More about: James Bay

Two days before the UK was plunged into its first lockdown, James Bay had returned from Nashville armed with a new album ready to mix and master. Excited about a prospective year ahead full of promotion and shows, Bay suddenly found himself re-evaluating many aspects of his life and music when the world was placed on pause. It took a quote from esteemed American naturalist John Burroughs (“Leap and the net will appear”) to encourage Bay to return to the drawing board. Now inspired to break away from his tried and tested mould of self-proclaimed ‘sad songs’ crafted for the record, he began to write again, and his risk was transformed into his new third record, the aptly titled Leap.

“It did not go the way I planned, and I have to say: in this moment, today, I'm so pleased. What a strange twist of fate and series of events,” Bay tells me over Zoom. Chatting with the multi-award winning artist with billions of streams to his name feels like a catch-up with an old friend: he’s warm, open and full of enthusiasm for the new record. Bay is also refreshingly candid when speaking about his mental health: “I definitely struggle in waves with any amount of anxiety and insecurity, as somebody whose job it is, and who enjoys to get up on stage and be quite outgoing, and vulnerable in a way, someone who loves to perform, I couldn’t work out where I was with that side of myself in 2019,” Bay admits. 

Expanding further Bay said: “I think in truth, I was still fighting with a feeling of imposter syndrome because the waves of highs and lows that I go through in my life and work really blur together. The ups and downs come thick and fast. One day I’m on stage feeling like I know exactly who I am, and the next I’m not sure when I'm going to be back on stage, and I’m not sure who I am as a result of that and it’s very strange and difficult to navigate those sorts of emotions.” 

As previously alluded to, it was the pandemic that caused Bay to understand he “hadn’t finished this album” but It would take till the end of 2020 for Bay to come to terms with that and begin writing again. “It was a very overwhelming experience for everybody initially, even just writing about the times we were living in was too on the nose,” Bay says as he jokingly sings to me a mocking line of “I’m all alone, everybody’s all alone”. Eventually, however, he found himself addressing what he’d been going through pre-pandemic and during, which is when he encountered the John Burroughs quote. “It really resonated in such a big way, it sort of moved and inspired me to say ‘Okay, I write in this sad direction because that comes very naturally to me, but what about this quote, what is it asking you to do?’ It asks you to keep your chin up at the very least and try to appreciate that no matter how hard this day is, there’s another one coming tomorrow,” describes Bay. That quote inspired Bay to split his record. He kept half of the “sad songs” he’d created in Nashville, whilst he “took a turn into joy and hope” where “all sorts of new songs were born”.

Lyrically, with his new album Leap, Bay is an open book, letting his guard down for the first time. Whilst a self-proclaimed honest songwriter, when asked recently the difference between honesty and vulnerability he found himself questioning if he’d ever truly worn his heart on his sleeve before. “Somebody asked me the other day (and it’s gonna stay with me for a while), they said: ‘What’s the difference between honesty and vulnerability?’ and I said the lines blur, they’re kind of the same thing… but then she said to me ‘Well you’ve always claimed to be a very honest songwriter, but you said that this is the first time you’ve really been able to be vulnerable in your writing’. And in that moment I realised, okay there is a difference for me in my songwriting… and one of the best ways I can describe it is I know I’ve always been honest in my writing with myself, and what I’m writing about privately, I stick to the story but I haven’t been able to be vulnerable enough to open up about that in a more public space”.

His commitment to joy, hope and becoming more vulnerable can be felt in key moments across the record, notably the touching single ‘One Life’ which focuses on his long term relationship with his girlfriend Lucy. Together since they were 16, they’ve since welcomed their first child, Ada. “‘One Life’ is a really good example of me finding a way to access the vulnerability, to say this is a part of my private life, I really do keep private, but I’ve found a way to share some of it,” Bay explains. “I’ve been with Lucy for a long time, 15 years, we were kids when we met and it’s been such an important thing to sort of keep away from my public professional life, and that’s an agreement that her and I both made from the start,” continues Bay. However, he found that his desire for privacy went to an extreme length that he was no longer comfortable with: “But I sort of started to encroach into this place where it was almost as if I’ve been acting like she doesn’t exist, and that’s not alright”. 

‘One Life’ for Bay was the turning point: “I love that I’ve been able to come to this place through writing ‘One Life’, as well as other songs on this album where I can celebrate her and celebrate us. I still wouldn’t have been able to do it if it was just me saying ‘Oh I’m so in love’ I can’t, that’s not a song that would ever move me”. Instead, Bay references the track’s second verse: “Sometimes I get sad. At the front, at the back / In the middle of the happiest moments / 'Cause good things can go bad, easily”.

