“对不起，我们在这里挖掘了大量挖掘，采访还没有开始……”
For the last five minutes,James Bay一直在告诉我们所有关于他与金箔拾音器的陷入困境的关系，发现了一个和谐，上面装满了最独特的拾音器supposed大约是31岁的英国人，格莱美奖提名的英国吉他手的新唱片，飞跃。
After enthusiastically trading tales of gold foils we’ve loved and particularly, Bay’s ShyBoy T-style loaded with aLollar标本，他只是意识到采访还没有开始，他已经被带走了吉他。是的，朋友，詹姆斯湾可能是一位beh徒，英俊的流行歌手，热门歌曲困扰着世界各地的排行榜，但他毫不犹豫地毫无疑问我们中的一员。
如果you want any further evidence that James Bay is a bona fide guitar obsessive, we’re straight into talking about the墨菲实验室莱斯·保罗he’s just got,吉布森的upturn in quality since coming under new ownership since 2019, and the thorny issue of artificial ageing.
“It’s unbelievable,” Bay enthuses of his singlecut-squeeze. “I was romanced, like a total simpleton, by the knackerdness! I got the most heavy relic’d one and even that helped me love humbuckers. I still have it, I play it on tour, it’s just gorgeous.” he pauses and laughs as he realises we’re now 10 minutes in and not one word has been said about this album he’s supposed to be promoting. “Well… what a lovely digression that was!”
熄灯
曾经有一段时间，他的一些粉丝会质疑这种吉他 - 击倒是否仍然是一个海湾感兴趣的。当然，胡说八道，但这是人们在发行专辑时就会得出的愚蠢结论电灯。Bay的大二努力是对所有其他音乐流派的风格左转，无论是否里面有吉他 - 从嘻哈音乐和R＆B到Electropop and Soul。批评家和粉丝都被这种大胆的创意选择两极化，NME描述为“more like a lush, exploratory mixtape than a coherent album”.
可以说，这不是湾所希望的那种反应。现在，凭借他四年的反思，他能够阐述自己对自己认为是一场大胆而令人兴奋的创意赌博的回应后感到自信的危机。
他反映：“这是一个艰难的时期，很难谈论。”“但是我喜欢各种音乐。我爱老灵魂，我爱新流行音乐，我喜欢最真实的摇滚乐。我喜欢90年代英国流行吉他开始发生的一切……我喜欢很多不同的声音。而且我认为任何艺术家都在试图将它们引导到他们创造的任何东西中，我只是不想将自己局限于一维。但是我想知道这种适得其反吗？”
适当的标题飞跃then, is another jump into the unknown, but one made with the confidence and assurance of someone who has learned from the past.
“I think I’m starting to mature and settle with myself on what is me, and what I should maybe leave to my heroes,” he admits. “And I got caught up in bits of imposter syndrome in all of that, but I’d say to myself like, ‘What if what I’m doing just isn’t me?’ or, ‘What if I’m just not doing something that I really wanna do?’ And anxiety came in, and insecurity became a bigger issue and then imposter syndrome involved itself.
“我是表演者。我是口译员。我本可以写很多关于我对此感到多么悲伤的悲伤歌曲。但是相反，我选择跟随这种悲伤的一部分旅程，然后找出每首歌中如何举起自己并探索什么使我失望的原因。并喜欢与听众分享这一点，因为那是我希望我们都可以联系的地方。这就是我们在音乐中都在寻找的东西 - 我们与之联系的位。”
飞跃forward
飞跃is an album that feels at the same time a sensible rediscovery of what made Bay a Grammy-nominated rising star with 2014’sThe Chaos And The Calm, but also a refreshing subversion of the classic tropes of blues and rock ‘n’ roll that can so often leave artists boxed in. After all, how many brooding bluesmen have you heard singing songs in appreciation of being happy and comfortable in a relationship, or celebrating the serene joy of being a new parent?
“ Rock'n'Roll植根于蓝调，而布鲁斯音乐则植根于悲伤。我受到所有这些的启发。但是我的现实不是，“因为我的孩子离开了我……”贝解释说。“我他妈的喜欢那种音乐，从12岁起，我就虔诚地听了它，我一直试图beit in some way or another.
“这就是为什么对我来说很自然的原因，很长一段时间来写悲伤的歌。但是这一次，当我撕毁了我通常喜欢创作的规则手册时，我决定给自己机会从与之打交道的所有内容中写作。因为悲伤有波浪。焦虑。男人仍然不允许完全开放并表达的事情。但是在这种情况下，我不想被它完全击败并完全忧郁！我不希望这首歌开始和结束，这是一件可悲的事情。
“我在这方面推动了歌词和写作的界限，并促使自己试图庆祝写作，一生中的事物和人民，使我摆脱了悲伤，摆脱焦虑和不安全感。我想我继续在吉他演奏中回荡。有一个亮度，充满活力，我为此感到自豪，我希望它能引起人们的共鸣。”
But just because he’s trying to put a more positive and affirmative spin on the classic recipe of rock ‘n’ roll doesn’t mean that he thinks everyone should – far from it.
