An interview with John Oates: The new album, 'The Masked Singer' appearance, Daryl Hall+John Oates memories, more

John Oates’ new digital album is out now at streaming services. The veteran singer/guitarist’s strongest studio effort to date, Oates often delves into soulful groove rock and R&B territory after recent forays into acoustic folk and Americana.

As the creative other half of Daryl Hall + John Oates - the rock era’s most successful duo with 11 gold or platinum studio albums and 22 top 20 singles on the Billboard Hot 100 (six reached the pole position) – Oates co-wrote major hits like “She’s Gone,” “Sara Smile,” “You Make My Dreams,” “I Can’t Go for That (No Can Do),” “Maneater” and “Out of Touch.” Oates also contributed vital harmonies, guitar, and occasional lead vocals (“How Does it Feel to Be Back,” “Possession Obsession”) across 18 albums and a 54-year music partnership.

For the eponymous album, John Oates co-produced with David Kalmusky (Journey, Keith Urban) and Sam Bergeson (Blake Shelton, Gwen Stefani). Featured vocalists include Grammy-nominated R&B artist Devon Gilfillian and Wendy Moten, a “The Voice” runner-up, with Tim McGraw & Faith Hill tours and past Oates studio sessions to her credits.

Last August, Oates finished a brief tour at The Troubadour in West Hollywood that was livestreamed via volume.com (check the website for on demand replay). He plans to add more scattered shows, possibly in late fall, and then next February in Florida associated with appearances at the sold out Rock Legends Cruise XIII.

“I don’t really like to go on tour where I’m out for long periods of time,” Oates admits. “The reality is, where I’m at in my life, my age and everything like that, I want to be at my best when I play. I can’t just be out there on the road living in hotels anymore.”

Oates checked in from a tour stop in Connecticut. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Q: Since some of the Oates tracks were previously available for streaming, how did you go about deciding which ones to include on the album?

John Oates: Over the last 15 years, I’ve been working in Nashville and working in the Americana/acoustic roots music lane…When I did the Reunion album (in 2024), it felt like the culmination of all those years of work. The players on it were people who supported me when I first came to Nashville - Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas, Jim Lauderdale, Bela Fleck, Sierra Hull, Guthrie Trap - all these incredible Americana-oriented musicians. They were all on the record and I felt like it was really the best expression of that.

It was time to do something else. I have a lot of influences, and I love all sorts of styles. Urban R&B and vintage soul are part of my musical DNA. [First], I did the song “Pushin’ a Rock.” Then I did a song with Devon Gilfillian, a Philadelphia R&B singer and a young guy who’s really great. I met him in Nashville, and we really hit it off. When we wrote and performed and recorded “Mending” together, it turned me on. It just got me really excited. I said, ‘You know what? This feels really good. This feels like a place to go for me.’

I [could] take a step and still stay in my wheelhouse because it’s all stuff that I’m comfortable with, but I kept it on the sidelines. That was the catalyst. It really made me [continue], and then I started writing like a madman. I wrote all sorts of songs. Then I looked back and I saw songs like ‘Get Your Smile On,’ ‘Pushin’ a Rock,’ songs that were, as you said, previously released. The songs all worked together and had that vibe. Between the older material that I pulled back in and the newer stuff I was writing, the album came together very quickly.

Q: The version of “Pushin’ a Rock” on your 2014 album Good Road to Follow was quite different.

John Oates: Can I tell you a quick story about that?

Q: Go right ahead.

John Oates: I wrote that with Nathan Paul Chapman, who produced the early Taylor Swift material (the multiple Grammy-winner also produced, written, or played on albums by Michael Buble, Keith Urban, John Fogerty, Lady A, Lionel Richie).

He and I wrote that and to be honest with you, I always thought the lyrics were great, but I never felt the music stood up to the quality of the lyrics. Then during COVID, I had a lot of time on my hands. I started looking at all my material and things I had in the can.

I listened to it again. And during COVID, that song sounded even more appropriate and timely. I started messing around with the music because I really thought the lyrics were great. I called Nathan and said, ‘I’d love to do a revised version of this song.’ He said,’ Sure, give it a try.’ And I did. When I sent it to him, the response was, ‘That’s the way it always should have sounded.’ That really made me feel good…it fits so well with what I’m doing now.

