeous 2021 album, Leap. Bay has sold out many headline shows across the globe and toured with The Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen and other songwriters he would cite as heroes.
However, no matter the achievement or glitzy accolade, James Bay isn’t willing to rest on his laurels, and that’s easy to understand when you look at his background. From the age of 11 years old, the bright-eyed youngster picked up a guitar, enamoured by songwriting greats like Ray LaMontagne, Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, and countless others, hungry to learn the craft. After studying at the altar of these colossal artists and bravely taking his first steps through open mic events in Brighton and London—a rite of passage for most songwriters—James honed his craft over the coming years. As we spoke on a September afternoon, it became abundantly clear that Bay is a humble and self-aware individual who is purely in pursuit of an almost “superhuman” experience when it comes to creating music. An experience which offers connection, growth, and what could only be described as a cathartic release, given how the wordsmith pours every fibre of his being into his work.
Over the years, it may be easy for the uninitiated to pigeonhole the artist as a talent who is known for only penning sad ballads and wearing a signature fedora but this is far from the truth. Bay is a multifaceted individual when it comes to his music. With his new record, Changes All The Time, out tomorrow via Mercury Records, James Bay is at a place of unwavering creative freedom born from his years of experience in the industry. This spirited body of work offers the listener a thrilling journey which conveys the most direct representation of who James Bay is as an artist, musician, writer, and guitar player. The record’s soaring highs are nestled between devastatingly beautiful moments, an emphasis on guitar playing and some of his most introspective lyricism to date. He’s taken his live band members into the studio, worked with The Killers’ Brandon Flowers and artist Holly Humberstone on some of the album material, and co-produced the album alongside Gabe Simon and more.
Now in his early thirties, the 33-year-old, has crafted a record which sees him express himself in the present moment, fuelled by a desire to create music that connects on a deep, human level. The end result is his best work to date.
In conversation with 1883 Magazine’s Cameron Poole, James Bay speaks about his new record Changes All The Time, his first and last open mic, getting back into skateboarding after 17 years, his desire to start a supergroup, and more.
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Hi James, your fourth studio record Changes All The Time is out tomorrow. With this record being a real confident statement about who you are as a musician and showing your clear passion for the guitar, in the writing process, did it bring up any memories from when you started playing the guitar at age 11? As it has been said, this record is you coming home to the guitar.
Yeah, your question is so lovely. Here’s what we sort of went for me more than ever, I said something around the build-up to this record about reaching a sort of higher sense of musical freedom than I’d ever sort of felt before. That was achieved with the help of my lovely mate and co-producer on this album, Gabe Simon from over in Nashville. He is so heavily invested in what we have done and what we sort of did when we worked together. Lots of producers are invested to different degrees, of course, and Gabe is so all in. He’s only a couple of years older than me, we relate on so many levels. The first time he ever saw me play live, he saw me solo acoustic, in front of about 500 people, and he said his favourite thing about the show was that it was like witnessing a whisper and a hurricane all at once, which I appreciated. It sort of resonated. He knows a fair bit about, you know, the 11-year-old me, the 14-year-old me, in his bedroom, learning riffs, and guitar solos late into the night. And he said, Where is that guy on your records? And I’ve been asking myself the same question. So he really helped me do this thing, as you put it, come home to the guitar. Before being a lyricist, a singer or even much of a live performer, I was a guitar player in my room, playing with mates and playing guitar myself as well. I would listen to records and learn everything by ear. I wanted to be that in my music, more than ever.
I’ve been on a journey for the last sort of seven years, bringing that side of myself to my live show. When I started playing live professionally and playing to people, I had been playing live for a long time at that point, but it wasn’t as focused and I was focused on translating the chorus to people. Ten years after my first record, it felt like time more than ever to allow myself to have the courage and to allow myself to be the singer, songwriter, the guitar player. As that’s what I’m all about. I think I’ve been more shy about that in the past. A great vocal, great lyric and great chorus reach more people, I think we can all appreciate than a guitar solo might and that’s okay, that’s all right. But there’s a guitar-playing-animal in me that needs to get out now. So I’ve enjoyed with the help of Gabe, really stepping into that, owning it in a bigger way than ever before on this album.