“That’s the everyday for me, I think for any relationship,” Bay elaborates. “Nothing is ever one-dimensionally happy or one-dimensionally sad, but the point in the chorus of ‘One Life’ is this realisation that I live my best life with her, rather than without her, and because of the contrast between the lyrics in the verse and chorus, I was able to say ‘okay world, have this!’”.

Opening himself up encompassed the entire creative process for Leap, leading to exciting new collaborations which challenged the way Bay created music. The album features writing and production sessions with the likes of Joel Little (known for his work with Lorde, Taylor Swift and Olivia Rodrigo), Dave Cobb (A Star Is Born, Chris Stapleton), regular collaborator Ian Fitchuck, and for Bay a surprise long time fan of his in the form of FINNEAS (brother and producer of Billie Eilish). I asked Bay what effect these new partnerships had on his tried and tested way of creating music: “They encouraged me to sort of tear the rulebook up. I think I’ve been trying to build a rulebook for myself over time, whether I like it or not, I have to confess that I have tried to sort of create a guide for how I might make a record every time I go to do it, and this scenario really tore that up as you can imagine, so I just embraced it”.

A notable example of this is the aforementioned renowned producer Dave Cobb, who has won multiple Grammy awards for his work with both Chris Stapleton and on The Star Is Born soundtrack. He is a strong believer in capturing the rawest and most passionate of takes.“I’d say he’s particularly confident in his process… what’s funny is he operates like that because he loves all these old records where people weren’t doing hundred of tapes, and they weren’t playing to a click track or metronome, which is what we do every single time now”. That desire for minimal takes comes from a passion shared between Cobb and Bay of the classics, he explains: “There are great examples of like ‘Honky Tonk Women’ by The Rolling Stones and ‘September’ by Earth, Wind and Fire made decades ago, ‘September’ starts at one tempo and at the end of the song is 10 beats per minute faster than when it started, because they’re just having a great time, that emotional momentum leads the performance and Dave was like ‘Let’s do that!’”. 

It was Cobb’s impulsivity and their joint love for timeless records that really inspired Bay to take that sharp push outside of his comfort zone as he expands: “I’ve been making music professionally for nearly 10 years now and we operate to a click track, but I love those old records. There’s a contradiction in me, because I’ll tell you, I love those records but I won’t have the courage like Dave to bypass the click track, so he challenged me… we had a great drummer called Nate Smith and he said ‘Let’s just give it a shot’ and it was frightening, I could feel the track's tempo changing, I love the performance but it’s listening back that made me go ‘Woah, this is not what they put on the radio these days’, and he really helped me say ‘fuck that’”.

You can hear the excitement in Bay’s voice as he describes the thrill of having his way of making music challenged and expanded upon. He is as knowledgeable about the craft of music as he is passionate about it. There is a visible glint and awe in his eye as he recounts an anecdote of Cobb gifting him a vintage 1963 Fender Jaguar guitar. Those with astute hearing will notice the instrument on ‘Love Don’t Hate Me’. Bay recalls how Cobb was keen for the instrument to get some decent usage and was eager for Bay to try it out on the track: “We did a take that to me was sort of the practice run but Dave was looking at me raising his eyebrows like ‘that's the one!’. And I'm like ‘Dave steady, easy, can we do one more?’ Typically, I might do ten takes. He said ‘Yeah, all right. We'll do one more’ and we did a take that was particularly fantastic. It felt great. We finished it. He got up and he walked over. He said that's the tape and that's your guitar now you take it home.” Astounded, Bay took the instrument under Cobb’s instruction it had to be played live: “he said you can have it as long as you play it live. So I'm gonna play it live. What a guy! He loves the story of an instrument,” Bay enthusiastically explains. With that in mind, eagle-eyed readers should look out for the guitar on his tour dates later this year.

As anyone who has seen Bay live can attest, he comes alive and thrives on the stage; his guitar an extension of himself. I asked him how he handled the unexpected absence of live performances. “Oh man, can I say I suffer from FOMO, like, the worst… for such a long time nobody could play a show so we were all in it together, but then as people started to find ways to trickle back on stage, I was desperate to put a tour on.” But now he’s back, and with shows on the horizon, he hints at his most exhilarating live performances yet: “It’s an almost out of body experience to finally be back on stage. It’s euphoric. I've got tours coming up at the end of the year… It's very, very exciting, and it's absolutely how it should be.”

Leap arrives 1 July via EMI.

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More about: James Bay