Bay opens up his heart to write new album for his ‘rock’

James Bay felt he was “lying” by not writing songs about the woman who has been his partner for half his life.

The Let Her Go chart-topper has dedicated his new single Chew On My Heart and his upcoming album to his partner Lucy Smith after keeping their relationship strictly private since he became a very public pop star.

Bay said he felt it was important to acknowledge her existence in song and publicly show gratitude to the woman who has supported his career.

“I’ve realised only recently that I have let this more private detail from my life come forward into my songs and then into the narrative about this new music because it felt more forced not talking about it,” he says. “And then I say to myself, let alone to my girlfriend, ‘that’s more lying than I ever want to be doing’.

“She’s such a rock, a source of grounding and stable presence in my life throughout all of these ups and downs and I want to celebrate that.”

Bay said Smith has long been his extra pair of ears to test-run his works in progress.

So he wasn’t particularly nervous sharing Chew On My Heart or the other songs she inspired for his third album due later this year.

“I’m always a bit nervous. It’s funny, she gets to hear everything more or less. If something is exciting me and I need another pair of ears on it, it’s her,” he says.

“Eighty or 90 per cent of the time she’s ‘yeah, it’s decent, keep working, keep working’, which is the greatest thing on the planet. But on this occasion, when I showed her the demo to Chew On My Heart, we were both just dancing around because it’s such a fun song.”

Bay jokes he should have been more guarded when it came to filming the video for the song just outside of Paris. Perhaps he should have reclaimed his signature widebrimmed fedora — almost as popular as the singer himself during the campaign for his 2015 breakthrough debut album Chaos And The Calm — when the video’s director ordered him to run through fields in 35C.

“I sunburn in a second! And that wheat field looks lovely and flat but the ground beneath went up and down and up and down and I don’t know how I didn’t roll an ankle,” he says. “I’d like to think I run in a more even fashion but we didn’t capture that, it’s the gangly experience. So yes, young artists should be warned about running in videos and that you have to run faster than the quadbike with the camera that’s following you.”

Bay has been sharing his guitar skills during the pandemic shutdowns with tens of thousands of fans tuning in for his Live Lessons on Instagram.

“Social media has become a clubhouse during this time and fans were happy to get involved with the guitar sessions I’ve been doing where I’ve been showing people how I play my songs and teaching them simple, or more complex, versions,” he says. “That was all a wonderful connection to have with them.”

Chew On My Heart is out now.