The concept of change is terrifying because whether we like it or not, it’s going to happen for better or worse, and change is the crux of your new record – you’ve said you try and have control over change, how is that as a musician and in your everyday life?
Well, I guess you can sometimes dictate the kind of pace at which you move towards different sort of junctures in your life. These are hypothetical things, I’d love to sort of give you more realistic sort of scenarios, but I don’t know. For anybody, it might be I need to buy a car, or I need to sell a car, and that will change how I get around. If I’ve moved to a city, do I need a car? Well, I have to face getting up a bit earlier, getting on public transport and that’s okay, that changes the cost of things, that changes the outlook of your life for a moment. And these are all, in their way, sort of uncomfortable and necessary or comfortable and unnecessary. Like, for example, I treat the way I make music a bit like painting in my mind. You have your blank canvas, which is silence, and then you put colours into that blank canvas, and into that silence. You could argue that I could do all of that with one guitar. But I have lots of guitars because they all represent different sounds, which I liken to colours. It’s a very fortunate situation that I exist in wherein I could dictate for having those more or less and a decision and a consequence, good and bad, comes with every choice or every change. If some change is inevitable, for example, then I might be able to control the speed at which it happens, for example.
Sorry, I feel like I’m rambling, it’s hard to answer your question, because there are some things that I’m never going to tell you about my about my life that certainly would make for an answer to your question. But here’s a good one. It takes narrowing songs down and deciding 10 or 12 to make a record, typically speaking. But 100 or more will get written. A few have to get cast aside in that process that you fully understand why they did. That all in itself is a change that I can control and will choose to based on the kind of artist I want to come across as. The artist that I come across as means a lot to me. It means a lot to my self-consciousness, my confidence, my anxiety, my vulnerability. I might want to put songs out that have more revealing lyrics than I’m comfortable with, and because I am uncomfortable with the lyrics, I might choose then not to put them out, and that’s my opportunity and my ability to control circumstances about my life.
Last part, my personal life and my professional life exist very close to each other. The line between them is very blurry. That’s very difficult, but thus far, I have had a brilliant, very fortunate, sort of successful experience. So I don’t want to overlook that either. I’m not trying to whinge or moan about my life. It’s unique though, and I can’t share the experience with even some of my oldest, closest friends, because they don’t know what it’s like. What a massively long-winded answer to a very complex question.
I’m sorry I shouldn’t start with such a complex question [laughs], but I appreciate it.
No, it’s alright, it’s a very difficult question to answer, but I’ve chosen some pretty heavy subject matter to make an album about [laughs].
Given you’ve spent more time focusing on expressing yourself in the present moment on this record, and thinking less about the aesthetics when compared to previous records, how did that positively manifest inside the studio?
It positively manifested as having my touring band in the room, so frequently having more people in the room made for a really, and we’re always trying to reach this, superhuman experience. We are humans in a room together playing instruments to make a great noise, to make sound, to make music. The result of that we record and it comes back at us through the speakers, we’re looking for that to feel a bit superhuman. That’s why music is referred to as magic. In sharing those days in the studio with more people, people that aren’t just anybody you know, these are the guys that I tour with as well. One of them is Tom, who is my oldest friend since I was three and he plays bass in my band, and this was the first time he’d spent a lot of time in the studio with me. That’s one of the ways that it manifested, by sharing the experience. By the way, in front of other people, I am invited, if not required, to make music more honestly.
I might think this song needs to be fast, rocking and I might look in the eyes of the people around me in the studio and go, they’re not reacting. They’re not finding this magical. This needs to be a ballad. This actually needs to slow down. That was very important to me, and I lent into it more than ever before. So there’s a clarity, purity and honesty, an earnestness and a simplicity to these songs that I was able to achieve as a result of the ingredients I’ve sort of referenced. Just me and my head, I’ll struggle to get to that place. It’ll get very sort of complex, convoluted and confused. And it’s the way that you can hear the air and the space between all the noises that are being made, which is quite a sort of abstract and maybe complex thought, but that really makes this record for me, in many respects. I really lived and embodied the lyrics as well, and that really sort of made it feel more powerful when making it. Even when I listen back and hear it, it feels more powerful as a result. Music, I think, is supposed to be powerful. It’s supposed to move you.