Q: While listening to these songs, I was really impressed by the use of your falsetto on “Pushin’ a Rock,” “Away’s Away” and elsewhere. How do you keep your voice in such great shape these days?

John Oates: I’m a natural singer. I know how to sing and how to save my voice. Again, it gets back to what we spoke about earlier about doing too many shows. It’s a muscle and I have to be careful. I’ve learned how to use it and how to sing, and I've started to do much more falsetto because it’s part of this musical DNA that I have.

Going back to my influences, people like Curtis Mayfield and the [late 1960s-70s] Philly [sound] stuff, used a lot of falsetto singing and it’s pretty prominent there. I haven’t featured my falsetto much in the [recent] past. I thought, ‘This feels like I’m making a connection to my musical influences.

Q: “Enough is Enough,” your collaboration with young NYC soul-pop duo Lawrence is a standout on the new album and has such an ebullient vibe with the horn section and everything. I could listen to it on endless repeat. You were so impressed by their sound that you tried to write a song like them, right?

John Oates: Exactly. I got on a roll to write a lot of new material to add to the existing material. I was at my place in Colorado, in writing mode, looking for inspiration. I started listening to Lawrence and felt a kinship with them in terms of [how] they’re from New York, they’re a pop group, they're great writers, great singers, and great instrumentalists. They don’t use samples. They don’t use [prerecorded] tracks [onstage].

They’re really a new version of old school and I love that. It appealed to me. I also liked the joy and energy that I felt coming from their music. I really felt like I needed to write something that maybe could have that same type of joy and energy, you know?

Q: Yeah.

John Oates: I started writing and came up with the song, ‘Enough is Enough.’ It started sounding like them and seemed to have their vibe. Then when I got to the second verse, I didn’t have any really good lyrics. I couldn’t come up with anything decent. I looked at their songs and (2021’s) ‘Don’t Lose Sight’ seemed to be talking about the same thing that I was, except it was their version. The gist of their lyric was about frustration with the music business. The gist of my lyric was frustration with the place where I was in my life. I cobbled together some lyrics from their song and stuck them into my second verse.

Then I said, ‘I’m not going to steal their words, obviously, so I reached out to them through some mutual friends and.sent it to them. I said, ‘Listen, I want to give you a share of the publishing and we’ll do a share of the co-writing, whatever it takes. But I really like the way this is working and if you like it, I’d love to collaborate with you.’ They did and it was awesome.

I cut the track in Nashville with my guys and did my part. Then we went to New York and brought Clyde and Gracie (Lawrence) into the studio. It was really cool, being at the new Hit Factory, which was like completing a circle in a lot of ways. That’s the place Daryl and I started recording in New York in the late Seventies…I hadn’t recorded in New York in ages. There was a lot of good juju there.

Q: Did collaborating with younger artists like Lawrence, Devon Gilfillian and Sam Burgeson on this album provide a creative spark for you?

John Oates: Yeah. I collaborate with a lot of people. Over the years, what I found was - and I don’t mean to say this in a negative way - but every time I would collaborate with someone in my same age area, or who is drawing from the same kind of influences that I do - it always seemed a bit stifled and almost like we were treading water.

But every time I’d collaborate with younger artists, they would bring a different point of view, a different set of references. I would bring experience and some other things that they might not really have. It seemed to work, so I began to really seek out younger artists and songwriters. It’s just fun.

Q: The two Latin-tinged songs on the album provide a pleasant change of pace. What prompted you to do them?

John Oates: They are both outliers, songs that I had in the can that I really wanted people to hear. ‘Bajo La Luz, De La Luna” (Translation: ‘In the Sun, Under the Moonlight’) was specifically written for the film ‘Gringa’ directed by a friend of mine. He asked if I’d contribute some music, and I did. That was one of the songs I contributed. I just dipped into my high school Spanish and threw out a couple of words. If you see the movie, it works really well with the theme (The track plays during the end credits of the 2023 drama starring Steve Zahn, Roselyn Sanchez, and Judy Greer).

