20 illinoisentertainer. com april 2018
By Tom Lanham
O
n a recent visit to New York, British folksinger James Bay – fresh off a Brit-Award-winning, triple- Grammy-nominated hot streak for his jangly 2015 debut Chaos and the Calm – was lucky enough to procure tickets for the one-man Broadway show of one of his songwriting idols, Bruce Springsteen. It was an evening he never forgot.“ It was kind of incredible just for the stories he tells, which are fascinating,” he recalls, wistfully.“ But he played " Born in the U. S. A," which is probably one of the first songs I ever fell in love with in my life – one of my earliest memories is loving that song, and I was only three years old, I think, and that’ s a true story.” But it wasn’ t just the hit’ s inclusion in the set that proved so riveting, but the way it was included.
“ When he played it, he dropped the tuning of the guitar really low, and he played it like it was this dirty, downtrodden blues song,” Bay says.“ And that suited the lyric much better than the production that the original recording had. So it was amazing to me that he did it like that, and he did it because he doesn’ t have to be the same thing all the time, And the true artist isn’ t willing to be the same thing all the time. So that’ s what I’ m doing on this new record – exercising that desire to evolve.” He’ s not kidding around. If Chaos – and its gentle flagship hit singles " Let it Go " and " Hold Back the River " was the man’ s skeletal Nebraska, his solid new sophomore set Electric Light stands as his rollicking " The River," fairly crackling with a high-voltage current that might surprise his fans.
Because Bay, now 27, had created a certain profile for himself in his overnight stardom – that of a hippie-ish, raspythroated hipster sporting a signature floppy-brimmed hat and shoulder-length locks, who relied on affable acoustic guitar to get his poetic points across. But now he’ s ditched the Hoss Cartwright Stetson, trimmed his hair into a sleek James Dean pompadour, and – as his recent appearance on Saturday Night Live clarified, as he wailed on chugging kickoff single Pink Lemonade-- strapped on an electric guitar photos by Sarah PIantadosi
and learned how to make it talk.“ It was time, and it’ s all part of the evolution,” he adds of the sudden stylistic changes.
This transformation didn’ t start with Bruce, per se – seeing Springsteen only cemented the concept in Bay’ s mind. It began on the world tour behind Chaos, as the energy of fans singing along to its songs caromed back to the performer onstage and surged through him, sparking increasingly forceful deliveries.“ And pretty soon, it was a whole new experience from what people heard on the record,” he notes with proprietary pride.“ And I’ ve always been interested in evolving. And I appreciate that if you give someone enough of the same thing for long enough, they get used to it and you become familiar. And there’ s something smart in that.” He pauses, then adds a caveat.“ But smart things aren’ t always exciting – smart things can be boring. So you have to test yourself and test others, for the sake of art, for the sake of creativity, for the sake of staying in love with something. Or else you will fall out of love with it. And I didn’ t want to fall out of love with this.”
Exhausted, Bay returned to London around Christmas of 2016. Looking at his blank post-tour calendar, he panicked and at in early January 2017 booked time at a local studio, where he and his songwriting partner Jon Green began to cut experimental demos. Chaos had been recorded at Nashville’ s plush Blackbird Studios with the renowned Jacquire King producing.“ But this was a small basement studio around the corner from my house, basically a demoing room,” he says.“ And Jon lives near me, and he’ s an old friend, and we wrote some of the stuff on the first record together. And co-writing is a bizarre experience, so when you’ ve got a good friend that you can successfully do music with, it’ s priceless. So there was no pressure from the label because they didn’ t actually know that I was writing yet. So Jon and I just started throwing musical ideas around, anything that felt like musical horizons I hadn’ t aimed for yet. And that’ s when all this new music was written
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