![]() ![]() He reflects that he was just as guarded back then in his private life, too. There was no literal explanation, there was just a bunch of very carefully written poems.” In my old interviews, I would have been able to talk about how I was influenced by Andrei Tarkovsky, or whatever the fuck, but I don’t think I was necessarily going to tell you about how afraid I was, or whatever emotion was happening. “(Music) was easier for me, emotionally speaking. “For so long – and maybe it’s even the reason I got into music in the first place – I found it hard to communicate with words,” he says. Assume Form is an album rich in metaphor and imagery the lyrics just vague enough that a listener can project their own interpretations onto them, but specific enough that it’s plain to hear that they come from lived experience. Today, at 30, Blake is less concerned with wearing masks. “(My lyrics) need to be masked in a certain way, but you can unwrap them.” A perfect example of that masking comes in the early track “I Never Learnt To Share”, a mournful loop of a line about an estranged brother and sister – who, it turned out, were entirely fictional. “If I try to write to-the-point like Laura Marling, it’s too much exposure,” he said. In the interview, for our May 2010 issue, he took pride in how obscure and impenetrable his lyricism could be. At that point, he was a final year student at Goldsmiths in south London, poised to release his melancholic, dubstep-warping self-titled debut album in the coming months. These bright and bold strokes feel miles away from the 21-year-old artist that Dazed met, in our first interview with Blake, almost a decade ago. ![]() “Can’t Believe the Way We Flow” is a straight-up love song (co-produced by Oneohtrix Point Never) that floats on a tide of layered vocals, and the whole record closes with a lullaby. With emerging Spanish star Rosalía, there’s an airy, dual language ode to kicking off your shoes on a summer’s day ( “Who needs balance?” they sing together, with the heady, obsessive feeling that comes with the earliest days of a relationship “I’ll see you every day”). Over a low-slung Metro Boomin beat, Travis Scott and Blake pitch their voices up and down to meet one another, weaving together in a sweet duet about being so in love it’s like having an imaginary friend. Now, after something of a break from the spotlight – during which he’s been heard on tracks with Beyoncé, Kendrick Lamar, Frank Ocean, Travis Scott, and others – Blake is returning with an album that, for the first time, features a slew of collaborators.Īssume Form is an open-hearted, melodic record that is unabashedly romantic. On 2016’s The Colour In Anything, a rich, varied palette of emotions oozed through 17 dense tracks (and the vivid watercolour artwork by Quentin Blake). The label of “sad boy” has followed Blake throughout his career, from his post-dubstep, Joni Mitchell-covering origins in the early 2010s, to his 2013 Mercury Prize-winning second album Overgrown, a soulful collection of insular, occasionally bitter electronic love songs. ![]() So in that way, you could say I am a SAD boy.” SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) is real. “Well, it’s sunny all the time here, so that has to have some kind of effect. “Well,” he quips, “I get out of an S-Class and get into another S-Class and go to big Hollywood parties and eat a lot of kale and I don’t have any problems!” In seriousness, though, he adds, “it’s been a peaceful place for me to take some time, to stop the noise of my mind.” You can hear some of that sunshine and space on his upcoming fourth album Assume Form, I suggest. ![]() When Dazed catches him on the phone, as he rides an Uber to the studio of an unnamed artist for a session, he explains what life is like since he made the move from rainy south London to LA. James Blake is getting more vitamin D these days. ![]()
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