On ‘Dreaming About Brazil,’ I wrote that song because I’m a huge Antonio Carlos Jobim fan and very much a bossa nova fan. I have played bossa nova my whole life. I started messing around with something that was like very Jobim-inspired, in terms of the chord progression, but then I couldn’t sing it; I could, but it didn’t sound very good.

Q: Because you’ve worked with Wendy before, she was the perfect choice.

John Oates: Exactly. I love Wendy. She’s one of the greatest singers on the planet, and I will stand behind that statement. She’s an amazing person and an amazing singer. She’s toured with me and sang with me on records. I asked her, and I just thought it might be a cool moment to have another personality on there. She came in and of course, she just killed it and did a beautiful job. I loved the song and wanted people to hear it.

Q: In 2023, you put your own spin on a cover of Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World.” What led you to tackle Mark Cohn’s “Walking in Memphis” on the album?

John Oates: That was because I did ‘The Masked Singer’ and in the first episode, they give you a list of songs. You don’t just get to pick anything you want. They have a theme involved with every show, and that that was the only song I wanted to do from their list. So, I did it. And having done it on ‘The Masked Singer,’ it reminded me of what an amazing song it is. I wanted to put my stamp on it. Did you get a chance to hear the Grabbitz remix?

Q: Yes. When my first reaction was, ‘Now John Oates would be cool to the Coachella kids.’

John Oates: I’ve got a mutual friend who knows Grabbitz (the Buffalo, N.Y. DJ scored a 2016 dance hit with Deadmau5 on “Let Go”) and sent him the song. He loved it and said he wanted to give it a try. I’m open to all these possibilities. It keeps me on my toes, and it’s really great to hear people’s interpretations.

Q: Another one of the standouts for me on Oates is the acoustic guitar-accented “World Gone Wrong.” What was the impetus for it?

John Oates: I wrote that right around the time I wrote ‘Enough Is Enough.’ I was in my house in Colorado, and my wife and son had gone back home. I was going to spend a few more days there wood shedding. I was just sitting there and had this really weird, sad emotion about how terrible it would be if this were my reality and they weren’t around. I know it’s dark and a little bit depressing…

Q: I want to switch gears now. Veteran classic rock musicians who get played regularly on SiriusXM’s Yacht Rock Radio stations sometimes complain about the invented genre. But yacht rock’s popularity has made unfairly maligned 1970s pop music somewhat fashionable again and brought new listeners to Daryl Hall + John Oates’ music. What is your opinion on it?

John Oates: Listen, anytime our music can get played, especially vintage and classic rock things - keeping this music alive is very important. On SiriusXM, the yacht rock station is [one of] their most popular stations. There’s a reason for that: the songs are good, and people love them.

Look, I don’t care for the title. I think yacht rock is silly. I don’t even know what it means. I don’t know where it came from. Regardless of that fact, it’s a great format to keep the music of the past alive. And I’m thrilled that they’re playing Daryl Hall + John Oates songs.

Q: On Spotify, the most streamed song by Daryl Hall + John Oates is “You Make My Dreams” – amid the platform’s Billions Club. What elements in that song do you think has made it connect with more people than any of your others?

John Oates: Interestingly enough, that song really wasn’t a hit when it first came out. I mean, it was a hit, but by our Eighties standards, it was not a hit (the song reached No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100). It was never even released as a single in England or Europe or any place outside of America.

It really was an outlier and when it got picked for the ‘(500) Days of Summer’ movie soundtrack, it really started getting traction with millennials and the younger generation. It’s a very simple song with a very direct message and it’s got a great groove.

Q: Agreed. This past July, there was plenty of media attention surrounding the 40th anniversary of Live Aid. You and Daryl performed with Mick Jagger, Tina Turner, members of the Temptations and on your own. Would you consider your appearance at the all-star benefit concert to be a highlight of your career?

John Oates: Absolutely. That was a landmark moment in music history, and it was the first time music was simulcast around the world - to more people than ever before…Mick Jagger had done a solo album, and he didn’t have a band. He reached out to us to back him up. We had just played the Apollo Theater with Eddie Kendricks and David Ruffin (a corresponding live album arrived two months later). We wanted them to go on with us and we did a reprise of the Temptations medley.