I think it speaks to your very humble and self-aware character that you’ve been performing some of the material at open mic events in London before the launch. It’s really beautiful because before you made your name that’s what you did, play open mics. And when someone has got to a certain level, they may think that’s beneath them, but you clearly haven’t forgotten the importance of that live setting. Can you walk me through your first-ever open mic experience and your most recent – how did they differ if at all?
Wow, they differed in many ways, particularly based on experience. My experience is completely different. At the first one, I don’t know if I’d done really any hours of practice and gained many hours of experience. At the most recent one, I well surpassed my sort of supposed 10,000 hours, as they say, of practice and training. In both cases, there was that very healthy, very exciting, very necessary degree of uncertainty, fear, apprehension and anxiety. These are ingredients that can make for a very engaging, sort of magnetic performance. And that’s what I’m trying to do. I was trying to do that the first time I ever performed at one and I was trying to do it the last time I ever did an open mic. I’m trying to do it every show. But I really respect and appreciate the experience that I’ve gained, and I wear that on my sleeve, and I hold it inside me the most recent one. When I did my first ever one, I can’t tell you too many things about it because it was such a long time ago, and I’ve done so many since. But I can guarantee you that in doing it, I was hoping that one day I would have 10,000 hours of experience doing that and be more than 10 years into a career where performing was my bread and butter.
Why? Because of the therapy and the medicine that live music performance is for me and other people at the same time. I think you’ve asked about differences, one of the sort of similarities that has its own differences compared to my first open mic and my most recent, one of them is connection. That’s the one of the most addictive bits, I love the feeling of singing, the vibrations in my body, literally. I love that. I love playing a guitar and what that takes, and how moving that feels, and how emotional that can be. But the connection, whether I’m standing up there at my first open mic night with my eyes closed the entire time, or whether I’m looking at the whites in people’s eyes at my most recent one, or whatever, it’s that connection. There’s something incredibly unfussy about an open mic night. When I did my most recent open mic night, at some nearly empty bar in Camden on a Tuesday night about three months ago, there was about 15 people in the room, half of them are sat down. I snapped straight back into open mic mode and I had to introduce myself. Part of my ego was concerned that people already recognised me. The rest of me didn’t know or care, because I am still just another one of the millions and millions of people who get up on a little stage and holds a guitar and says I’d like to sing you some of my songs.
All of the best things happened, some people recognised me, some people gasped, some people were walking up the stairs, and when I said, ‘I’m James Bay’, they turned around and came back down. One lady afterwards said hi, and she walked in halfway through the set, sat and listened. She had her phone with her when she came over to me, she had Spotify open. She said, ‘can you tell me? Can I find your music anywhere? Can I listen to you again?’ Perfect. There’s no airs and graces. It’s just connection in a public space, it’s so full of love, and I’ve wondered a bit from what your question is asking, but it’ll always be that for me, it’ll always be the great leveller.
I talked to my mate, Russell Howard, who’s such a fantastic and successful comedian, about ultimately, the power of an open mic and in many respects, unless it’s a big ticketed event. You know, a lot of comedy can feel like an open mic night. Comedy is also born from open mics, ultimately, in the same way that singing and songwriting is. To walk into a space where nobody’s even bought a ticket, and they just want to stand and have a drink in the same room that has a microphone and a PA system in. They just want to talk to their mate and catch up. To try to have the fucking balls to say, ‘I’m going to take your mate, your drink and I’m going to make you more interested in what I’m doing.
It’s a fascinating exchange and a magical one when it works. And it is something to be learned from when it doesn’t, it’s just as important to fuck it up [laughs], or for it not to go well. There have been so many differences, but many similarities for me between my first ever open mic and the most recent one I did.
