James Bay says his latest music is his most personal to date

31-year-old singer James Bay says his latest music is his most personal to date

“I think the lyrics and the vulnerability are where I’ve pushed the boundaries the most on this record and it’s a new kind of very personal song-writing,”

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“A lot of my drive is rooted in pushing boundaries. I think I did that sonically on the second album because it was so different from my debut. I didn’t think as much about the sonics on the EP: I just tried to strip the songs right back to do something different again. That project was therapy for me. We all go through down moments and I went through one around that time. I needed to work some of that out and express it creatively, so that’s what that EP was all about.

The ‘Hold Back the River’ hitmaker – who became a dad in October to a daughter called Ada – now feels as though he’s got his life back on track having reflected on a turbulent experience prompted James to write the song ‘Everybody Needs Someone’.

James Bay admits to ‘losing himself’ on tour in 2019 and confessed to having a difficult time. He shared: “To be really f honest with you, I lost myself a bit.

“I’m going back to 2019, I was rolling around the world, I got invited on tour with Ed Sheeran and I was having a nice time on the surface.

“But inside I felt weird and I did some writing and it was all a bit of a blur.

“When I was feeling weird I was feeling lonely and I felt like I couldn’t connect with anybody. It’s a difficult thing.”

He added: “A whole load of other stuff happened in the last couple of years – I had a baby, that’s beautiful.

“It’s a rollercoaster ride. Everybody backstage that I know quite well, I’ve bored them to tears with stories and pictures. It’s a crazy beautiful thing.”

Meanwhile, James previously expressed his support for small music venues in the UK.

The singer fears for the future of some venues because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

He said: “The music industry in the 21st century is very online: we’ve seen ‘bedroom artists’ and we’ve seen people explode onto the scene from a blog, a YouTube channel more or less overnight.

“But at some point in their journey, they need to get onto stage to develop their performance. The industry would fall apart without such venues to cultivate emerging artists, turning good artists into great ones.”

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Dan Dunn

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