It was just a great, exciting moment. Of course, it was in Philadelphia [where we got our start], and we were at the top of our game in terms of the world of commercial music and hits. The whole thing just was really powerful and I'm very, very proud of that.

Q: Looking back to the entire Daryl Hall + John Oates catalog, which albums do you think stand the test of time and which, if any, would you listen to for pleasure?

John Oates: I can pinpoint albums that I think were pivotal to the changes in our career. ‘Abandoned Luncheonette’ (The 1973 release featuring “She’s Gone”) really put us on the map. That album, to this day, is our version of a masterpiece. I don’t know if the rest of the world agrees, but as far as I'm concerned, it is.

The ‘Voices’ album, because it was the first album that we produced ourselves. What it really did was set the tone for the Eighties. It put us in a creative place where we could really do exactly what we wanted to do - and do it in the way we wanted to do it.

I would say that the big hits on ‘Private Eyes’ and ‘H2O’ are important. I think that the most important record would be ‘Big Bam Boom’ because it was a change in technology. It was the end of the analog era and early in the infancy of the digital era. We were combining these two technologies for the first time and doing some groundbreaking stuff in terms of sonically and production wise. I don't think enough people give us credit for that. I like a lot of the records, but those are the high points.

My interview originally appeared as the September cover story for rockcellarmagazine.com.

An interview with Tim Booth of James: 1990s album "Laid' and themed U.S. tour, Brian Eno, Patti Smith, more

Photo: Ehud Lazin, Courtesy Shore Fire

James - the enduring Manchester, England band known for its passionate, frequently danceable rock music and iconic daisy logo merch – is currently on its first North American headlining tour in 15 years. Each show finds the nine-piece group performing two sets – everything off 1993’s Laid, plus hits, deep cuts, and fan favorites.

That album went gold Stateside and spawned the top 5 alternative radio title track prominently featured within the “American Pie” film series (“Sit Down,” “Born of Frustration” and “Say Something” also received major college/modern rock radio and MTV “120 Minutes” airplay here).

Formed in the early 1980s, James initially put out a pair of EPs on influential Manchester label Factory Records. Morrissey was an early James supporter. The Smiths invited James to open the Meat is Murder tour and even covered its song “What’s the World” during the shows.

During the height of the Madchester movement, James brought Inspiral Carpets on tour. The latter band’s young roadie Noel Gallagher reportedly got the idea for Oasis amid that jaunt. James gained more prominence in America after appearing at Woodstock ‘94 and Lollapalooza three years later.    

James split during the early 2000s, but has been on a creative tear since reuniting in 2006. All told, the band has made 18 studio albums and amassed multiple UK gold records and top 20 singles. Coldplay’s Chris Martin has even praised James (Coldplay covered “Sit Down” in Manchester with Booth as special guest).

Outside James, Booth has acted in British theater, portrayed a villain in Christopher Nolan’s 2005 film “Batman Begins” starring Christian Bale, and recorded a memorable solo album with “Twin Peaks” composer Angelo Badalamenti as Booth and The Bad Angel.

We caught up with Booth at a tour stop in Boston. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Q: What has it been like to play all the Laid songs live for the first time?

Tim Booth: It’s been beautiful. Nerve wracking at the beginning because we didn’t know them. We came straight off gigs in England, so we hadn’t had time to really rehearse. But that’s how James roll, anyway. [Trumpeter] Andy Diagram goes, ‘We’re the most unrehearsed band on the planet.’ That’s purposeful, because then you watch the thing grow and it becomes quite exciting. I think the audiences are excited by watching something imperfect struggle for its own existence. After the third gig, we started mixing the songs up. We played the whole album, but not in sequence. That really took the leash off.

Q: Whose idea was the Laid-themed tour? You’d never done anything like this before, right?

Tim Booth: No, we’ve never done that before. It was our manager’s idea. He sold it to us. It goes against our ethos to some degree, because we do like spontaneity and people not knowing what’s going to happen: changing the set list every night and changing it during the set. We still do that. [For the tour], we thought, ‘Let’s have a go at this and see what happens.’