Just to pivot somewhere else for a moment but keeping in the spirit of getting back into old hobbies, after 17 years, you returned to skateboarding earlier this year, how is it going, and why was now the right time to get back into skating?
It’s interesting, It’s a good question. It makes me think about how we’re always searching for something else in ourselves, or at least, rather than sort of opening up that wide, I should just say to you that I’m always searching for some other part of myself. I’m always curious to sort of remain multi-dimensional, rather than one-dimensional. I’m publicly a musician with a guitar in my hand and a song to sing, and I love that reality. But I’m so much more than that. By the way, that can be narrowed down even further, to most people, I sing a little delicate ballad and that’s who they know me to be, and that’s what works for them. But I love to play loud, hard, fast, and because I have a desire for adrenaline and endorphins in a very particular way. Some people get on rollercoasters. Some people take pretty heavy drugs. I like to get my pulse up, get my blood pumping and I like to do that by playing live. I like to do that by running around playing football. I like to do that. I used to love to do that by skateboarding and crashing down onto concrete, grazing my knee, getting up and having another go. I was 15 or 16 when I last sort of did that regularly. I thought, why don’t I do that anymore? Because, okay, lucky me, I’m basically the exact same build that I was when I was 16. Very fortunate, sure. I put that partly down to having a pretty erratic metabolism, for all kinds of reasons, I’m sure, but I just wanted to feel it again.
It’s a very tactile, physical, sensation skateboarding, just like football is, just like music is. This might go over a lot of people’s heads, but when you play a guitar, you can have very soft, thin, quite gentle feeling strings, and if you hit them too hard, they will fall out of tune, because they’re not that strong, but they’re guitar strings nonetheless. Or you can have very thick, heavy gage, robust guitar strings. I need those ones because when I go on stage, even if I’m playing a delicate ballad my body is quite tense. There’s a fuck ton of adrenaline coursing through me. I don’t know why, because it means that much, but because the whole thing’s a very physical act. So to pacify and to provide for that part of me that’s navigating so much adrenaline, I took up skateboarding again. It is freeing as well. It’s such a freeing feeling.
The things that I got confident to do again in the first few weeks of skating again was so fun to do. Initially, it was hard to do an ollie, which is to just sort of pop the board in the air. But then I was back to doing all these flip tricks and flying off the ramps and all of this different stuff, going to all different skate parks around where I live. I can do it on my own, and I can do it socially with mates as well. I inspired a mate of mine, who’s only a year younger than me, to get back into it as well, for the first time in about 15 years. So I think I wanted to see if that version of me still exists, or if he still can exist because I don’t ever quite feel sort of settled as one thing that everybody sort of thinks they expect and understand. Not sure why that is, probably a whole therapy session to be done there.
Whether it’s gaining a UK number-one record with Chaos and the Calm, selling out shows, opening for Bruce Springsteen, performing “Beast of Burden” with the stones, or working with Brandon Flowers on “Easy Distraction” – you must have so many highlights over the last eleven years. how have these moments shaped you as an artist, and what did you take away from working with such iconic figures?
They always teach me that there’s always more to strive for, there’s always more to work for. I get a little look behind the curtain and behind the scenes at why my heroes and everybody you’ve listed is a hero of mine in one way or another. Why my heroes are heroes to me, they all have a gift, talent, a drive and be great to a kind of superhero like level. Something about Brandon Flowers is like standing in a room with Superman, from his big, charming grin to his abilities… he’s a musical Superman, I think. We would get some chords recorded with a little backbeat and loop them round, have them playing back to the speaker and he would stand up in front of a microphone, open his phone, where he’d sketch down hundreds of different lyric ideas, and he’d sing them all in. They all felt and sounded quite profound. He has a very prolific ability. The way that Mick Jagger is so so constantly. He really lives. Mick Jagger is not a character. He’s a real existing being. What an unbelievably lucky world to have that in. I got to fly so close to that sun, and it felt fucking awesome [laughs].