“你仍然有你的Greta Van Fleets和Måneskins, these acts that in 2022 say, ‘We’re traditional rock ‘n’ roll!’ And I’ll say, ‘Great stuff mate – go for it! Do your thing!’ And I’m very happy for them. But I’m trying to be honest with myself,” he reflects.
“If you go back to the 60s and the 70s,Led Zeppelin或者石头, the most honest thing they could do was break as fast and hard out of the confines of the nice haircuts of the time, and the sensible dress of the time – by wearing all those colours and letting their hair grow long.
“And in 2022 I feel like maybe it could be just as rock ‘n’ roll for me to be inspired by all of that posturing – and absolutely I am – but try and stay honest to who I am inside emotionally. To let that shine through, still make that same kind of music, still pick up that guitar and still want to call it rock ‘n’ roll.”
纳什维尔会议
As part of his desire to get back to making rock ‘n’ roll, Bay returned to Nashville, site ofThe Chaos And The Calm’s sessions to record飞跃, but this time he would team up with the city’s hottest producer Dave Cobb, who welcomed him into the hallowed halls of his home at RCA’s legendary Studio A. And it didn’t take long for Cobb to remind Bay of exactly what it means to record in such an iconic room.
贝回忆说：“我们进入工作室只是闲逛并'拥抱空间'。”“我说，‘那么他们在戴夫（Dave）还做了什么？’他就像，‘好吧，在1975年多莉·帕顿（Dolly Parton）came into this studio and in about three hours she laid down,乔琳， 和I Will Always Love You’。就像没什么大不了的！哦，很棒的戴夫 - 让我们记录下来。他妈的！”
迄今为止，科布（Cobb）凭借他的八场格莱美奖获胜，显然知道如何从与他合作的艺术家中获得最好的作用，并为Bay带来了一些涉及一些温柔的哄骗，以将他赶出以流行为中心的舒适区。
“I love all these old records from decades ago, where they didn’t press go on a click-track or a metronome, and the drummer counted them in,” he explains. “And I talk a big game as to how much I love that, but I try to operate from a standpoint that my music will hopefully go on the radio today as well! It’s harder than ever to record music like that in the old style and get it on the radio, but Dave was like, ‘Y’know, if you’re gonna say you love it so much we’ve got to give it a shot!’ And it was frightening! The pop side of my brain was like, ‘Oh god!’ Even afterwards, coming away from it I’d listen back and I was like ‘Ahh I’m not sure!’ Now I’m glad.”
Bay left RCA Studio A just as the pandemic was becoming a real and scary thing, thinking he had a completed album under his belt. But the following months of isolation and stagnation led him to do something rather radical – he culled roughly half of the Nashville-produced tracks for numbers he’d written in isolation, recorded at home with the aid of remote collaborators from around the world.
贝解释说：“因为我无法释放它，所以我做了很多写作。”“我在2020年底写了新歌，整个2021年都击败了一些最初的歌曲。我从来没有这样做 - 我会neverwant to do it like that again! But I am sort of proud. It forced me to tear up the rule book and face the times that we were all living in. And I decided to make a record, and let it be an example of how we were living and how I was having to make a record. So that in 10 years, in 20 years, if anyone asks I can say, ‘Well, it sounds like that because this is what was happening in the world.’
“这让我想起了何时Bob Dylan说：“您必须写有关时代的文章，您必须为自己生活的时代制作音乐。”而且我认为我肯定创造了一张唱片，就像2020年初以来不同时刻的拼贴画，直到2021年底 - 我们一直在我们度过的时间。我为此感到非常自豪。”
Bay合作在专辑中合作的人之一就是Finneas - 兄弟，合着者和地球上最大的流行歌星的制片人，比利·埃里什（Billie Eilish）。正如您所期望的那样，Bay很高兴将他的茎移到Pop最重要的合作者中，并让他发疯，但实际上Finneas比他预期的要多得多。
“It was an interesting experience,” he reflects. “It was wonderful, but his opening gambit when we started to talk was, ‘Hey man, I’m a fan of yours!’ Which is flattering, although he made me feel very old. Because back when I first went to the Grammys, I was in town for a week before doing press and promo, and I did a thing where I sat in front of an audience of about a hundred people and talked about the songs, the making of my first album, and played. And he told me he was in the audience as a fan, like, ‘Yeah man, I was in college!’ and I was, ‘Fuck you’re young…’
But it helped me understand why, when I sent him the guitar part for that song, he left it alone? It almost felt like he was handling it a little bit as a fan? He kinda, Finneas’d around it! He was like, ‘No that’s good, I don’t know why I’m touching that! And then he put a load of great Finneas stuff around it which I really respected. It was flattering that he wanted to treat it that way, because he is quite a visionary in his own right. And I love how it fell together.”