Q: Have you rediscovered things about the Laid songs as a result?

Tim Booth: We leave a few of them quite open-ended, but the one that’s really shining for me is “Knuckle Too Far.” We found a way to make “Low Low Low” a lot more fun. That was always the weakest song on the album to me. In the studio, I voted for [eventual single B-side] “The Lake” to be on the album. So did Brian Eno. We got outvoted on that one.

Q: James thrives on unpredictability in concert. You don’t stick to a static set list all the time.

Tim Booth: Yeah. When we were younger, all we wanted to do was play live. We didn’t even want to record. We felt “live” was the litmus test of a band. We came from 1981-82, with all those great post-punk bands from The Gun Club to Wire to the Stranglers to The Pop Group, Pere Ubu, the Cramps, Jonathan Richman - everybody was taking risks.

No one was making music to make money. That was seen as beneath us. We were artists [like] Patti Smith, Talking Heads. If you had success, it was almost by accident. We came from that crew of people who believed that the live event was the thing that was the real connection and the really exciting thing to do.

Q: The musicians in James often change instruments at the shows, which must keep everything fresh for you.

Tim Booth: Yeah. Especially with some of the old songs. We really don’t know what’s going to happen. A song like “Sound” could be seven or 13 minutes long on any given night.

Q: What have the two newest James members, Chloe Alper and Debbie Knox-Hewson on percussion, guitar and backing vocals, brought to James’ live aesthetic?

Tim Booth: They’ve been with us for six, coming on seven years, which for most bands would be the entire length of a band. For us, they’re newbies. They’ve brought joy and balance to us. I think they’ve made us more joyful. Debbie’s a fantastic drummer. Chloe is just creating these backing vocals that are a real art.

My favorite backing vocalists are people like Eno, Bowie and Bob Marley and the Wailers. Chloe really takes off…she's really changing our sound. It’s fantastic. We’re the happiest we've ever been as a band. We get on better. We are appreciating what we do more.

In Britain, we’re bigger than we've ever been, selling out 20,000 seat venues, and it’s a really mixed age range [at the gigs]. A lot of the young people are coming for the new songs, and a lot of the old people come for the older songs. So, everybody’s disappointed [Booth laughs]. We look to give people not what they think they want, but what they need every night.

Q: Considering the period of making the Laid album, what was the experience like collaborating for the first time with a legendary producer and musician like Brian Eno, who you’d sought for previous albums?  

Tim Booth: I think every man and his dog wanted Brian to work with them. I had conversations with Flea [of Red Hot Chili Peppers] and [R.E.M.’s] Michael Stipe asking about how we got to do five albums with Brian Eno…they tried for years. Brian was clearly, head and shoulders, the best producer in the ‘80s and ‘90s. For that record, I sent him the demos, and he rang me up one morning about a week and a half later. We had a conversation about perfume, pornography, climate change, and quantum physics.

Q: As you do.

Tim Booth: This is at nine in the morning. I’m quite a late sleeper because I suffer from insomnia. At the end of the conversation, he said, ‘I’d like to make your record.’ He’d particularly fallen in love with our song “Sometimes (Lester Piggott).”

Q: In retrospect, what do you think it was about Laid that made it your most successful album in America?

Tim Booth: I think [the opening “Laid” lyric], “She only comes when she’s on top” caught people’s imagination. That was a 2 minute, 20 second, little flibbertigibbet [Old English meaning: devilish or silly] of a song. We thought it was a B-side and Brian went, ‘No, that should be on the album.’ But for us, it was quite a throwaway. It’s quite different to nearly everything else on the record except “Low Low Low.”

We’d been playing acoustically with Neil Young, and we loved it so much. We carried on acoustically and Brian came to one of the [UK] gigs. He saw that we were playing a lot of those songs acoustically. We just continued in that vein for the record.

Q: Was that a really intense recording process, having several studios going at the same time, which eventually led to the Laid and the double album follow up of more experimental songs, Wah Wah?