I will never forget, I opened for the Stones wearing some very bold, exciting and eccentric silver trousers. About 45 minutes or an hour later, after our set, was invited on stage with them, I was still wearing my silver trousers and my black T-shirt. Up until then before my song with The Stones, “Beast of Burden”, Mick had been wearing a red jacket and I wonder if it was chance, or if it’s just how tapped into the show he is…But just before he announced me on stage, he stepped off for a second, switched into a silver shirt, which matched my silver trousers. He walked back on and he said, ‘ladies and gentlemen, we’re going to have James Bay back on’.
You know he coordinated with the guest. I don’t know if it was an accident, part of me felt like it was a little bit intentional, and that was just such a wildly particular and genius little insight into one of the absolute pop-rock legends of all time. There was so many nuanced, bold and brash things that I’ve learned, and I continue to sort of look back at pictures of those times and think about the experiences and all sorts of things get picked up again and again. The way we arrive at our own unique style as an artist is in failing, very legitimately, to accurately emulate our heroes. That’s why the reason I’ve written with people and worked with people and they say the way you always do this on a guitar, and where you always sing like this in this way, and your melodies do this thing, those are the things that are so signature about you, that’s real James Bay stuff, which is such a wild thing for me to receive. It’s very flattering. It’s a massive compliment. There’s a little voice inside me that says, you sound those ways James, because you will never be Ray Lamontagne. You will never be Adele, you’ll never be Aretha Franklin. You will never entirely be Keith Richards, but by failing that clearly something signature is coming through as a result that is all my own.
Talk is just an emotional rollercoaster on the record and probably my favourite song on the LP, what’s your current favourite from the album?
It is a tough question to answer, Talk has been the answer to the question and will be again I’m sure. I love Dogfight so much. I really went on a journey with it, I loved writing it with Holly [Humberstone]. not just with her but with my great mate Phil Plested. They are both artists, and there is something about writing with an artist – as I experienced with Brandon too. That is just even more sort of a concentrated experience of writing. I wrote Dogfight and recorded it a few months before we made this record. I really liked how it felt, but I could never quite get comfortable with it so. We had a different go at it and on the second go, we got what you’ve heard on the album now and there are so many things I love, I just tried to sort of pair it back in its sonics and its delivery to allow the emotions in the words to come through.
I think I struggle with myself is the truth and that’s where hell, it’s been rough, It’s been a dogfight, really sort of resonates with me, because I think I naturally have to and also choose to work very hard to present myself as best I can to the world, doing the thing that I do. But to differentiate that between who I need to be, have to be or want to be, get to be my personal life, the way of those sort of atmospheres and scenarios interchange, and it’s a lot to deal with. Dogfight was a real kind of mantra type of thing to write.
But the performance in the delivery of it in a studio and in the way that we got it to sound how the band played, fucking hell, an absolute privileged to be anywhere near that, as it was happening. I’ll take credit that I can for doing my bit, but everybody brought their A-game and it’s in the things they didn’t play.
This makes me think of that funny Jazz quote that says it’s about the notes you can’t hear and that you don’t play. Sometimes that really applies and everybody held back and exercised restraint in their performance in the studio for that song. In the most eloquent,
and emotional way whilst giving everything to the stuff that they did play. To listen back to it is a wild experience for me. I’ve found it very emotional because it expresses things that I am incredibly uncomfortable talking about. That’s no offence to you. But I’m still glad I’ve put the music out. I am still glad it exists in the world and I will look forward to playing it live because I will want to and need to express and exercise those emotions. I might find it very hard like I did find it very hard to sing it down the studio.
And yet, for all those extreme emotional reasons, it is the answer to your question. It is my favourite, I’m really proud of it.
You’ve got quite an extensive guitar collection, this may be too difficult, but if you had to give most of them up and only keep one, which would you keep and why?
Ironically, I’m in a room with 20 guitars at home and the one that I would keep I don’t have here. The one I can’t give up is the guitar that played such a huge part in my career, which is a 1966 Epiphone Century. It’s bright red but you can still see the wood grain through the paint. I found it when I went to New York in 2013 to meet my record label, well those that would become my record label.