我型jag
It’s been a minute since we’ve had a guitar-related digression, hasn’t it? Okay, okay, he’s been trying to talk about a very special guitar he met in RCA Studio A for ages now, but we keep asking him about other things – but we can restrain our subject no longer.
“Dave had this battered 1963挡泥板Jag – really battered up.” Bay explains of the most memorable guitar he used on飞跃。“He hadn’t had it for long, and he said he hadn’t really given it a run-around yet, but I loved the look of it. But it was fun to muck around with that, but on one particular song, I plugged it to a Jazz Chorus and it sounded so fucking cool. We loved it, and I said, ‘I think this is the sound…’ and Dave was like, ‘I爱that sound!’
“因此，我们进行了一次跑步的态度，戴夫（Dave）采取了那种老式的方法，‘那就是！’我就像，‘哇。哇。As the guy that likes to do ten takes, can we at least do a second?’ And he’s cool with it, he sits in the room with the band and he plays a shaker or a tambourine, and we run through it again and, ‘Oh my god, it sounded great – to this day it’s one of my favourite memories of the sessions, just playing the take through.’ But then we finished, he put his tambourine down and said, ‘That’s the take… and that’s your guitar now.’
“I was like, ‘Are you joking me?’ He was like, ‘You have to have it. You have to take it home. You sound so fucking good playing it.’ I was like, ‘Mate, but this is your 1963 Fender Jag!’ And he’s like, ‘Nope! As long as you promise me you’ll play it live you’ve got to keep it.’
“But the funniest part is, as I said, he hadn’t owned it very long, and as he was telling me this, I was holding the guitar in my hands, turning it around, looking at it, and I noticed something on the neck plate. The previous owners of this guitar had been scratching names into plate, with like a key or something, and there were two legible names there – someone had scratched the name ‘James’ and someone had scratched the name, ‘Dave’.
“And Dave got well spooked by this! He’s a beautiful man and he’s quite a religious dude, and he got quite freaked out because he hadn’t clocked this, having not owned this guitar for very long, and living in a studio with 100 guitars. And they had last names that went with them, but they’d fucked them up, you couldn’t really read those. It was unbelievable. I was like, ‘Dave do you know this is here?’ He was so freaked out, It was like some weird magic trick. But that’s the sort of mad shit that only happens when you’re in Dave Cobb’s studio in Nashville!”
吉他星
如果飞跃is a return to doing what he does best as a songwriter and as a guitar player, it’s still not what you might term as a showy guitar album. As an alumnus of Brighton’s prestigious BIMM school of guitar, we know he’s got the chops – and indeed he’s been known to let them out in a live environment – so what gives?
“I’ve increasingly become more and more of the guitar player that I’ve always wanted to be, live,” he admits. “Now that’s live. On a record, it’s still subtle as far as guitar playing goes. It’s chords and it’s parts, and it’s little riffs here and there – it’s not a lot of lead parts and stuff like that.”
我们想知道，是否不想看起来像是您炫耀或吸引自己过多的关注的古老的英国感觉？
“You’re a Brit man, you know,” he chuckles, shaking his head. “Let’s be completely honest, we love our American influences – our guitar kings and queens and all that. But we find it a little bit harder to sort of… thrust our hips out, guitar forward!
“但是，就像，我在专辑《三》 - 专辑四角拐角处……这只是时间问题！Fuckin’ Daryl, the engineer at RCA Studio A, kept saying to me all the time – and obviously he’s an American – but he was like, ‘When are you going to play some solos?!’ And there’s a little acoustic guitar solo at the end of one of the tracks where I go all今晚真美好…” he picks up his acoustic and plays some deft runs almost apologetically. “And even now I’m like, ‘Oh god!’”
It’s a pity, because it’s abundantly clear that James Bay is a热屎吉他手，我们甚至都没有看到他被割开。
他笑着说：“我很感激这种认可，我确实如此。”“而且我觉得专辑四是时候了，我很期待。我不知道我该如何工作，因为我仍然不想使它变得非常明显。我很佩服约翰·梅尔写他的独奏。你知道我喜欢即兴创作，但是如果你去看林纳德·史金纳德玩自由的鸟, for example you want it note for note. Or y’know, the slide part at the end of莱拉- 您想要那笔漂亮的笔记，我认为没有太多其他空间。
“因此，我想我会尽量不要过分放松，我会尽力保持它的吸引力，而不仅仅是空的舔。因为不幸的是，作为一个爱他们的人，我认为它们也确实存在。您必须小心。但是我将尝试找到一种方法。我知道我在那里有吉他手粉丝！有时候，感觉就像我们俩都在保密！如果他们来到我的表演中，他们会在女友后面令人讨厌，我想，‘不，不，不！挺身而出！让我告诉你这个！让我们怪胎！”
飞跃7月8日在EMI记录/共和国。