Tim Booth: It was. We did it at Peter Gabriel’s Real World studios. Peter notoriously takes a while writing lyrics. He’d say to me, “I’ve been away for the last year writing lyrics for the album. How’s your lyric writing going?” And I’d go, “I wrote two songs today.” Because I had to. We were doing two albums in six weeks and there were a lot of songs that didn’t have lyrics. It became a running joke between me and Peter that I had to improvise lyrics quite a lot of the time from my unconscious. I’d take the piss out of him for taking so long writing lyrics.

Q: What was your reaction to James having its first No. 1 studio album in the UK with 2024’s Yummy?

Tim Booth: It was quite strange knocking Beyonce off the top of the chart.

Q: Now that the Yummy album has been out for more than a year, are you satisfied with how it turned out and the reception from fans?

Tim Booth: Yeah. We can play five or six of those songs live alongside any of our greatest hits, and they stand up. That is all we want really.

You want to keep making music of the same quality or if not better, feeling that you’re stretching yourself. So we are, after 44 years, one of the rare bands that still feel like they’re stretching themselves and looking for the new language; the new way to communicate.

Q: On some Yummy songs, you sing about serious topics such as politics, society, and the environment. But they’re not downers; in fact, many are buoyant. How did you balance them out?

Tim Booth: It varies. I don’t feel I have too much choice over my lyrics. When I improvise a lyric - we improvise 120 pieces of music a year, generally – and then choose to work on some of them to become songs. Often, I’ll get an initial lyric in that first jam, and it gives me a clue about what the song’s going to be about. I don’t generally like political songs. It’s not something I set out to write, but every so often it’s impossible to avoid. Either because I’m so angry or upset or see a catastrophe coming. So, I’ll write about it. Trump was that catastrophe.

Q: The Yummy song “Rogue” made me laugh when I first heard you sing about a person fighting old age. Was that one fun to write and record?

Tim Booth: Yeah. That’s clearly not a political song. That’s about someone who just refuses to grow old gracefully and is going to burn out having fun. That’s great fun to write. To a degree, you know, we’re all in a band and it could apply to quite a few of us.

Q: Another standout is opening track, “Is This Love.” In an interview last year, you said that you don’t normally write love songs unless there’s a particular angle involved. What was that angle?

Tim Booth: [pauses] It’s watching with caution, especially as people get old, how they’re more frightened of falling in love because they know what the fallout can be. It’s ‘Are you afraid to love in your life? Or is that how you’re going to be for the rest of your life?’ Just a lover, basically. Somebody who just falls in love with every aspect of life and is ready to fall in love even with the parts that will necessarily die.

Q: You used an orchestra and choir to mark the band’s 40^th Anniversary for 2023’s double studio album Be Opened by the Wonderful and did a short tour for it. Did the preparations result in surprising new aspects of the songs as you rearranged them?

Tim Booth: Hugely. Our orchestra gigs were incredible. We got an orchestra that would stand up, sing and would really become part of the whole performance. I could send the choir out into the auditorium to sing in the audience. There was a lot of interdimensional stuff going on and you could hear a pin drop too.

We’d ask people to keep their phones hidden away. It meant that everybody got very present. Those gigs were magical. I think The Acropolis is the oldest music venue in the world. You could feel that in the bones of the marble. We played during one of the hottest weeks on record in Athens. They closed it three days later.

It was a phenomenal concert of beauty and delicacy. We caught it on camera and in the footage. We’re very proud of it. Every 10 years or so, we film a gig, but you really want it to be special when you capture that. We flew an orchestra and choir to Athens. It’s something that you’re going to lose a fortune doing. It’s an artistic choice rather than a financial one.

But we wanted to capture that event and those amazing people in the orchestra became James. At some points, the conductor would leave the stage, and they would improvise with us. And I would dance amongst them, and they would get up and start playing to me dancing. It was phenomenal.

Q: Then James released Live at the Acropolis album a few months ago. The concert was recorded and filmed in July 2023 at that ancient Greek amphitheater. How else did the surroundings affect that show?

Tim Booth: We first played with an orchestra and choir in 2008. We wanted to film it at the time, but we never got round to it. It’s very different. We wouldn’t play many hits, and we would go for the slower, more atmospheric songs, which is very unlike James live because we’re quite a celebratory, jubilant live band. It was fantastic to have that contrast. Then we reformed the orchestra, but with a gospel choir the second time.