I went to meet them to maybe sign a record deal. I performed a few songs to them on an acoustic guitar that I’d taken which is also a special guitar. After I performed, they asked my managers if they would stay in the building and if I would just go off and explore New York, they would try to do a deal right there and then. In sending me off around Manhattan, I went down to the lower east side to Bleecker Street where there used to be a shop called Matt Umanov Guitars which doesn’t exist anymore sadly. I walked in and I picked up and tried this guitar and it felt very special. Also, it felt very difficult to play, and I found that quite aspiring. I had recently at that time listened to Jack White talking about how he liked there t be some kind of struggle in the guitars that he played. He didn’t want it to be soft, silky, easy and accessible, he wanted it to be he wanted somewhere to put his adrenaline, which I could really relate to. So I found this guitar that kind of strung up and felt a little bit like an electric guitar. But it also had more soft acoustic guitar-styled strings on it and all these different details that made it a bit awkward. I loved it. It was fucking expensive [laughs] and I could not afford it, so I put it back.
I said to my managers as they joined me in the shop, I said, I’ll come back one day. That’s my plan, that’s my dream to buy that guitar. We had dinner with the label that night and went home the next day and everybody said, hope to see you again. No deals were made or anything. Less than a week later, my managers asked me to come to the office, there was a package for me. I went down and there was a big box, opened it up, a very dusty guitar case inside, there was a note from the guy at the label that said ‘when we went to dinner, you couldn’t stop talking about this guitar. We really want you to have it and of course, we would love to work with you’. I didn’t remember banging on about that guitar but apparently, that’s all I did. I went on and wrote “Hold Back The River”, “Let it Go” on it, and I recorded most of my debut album on it. I have recorded lots on it since but particularly those two songs. It’s very important to me, so I would have to keep it.
Speaking of live shows, with the big headline tour in February which includes a date at London’s OVO Arena Wembley, what’s exciting you about the live aspect for your latest era?
Yeah I’m exited for that and for trying to replicate what we did in the studio lives and also trying to tweak that you don’t want to do exactly the same thing. I’m looking forward to how the new songs can be emphasised or evolve on a stage and in a live environment. That’s a huge excitement for me. The Wembley Arena is my first UK arena, so that’s a big one for me. A lot of the venues outside of that on this UK run, I’ve been to before but not for a long time, they’re a bit bigger and I’m really excited for those because I love them. But the other thing I’m excited about is exploring. I’ve been saying a bit, so I’m going to have to start sticking to my word, but I’d like to find out how I can reinterpret some old songs. I think at about 10 years since the first album, it’s about time. I saw Paolo Nutini live recently, and he does a bit of that, few artists do.
They deliver a song that you know and love in a different way and I’m inspired enough as a musician, as a musical person to try that. I typically work that kind of stuff out myself and then in the rehearsal with the band. I love that process. I’d like to surprise fans at shows with those kind of moments because the fans are already incredibly good at singing along, so there’s almost a little bit like let’s have fun with this, let’s see if you can sing along to it like this as well, in a different way.
How has fatherhood changed you as a person and as a music fan, when Ada is old enough, what albums and artists are you excited to show her?
Oh I’m excited to show her everything. I’m excited to say to her, you know, on the one hand here’s the streaming platform, you can find everything in here, but on the other hand, I’m excited, she already likes the dropping of the needle on a record at home. She’s nearly three and she’s excited by how that goes and she loves to sort of put those records on and hear them come through the speakers and dance around the room. It’s hard to answer the first part that a question because I’m not really sure. I’m not really sure how it’s change me but I’m fucking dead certain it has. To become a parent, does change. It changes you forever, it’s like you grow a new limb, but that limb is going to wander off into the garden and have its own existence and its own life, it’s not going to be attached to you forever. I don’t know if you’ve got kids, but it’s only in the very first instance that you really sort of feel this thing, this person, this new human attached to you and all the cliches are true. There’s no question about that.
