James Bay

About

The best pop music is built on contradictions. It creates songs so immediate they stay with you for life. It inspires melodies that pluck one person’s heartstrings, yet can also inspire a whole stadium to move their feet. Pop is responsible for lyrics that speak directly to an individual experience while provoking total strangers to join in a communal outpouring of emotion. The greatest pop is a beautiful conundrum. It’s made by truly unique individuals like Bowie or The Beatles, Elvis or Aretha, yet soundtracks whole swathes of time. It’s impossible to imagine the world without hearing certain pop songs in your head. It’s art; it’s product; it’s style and substance, because in the rare instances when pop truly manages to balance its contradictions and marry its opposites, truly unique music emerges. Creating his second album, ‘Electric Light’, James Bay is not only aware of the precarious equilibrium needed to succeed in this pop world, but he’s determinedly embraced the challenge head on. He does have an advantage though, because the Hitchin-born singer-songwriter is something of a pop paradox himself… the best kind. Raised on a music diet of Eric Clapton and Michel Jackson as a child, he was a blues purist in his teenage years, served his musical apprenticeship as an open-mic troubadour and then emerged with a series of a heart-swelling pop songs like ‘Let It Go’ and ‘Hold Back The River’ as he made his debut with 2015 album ‘Chaos And The Calm’. Immediate anthems, the tracks were beautifully recorded in Nashville, earning their creator Grammy nominations, an Ivor Novello award, a nod from GQ, plus recognition that took him from wins in best new act categories in 2015 to triumphs as best solo/ male artists the following year at both the Q Awards and the BRITS. Yet when Bay took his music on the road his songs proved more than just trophy pieces, but beating, brilliant, vibrant moments that got audiences both pumping the air… and shedding a tear. There were sell o

Artists

• James Bay
• Hunter Metts

Sources

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