The chaos before the calm
Meet James Bay: Britain’s next big music export
In 2013, the Irish website her.ie asked British singer James Bay, then 22 years old, what artist he would most love to collaborate with. Bay, who had just released his first EP, settled on Irish singer-songwriter Hozier. “His voice is incredible, his songwriting is incredible,” Bay said. “He’s my answer.”
Two years later, Bay was asked to support the Grammy-nominated Hozier on his North American tour.
“It’s a crazy thing,” Bay says of the circumstances that have led to him progressing from pub stage performer in London to No. 1 record-selling artist — his debut album, Chaos and
the Calm, topped the charts in the U.K. when it was released March 24, and debuted in the Top 20 in the U.S. “In a lot of respects, I don’t know why that was my immediate answer. As I get deeper into all of this, you start to not really feel so far away from these people. You get kind of embarrassed about things like that. And I don’t think I’d even met him at that point.”
Bay is either the next Sam Smith, the next Hozier or simply the next big thing, depending on which publication you read. All limbs and chiselled cheekbones, he speaks humbly and seems grounded, but is quick to shoot down any notion that he’s surprised or put off by his star on the rise. “I’m being told that there’s a platform for me to get up on and deliver,” he says. “I’m burning to do that. I’m rediscovering the 14-, 15-year-old me who’d play guitar in the mirror when all my friends were sneaking to pubs, pretending to be the sixth member of the Rolling Stones. I’ve wanted this for a little while.”
Thirteen years, at least, which is about the length of time Bay has been playing guitar. He’s self-taught, and recalls the afternoon at his home in Hitchin, south England, when at 11 years old he heard the song that inspired him to pick up the instrument: “My dad was playing music downstairs and he was playing it quite loud and it was Layla, by Derek and the Dominos. It blew my little mind,” he says. “I knew at this point that we had a guitar, busted, in the spare room. I ran downstairs and said get that guitar strung up. It had wide old neck, and my hands were a lot smaller then.”
What came eventually was a move to London and a few months on the pub circuit, with Bay’s even- tual big break coming after a label exec at Republic, an American record label, saw a clip of Bay performing on YouTube. Bay, however, squirms a bit at the suggestion that he was at any point a “YouTube Sensation.” “I think something comes with that, those words,” he says. “It’s quite a specific thing. You’ ll be aware of these select few artists who have been ‘suddenly discovered’ because of their hundreds of thousands of views.”
“But it is true, though,” he says. “There was a video of me playing in a pub in London that had, honestly, somewhere between 17-22 views. They called me up — I had a manager at the time — and they said, ‘We really love this song and if it’s all right could we fly you to New York?’ ”
The 24-year-old Brit ended up recording his first album for Republic at Nashville’s legendary Blackbird Studios, under the tutelage of Grammy-winning producer Jacquire King. Bay grew up listening to soul and Motown with his mom and the titans of classic rock — Springsteen, the Stones — with his dad, but says that once he branched out on his own, he gravitated toward pop music (he cites Where Is the Love by the Black Eyed Peas as an early favourite). The confluence of influen- ces come through precisely as he describes them on Chaos and the Calm, every inch a pop record, with Bay’s strong voice and six strings taking centre stage throughout and particularly on lead single Hold Back the River.
“I had a good feeling about all of the songs,” Bay says of recording the album. A lot of them I didn’t even have demos for. I thought, I want to make these good enough songs that they come across as guitar and voice or piano and voice.”
Bay will be touring for much of the remainder of 2015, kicking off a set of gigs in the U.K. and Ireland this week before jetting around the U.S. and Canada for a month of dates that are, for the most part, sold out. Last year, a BBC interviewer pointed out that the actual James Bay, a body of water at the tip of Hudson Bay in Canada, was the top search result for Bay’s name. Twelve months later, though, Bay the human singer has taken that spot.
“I guess that’s a big part of knowing you’ve made it,” Bay laughs. “How high up you are on Google.”