The most terrifying and most euphoric feelings come with having a child, and that’s all hitting in a new way as she has been a toddler and she’s starting to become a little kid. It makes me think about my own mortality of course, it makes me think about so much. It’s not an overwhelming question, but it’s an overwhelming thing to think about and yet there’s also such a stunning, beautiful simplicity to a small child and parenthood. We get so complex, busy, for so many ultimately unimportant, peripheral, things in life.
A kid just wants to hang out, wants to chat, eat sugary stuff which you’ve got to keep an eye on. I think it makes me reach further as a songwriter, and in my work. I want her to have a nice, comfortable, exciting life. I want her to be curious and feel drive, witness her parents being driven people, ambition. I’d love her to get passionate and hungry about things that she finds and obsesses over in the ways that I did because it is an exciting journey. It’s reignited all of those things in me and how I understand about myself and how they could be possible for her.
As mentioned earlier, On Changes All The Times, you worked with co-producer and friend Gabe Simon, someone you’d like to work with again – what ideas or sonics would you like to explore next with Gabe in the future?
Good question. There’s a few things that come to mind. On the one hand, I would just like to do what I did Gabe again, because it felt so emotionally, musically, spiritually, nourishing. I’ve made a bunch of records and I’ve had different kinds of experiences, some of them really unbelievable some and some of them less so. But with this record, it stood the line, it was unique. Particularly in how invested Gabe was in the experience as my friend, let alone as a collaborator and a colleague. So that’s one reason, and that’s one thing I’d sort of like to explore. When I say again, on the one hand for the first time my life, I’m realising I would love to go back to RAK the same studio in London and maybe take the same people in with excitement in the new songs. We had such a great process to the way we worked on this record. It was equal parts constantly in the studio around-the-clock, and then also for the first half, we’d give ourselves the weekend and give us some time to ease in.
A separate answer to your question is, with the help of Gabe who’s really helped spearhead the idea, I got to release the first single “Up All Night” in collaboration with Noah Kahan and The Lumineers who are mates of mine and mates with Gabe, they are giant artists in their own right. I would like to manifest some sort of super group, let’s do a record, let’s do a tour. I am the only one saying it at the moment and that’s okay, someone has got to start. I know the lads had a very good time doing it and were happy to be involved. I’ve spoken to them and seen them a bunch since and it was a lot of fun. But they’re busy guys, lots of touring, new releases to come. It’s not just because super groups are a fun thing that sort of existed in the past, I’m a massive Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young fan. I would love to do that, I would love to do a version of that and I think with those lads it would be a lot of fun to do even a small record and a small tour. I think we started something that could be good, so I’m just a guy out here manifesting that, I would do it with Gabe too.
The possibilities are endless. Is there anyone else you would have in this hypothetical supergroup?
I’m a big fan of Maggie Rogers, and I think it’s her kind of sonic neighbourhood as well. Her, Feist, my mate Margaret Glaspy as well, check out her music, she is wonderful, she would be great in it as well. So there is a whole host I’m sure.
Finally, if your debut EP The Dark of The Morning was a snapshot of the beginning of your journey, what would Changes All The Time say about you at this very moment?
It’s a bit cliché, but it would say I am still a work in progress I am still curious, I’m still hungry. It would say I have learned a few things, it would say check this out, I’ve learned this along the way. The Dark of The Morning was pure naivety, innocence and being such a newbie and saying ‘I know nothing but I want to share this’. But this music would say, ‘I’m a work in progress’ and that feels like the most important thing to express, share, and talk about.
James, I know you’ve done a ton of interviews and human-to-human right now, I want to emphasise how much I appreciate you taking the time to chat.
No question man, thank you, Cameron. I do hope we can do a little in-person thing one day, that would be fun as well. It’s been wicked, thank you so much.
James Bay’s fourth studio record Changes All The Time is out tomorrow.
Interview Cameron Poole
Photography Garry Jones
Styling Benedict Browne
Grooming Joe Mills
Styling Assistant Alfred Humphries
Production Kelsey Barnes
Production Assistant Issy Dimauro
James Bay Publicist Jannat Choudhury @ JC Publicity
Location CHATEAU DENMARK, London
