By Lanie Brice
James Bay is quite the storyteller. With a mischievous half-grin and a glint in his eye that promises a memorable statement, he eases into a tale saying, “I’m gonna recount a bit of a story.” What follows is a picture of Ed Sheeran, fresh off the European leg of the Divide Tour standing nearly naked in the kitchen. In 2019, a year that had been difficult for Bay, one of the bright spots was a summer stadium tour with Ed Sheeran. “We finished the tour in Iceland,” he remembers, “where summer is about, in American numbers, 40 degrees. It’s not a warm process, summer in Iceland.”
He continues setting the scene for the late night adventure recalling that the house Sheeran was staying at had a driveway “like ten minutes long” that Bay and his crew visited for a celebratory end of tour party. “I was standing in the kitchen,” he continues, pausing and staring off into space as he describes Sheeran materializing in the kitchen before snapping his attention back to the computer screen to deliver the line, “in his underwear.” At that point, Sheeran announced that it was time to get in the lake. “It was dark outside. I said, ‘What? What lake?’” They went back and forth about the temperature and the darkness for a minute. “It was very fucking cold,” he assures us before revealing that he gave in, stripped, and ran for the lake as well.
“It was so unbelievably cold that I think my heart burst out of my chest for a second,” he says. “It was just the greatest feeling ever.” Though somewhat disconnected from the rest of the discussion that day, this anecdote captures much of the energy bottled into Leap and freeze frames Bay’s mysterious charm that filters through into his music.
That story also comes from the lengthy period of time between his 2018 album Electric Light and brand new release, Leap. The world has undeniably shifted since 2018, and while there have been wonderful, endless nights like the one above, there’s also been a global pandemic and personal mental health struggles for Bay. I had to inquire as to how he’s seen his perspective shift because of these events in the interim.
The largest looming factor is the pandemic and subsequent lockdowns which only further connected Bay with his love and appreciation for being both a touring and performing musician, reminding him not to take the opportunity for-granted. On a more personal note, he mentions, “I had a baby in that time. We had a little daughter called Ada who is the absolute light of our lives and that certainly threw all sorts of other stuff into perspective. It’s the most overwhelmingly euphoric and kind of terrifying experience in all the best ways.” He found growth and evolution in the empty spaces. He found himself suddenly set on, “Trying to make tomorrow different to yesterday in my work and in my life for the sake of variety, damn it,” he laughs.
In how those personal shifts have manifested in his work between the albums, he looks back on having starkly different goals for Electric Light. “Electric Light was about pushing boundaries. Let’s push, let’s change, let’s evolve. Let’s see what I haven’t tapped into yet. And I felt like it was a duty of mine to show I wasn’t just one thing,” he shares about creating Leap’s predecessor. In contrast, he found himself relaxing on Leap while still striving to make deep, powerful connections both within himself and with the listener. “I took my foot off the gas of evolution, and… I just let myself be more drawn to what felt more effortless.”
Part of that process of change and trying a new approach also came in embracing co-writing and finding joy and excitement in getting to walk into a writer’s room without a book of pre-formulated songs. Instead, he focused on building from scratch with his trusted co-writers. One of the bigger name collaborations on the album, though, came about in a classically music business way. I asked Bay how he decided to connect with Finneas to produce the song, “Save Your Love.”
“We were right deep in the middle of lockdowns of all kinds in all corners of the world, and I’ve not met Finneas before,” Bay reveals about the environment of the collaboration. It mostly came together via emails and Zoom calls after Bay’s A&R representative connected with Finneas’s manager about working on the song. After Finneas heard the iPhone voice note of finished song because, “All musicians and producers, they love the rawest form available if they can have it,” he agreed to work on the project to give it the finishing touch Bay was still searching for.
Through the collaboration, Bay also discovered that Finneas was a longtime fan having seen Bay perform in 2016 during a Grammy event while Finneas was still a high schooler. “Fuck, that makes me feel so old,” Bay laughs while sharing this discovery. But Finneas went on to share his enthusiasm for the project and the chance to collaborate. “I just wanted to follow his lead cause me doing me right is always gonna sound similar… he kinda finneas’d it in the ways we know and love.”
Aside from bringing in fresh voices to push past sticking points in the project, Bay also found inspiration in books, particularly a quote from John Burroughs that reads, “Leap and the net will appear.” Discovering that quote created a “turning point in the writing” after struggling with mental health issues around anxiety and “something on the borders of depression” throughout 2019. “Like the first time you hear a song that will be your favorite song or the first time you witness your favorite movie… the line, the quote, the words… sort of hit me like that. It inspired a jolt of lightning through me and sat me up,” Bay recalls. The quote offered a sudden clarity after a long period of haze.
Ultimately, though, this music doesn’t dwell in the sadness and frustration Bay was experiencing during the early stages of the album. Though the songs were made in conversation those struggles, Bay intends for this music to be a tool people can, “use to stay hopeful.” “A lot of these songs I was writing, I was making music from an emotionally dark and sad place, and I’ve done that before in the past. To some degree I’ve become like, not known for sad songs, but almost. On this occasion, I was very intentionally trying to push that boundary and change that, or just, sort of, evolve it,” Bay says. He ultimately landed on creating “anthems on hope.” Eventually, he made it to a place where he felt confident in giving the music to the world, satisfied on the balance of themes. “I hope I don’t find out in hindsight that any of these songs are intensely sad,” he adds as an aside.
Another major part of Bay’s journey in creating Leap has been moving away from a fixation on sonics and towards pushing his own boundaries lyrically. “It’s not as scary to be more vulnerable with my lyric writing,” Bay discovered in reflection, saying that the realization has allowed him to go to, “a new depth of reality in regards of what I say in my songs. 99 percent of my songs are written from very personal experience.”
This creates a marked contrast with his earlier albums where he worked to frame his lyrics in an “abstract” way. “I was always afraid to just say it,” Bay says. Eventually, he realized that stating his experiences and emotions plainly can even improve his connection with his listeners, something that he sees as a central tenant to why music is important. During Leap, he was able to free himself from the anxiety of finding the perfect descriptive word, metaphor, or lyrical flourish to simply lay out the story exactly as it needed to be told.
Bay finds the central message of the album a reminder he often needs as well – that it’s important to find ways to keep your chin up and have hope in the face of hard times. “Whether a day sucks or it really, really sucks, ‘cause sometimes they really do,” Bay says, “there’s tomorrow.” In each answer, he always takes his reflections on the album back to a place of not only sharing what he’s learned but creating his own antidote. “I needed it, so I wanted to share it.”
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