(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "DEATH OF LOVE")
UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL ARTIST: (Vocalizing).
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
The music of British singer James Blake seems to exist in two states at once, quiet and sincere, but with an undercurrent of bass, lush electronics and then his commanding baritone that shifts into a falsetto that takes your breath away. He's on his seventh studio album, a couple of Grammys under his belt and still wrestling with chaos.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "DEATH OF LOVE")
JAMES BLAKE: (Singing) I don't know how we got here. I think we might be sleeping. I think we might be walking to the death of love - to death. It never seemed so hard to say what you really mean when everything you have seen is from above.
SIMON: James Blake joins us now from London. Thanks so much for being with us.
BLAKE: Hi. Thanks for having me.
SIMON: We just heard a bit from the "Death Of Love." It's a haunting single.
BLAKE: Well, thank you.
SIMON: You're saying it's never seemed so hard to say what you really mean? And it never seemed so hard to wake up from your dream. What put you into the mood for this song?
BLAKE: Well, I mean, I started writing that song during pandemic - like, probably midway through it - at a time where I could feel people's empathy for each other kind of waning and potentially disappearing entirely under the weight of the chaos.
SIMON: Yeah. I remember. Then sometimes it just doesn't seem like some of that has really left us. Let me ask you about your technique, heavy bass and electronic music, and then your falsetto begins to dance. How do you play with your voice as an instrument in your music?
BLAKE: Well, as with all kind of art forms, the playing with the balance of light and dark. It's interesting you mentioned bass because bass has a kind of sort of primal effect on us.
SIMON: Yeah.
BLAKE: They say we interpret it as almost like a stampede. And it raises our arousal level in terms of, like, you know, excitement and you can sort of employ sub-bass to create excitement, but at the same time, there is something unsettling about it. So it can be used as a darker shade where maybe some kind of pleasant falsetto could be the lighter shade, or maybe a positive lyric or something like that. I mean, you see that a lot in reggae and dub.
SIMON: How do you decide when to let your voice go full throttle and when to alter it electronically?
BLAKE: That comes down to how I'm engaging with the lyric probably. And there are times when I maybe had enough of my own voice. You know, it happens...
SIMON: (Laughter).
BLAKE: ...You'd be surprised to learn. But it is a nice trick when, you know, maybe my voice is across a long period of a song, and then maybe there's no one else to sing with. So I'll just pitch my own voice up. Or there could be a section of a song or even, indeed, a whole song where it sounds closer to the truth of what I'm actually saying to pitch my voice up. I felt that in the case of "Obsession." It felt like that.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "OBSESSION")
BLAKE: (Singing) How I need it. I wouldn't change. How I want it. I wouldn't change. How I need it...
I think music, in general, is word painting. So when I'm writing songs, the way I produce them is painting those songs. So sometimes one of the techniques, one of the brushstrokes, is to mess with the format of the voice or kind of transform something that was otherwise organic into something that is less recognizable.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "OBSESSION")
BLAKE: (Singing) Obsession.
SIMON: Let's hear more from the title track, "Trying Times."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "TRYING TIMES")
BLAKE: (Singing) I'm breaking. I hide it well. 'Cause I can't afford to replace the shell. I'm an eyesore. You're a sight for sore eyes.
SIMON: That's quite a sequence. You moved back to London after a decade in LA, right?
BLAKE: That's right. Yeah. The record cover of me spinning many plates is a good encapsulation of my last couple years.
SIMON: So you're doing a lot. Is that the plates in the air?
BLAKE: You know, I'm spinning many plates, but there's a poise to the way I'm stood. And I'm also, in a way, conducting. And so there was some element of functional poise within the chaos.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "TRYING TIMES")
BLAKE: (Singing) As we go through trying times.
And I guess, in some way, that's what we've all tried to maintain, you know, since the pandemic. It has felt like things are just slowly falling off a cliff, and it's quite - you know, I can see everyone trying their best to just keep things in place.
SIMON: This is your seventh studio record. What do you learn as you go along?
BLAKE: Well, you know, part of an artist's journey is wrestling with, you know, how much do I need approval? Why am I doing this? What is the true reward of doing this? And I think those parameters shift over the course of your life and over the course of your career, and I'm lucky to have been around for a while now. And I can say that, you know, each album that goes by feels like I care less. You know, my value system becomes more aligned with my authentic self.
And I think that is a hard journey to go on. But it is rewarding when you can say, OK, I made this thing, and I genuinely love it, and I don't really care if, you know, it's not everyone's cup of tea. It's sort of just is what it is. And that, maybe, is most true on this record. So that's surely a good thing, regardless.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "MAKE SOMETHING UP")
BLAKE: (Singing) Why don't we make something up? Why don't we make something up?
SIMON: James Blake - his latest album, "Trying Times," out now. Thank you so much for being with us.
BLAKE: Thank you so much for having me.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "MAKE SOMETHING UP")
BLAKE: (Singing) Why don't we make something up? Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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