Five albums in ten years, five masterpieces. Author, producer, composer, performer, multi-instrumentalist: 33-year-old British James Blake has become one of the beacons of contemporary music. From its inaugural James Blake, this classically trained musician has turned the international electronic scene upside down with his ultra-sensitivity. James Blake’s music has the power to establish a kind of shared intimacy with his audience. Each piece is a half-open door on the faults of the artist where the listener is invited to penetrate.
Guided by a sometimes crystalline, sometimes robotic voice, the audience plunges to the rhythm of minimalist sounds into the depths of its melancholy, where vulnerability is exalted. “With a good chord progression and lyrics, you can launch a time capsule that someone else can share and then experience the same feeling.“, he explains on France Inter. In short, a romantic like William Blake, British painter of the 19th century who will inspire his stage name. Very committed to issues related to mental health, James Blake often expresses himself on this subject and even participated in the writing of an essay published in It’s Not OK to Feel Blue by Scarlett Curtis.
The talent of James Blake is not limited to his suave voice and his planing melodies, the Briton recently installed in Los Angeles is a nugget of the generation of “bedroom producers”, these producers who work independently in a DIY studio in residence. His first two albums, James Blake and Overgrown – this one which will earn him the prestigious Mercury Music Prize – were recorded in their entirety within the four walls of his London apartment.
Since then, the prodigy producer has collaborated with the cream of the rap and R’n’B scene. Beyoncé, Jay-Z, Kendrick Lamar, Frank Ocean, André 3000 from the duo Outkast or Rosalia, to name but a few. Experiences that leave beautiful sonic imprints in Friends That Break Your Heart, his last album with a production much more rap than the previous ones. Ten tracks to discover this unclassifiable, on display at the Rock en Seine Festival this Friday, August 26.
1Piano or guitar?
“Emotions, raw or sensitive, can only pass through the guitar, look for example at my hero Hendrix! The problem is that the guitar is very often mistreated, played by losers. For me, in comparison, a keyboard is clear and clean, mathematical, the white notes, the black notes, it very quickly spoke to my Cartesian mind, to my logic…”, he explains to the Inrocks dating from 2013.
2A first memory in music?
“It seems almost ridiculous to say that I had plans to be a musician when I was three years old. But my first memory was of singing (Sittin On) The Dock Of The Bay by Otis Reading, or trying to sing at the age of three in the bath. I can’t quite say the words, but you can hear me continually trying to do things right, which is unusual, it’s almost like I was born a perfectionist, recalls the Briton in an interview published in GRM Daily.
3Victim of school bullying
“I think when you’re in school, they really will find any reason [pour t’intimider]. It’s kind of blind in a way. Discrimination is blind. Jhad my heart on my sleeve. I was an easy target. I was a little weird and I think I didn’t really fit in, he admits to electronic music magazine EDM. I remember growing up, I had Tourette-like tics and all sorts of things that probably didn’t help. Things that I managed to get rid of later. But there were so many ways to pick on me back then.” (laughs).
4Less is more
“To achieve the simplicity of my songs, I go through a phase of extreme complexity. Then I just remove, layer after layer, note after note… My ideal music, it speaks to your harmonic sensibility in a roundabout way Like with Satie: he uses unconventional ways, but leads you to your destination, always. I like to use this kind of unusual vocabulary to say very human things. I curse the laziness of so many musicians who are content to use hackneyed formulas, to recycle the same Apple sounds… They seem difficult, but I have never left frustrated or distraught after such and such a piece of Satie or Talk Talk”. says James Blake in The Inrocks.
5Music is other people
“For a long time I looked at people like Kendrick and Adele – these people who sold millions of records – and I put myself in another category. I thought, well, they can achieve greatness and be recognized worldwide, but it’s not something that I’m going to be able to achieve. People come to me for weird ideas and I’m fine with that. Then when I worked with Beyoncé on Lemonade, it was a great moment for me. It made me realize that I could be accessible to a wider audience, and that’s not a bad thing. It’s actually a good thing, because Lemonade is a great album. If I can be included in this, then maybe it recontextualizes me“, he confides to the American musical magazine The Fader.
6Break away from electronic tools
“When I first became famous, a lot of people made a big fuss about me doing everything with a laptop. I was basically doing DIY music [do it yourself ou fait maison]. No engineer or big studio or that sort of thing. But it actually affected me quite a bit – having my whole career run from this computer. Staring at that screen all day takes away your…I really felt like a robot at the end of a session. And it really affected my ability to socialize.” tells James Blake to an EDM reporter. (…) “Anyway, when kids or other people now ask me what they should use to make music, I just say go DAW-free. [ensemble d’outils électroniques qui traitent numériquement un son]. try something else (laughs). Don’t do what I did”.
7Pieces forming fragments of the past
“Some of these songs are pretty raw”he blurts out to the magazine ID about the live performance of songs from his latest album Friends That Break Your Heart. “I’m discouraged from playing [ndlr: les morceaux] because they almost take me back to when I wrote them and how I felt then, and I find that quite difficult. That’s probably a side of songwriting that doesn’t get talked about much – how hard it can be to go back and sing some of that stuff. As cathartic as they were to write, they sometimes become inevitable, immortalized fragments of your past.”
8Fun first
“Who will be on your album? That’s the kind of question I hate the most.”he said. “I just want to make really good music and work with people that I have fun with. Now I don’t do a session if I think it’s not going to be fun. If I’m not going to laugh or have fun, I don’t see the point of it”, he admitted in September 2021 to the magazine QG. “I’ll never make the mistake of putting a song on a record that doesn’t necessarily feel good to me again.“, he swears a little lower.
“I’m not going to name names, but there have been times when I’ve thought back to a process and thought, ‘Wasn’t that fun. Then I have to play the song live or whatever and I don’t want to because she was steeped in that. It’s funny how the songs carry the energy of past sessions.”
9Deconstructing clichés of masculinity
“We’re supposed to be people who express their feelings. We’ve always stood the test of time. So the idea that this is new and men are going limp and blah blah, that’s bullshit. People have always did that […] I think we have to protect people who are honest in their hearts, they are the last to stand. Rappers who talk about their depression and are open about their feelings set a pattern for hip-hop in general and all other genres of rap.” defends the singer in the interview from GRM Daily.
10Raising awareness about the mental health of artists
“I know a lot of bands that have really stayed on the road. I don’t think it’s helped anyone, other than financially – and I think one of the things you learn after a bunch of touring is that money is useless if you go home and you don’t have anyone you can spend it on,” sensitized James Blake at the Performing Arts Medicine Association (PAMA) annual conference in 2018, he who saw the birth of his depression during a tour at the start of his career.
“We are the generation that has seen several other generations of musicians turn to drugs and turn to excesses and the coping mechanisms that destroyed them. And there are so many personalities who have recently taken their own lives. So we have, I think, a responsibility to talk about it and end that stigma.” he added.