Q: Your debut novel, When I Died for the First Time - about musician Seth Brakes coming out of rehab and reuniting his band The Lucky Fuckers - arrived last year. Was it always one of your goals to write fiction? Are the characters composites of people you’ve encountered?

Tim Booth: I lived in LA, in Topanga Canyon, for 14 years. A friend of mine introduced me to an amazing writing class there. Each week, you bring in a piece of writing and read it out to the group and sit and listen to other people doing the same. After a while, I started thinking, ‘I could write a novel’ - this idiot idea, very foolish.

I’d take in bits and read it to the group and see their reaction and get more encouraged and enthused. Finally, over a 10-year period whilst making James albums, I wrote a novel about a fucked-up singer in a band. It’s a kind of a dark comedy, a love story, and a ghost story.

It has obviously crossovers with James. I’m a singer who had to be sober because I had an inherited liver disease…When I was 21, I had a near death experience and was revived in Leeds Hospital. That was a really life-changing event. It meant that I was a singer in a band for years when everyone else was partying and getting wrecked and I couldn’t. Some of it, I think is the PTSD and the FOMO of witnessing wild events going on around me that I couldn’t participate in.

The book has got lots of that in it, but it doesn’t really follow my life. I’m writing about a world that I knew and had witnessed and lived for years.

Q: Turning to some James history: The band is among a long line of influential alt-rock acts to hail from Manchester, England over the past 40+ years. What do you think it is about the city that birthed such amazing music?

Tim Booth: The city is built on a swamp, and it rains a lot. It’s pretty miserable in some ways, and I think you don't have much else to do. You’re indoors, and you get together with your friends and off you go.

If you live in California and it’s sunny every day and you can go surfing, I don't think that’s necessarily a very creative environment for artists. Whereas I think a gloomy, external world means that you go in, and you go deep.

Q: When you were young, the music of Patti Smith made a big impression on you. It must have been a thrill for you to have Patti Smith Group guitarist Lenny Kaye produce the first James album Stutter in 1986.

Tim Booth: Yeah, of course. He’s just amazing. It was stressful for him. He came in with beautiful, long black, glossy hair and he left with gray hair. But we got on great. He became the godfather of my son. Since then, Patti invited me to perform at a festival she curated in London, and I’ve had some great connections with her.

Her song ‘Birdland’ is probably the most influential song for me to become a writer. I heard that song the night I was told my father was going to die, and the song is an improvised song about a boy losing his father. I think that hit me at the age of 16, made me go somewhere, and say, ‘Oh, I want to do this. I want to reach out to people across the world when they need me most, and articulate things that they maybe can’t articulate.’ That’s not meant to be patronizing, but [I wanted to] articulate something that someone could relate to in that deep way.

Q: I find it admirable for a band like James that has been around as long as you all have, to see you still recording at such a prolific rate.

Tim Booth: We’re artists. If you were a painter, you’d be making paintings most days of the week, because it’s what you enjoy and love to do and are here on this planet to do. We are artists who make music, as I say, we write maybe 120 pieces of music a year. We don't understand the bands that just write when the record company says it’s time for an album. That’s forgetting who you are. That’s thinking you are part of some industry rather than remembering that we are musicians, we are artists, and this is what we love.

Love does not just come natural; it’s what we’re here to do. This is our passion. When we write songs, it’s like we hire a cottage in the Yorkshire Dales in a beautiful landscape, we lock ourselves away and we turn our phones off and for six hours a day, we improvise music. Then we come back, and no one brings anything into the room. It’s all made up. We come back and listen to it and sort through it.

Then we make songs out of those improvisations. I don’t think you'll find many bands that do that, but it’s a joy. It’s like meditating, but with four people all having to listen to each other. So still, so quietly natural.

James tour dates:

Oct. 2 – Crystal Ballroom – Portland, OR

Oct. 4 – The Showbox – Seattle, WA

Oct. 5 – Commodore Ballroom – Vancouver, BC

https://wearejames.com/

My interview originally appeared at rockcellarmagazine.com.