Strange Time To Be Alive Early James

• 1 Racing To A Red Light 04:24
• 2 Straightjacket For Two 03:50
• 3 My Sweet Camelia 03:35
• 4 Pigsty 04:11
• 5 What A Strange Time To Be Alive 03:07
• 6 Real Low Down Lonesome 04:29
• 7 Harder To Blame 04:06
• 8 If Heaven Is A Hotel 03:08
• 9 Splenda Daddy 03:05
• 10 Dance In The Fire 03:51
• 11 Wasted And Wanting 03:21
• 12 Something For Nothing 03:12
• Total Runtime 44:19

Info for Strange Time To Be Alive

Alabama's native son, Early James, returns with his sophomore album, Strange Time To Be Alive. The lyrical wordsmith conjures the ghosts of great southern gothic writers from Eudora Welty to William Faulkner, while channeling the haunted spirits of Tom Waits and Townes Van Zandt. The album evokes a timeless amalgam of forsaken blues, folk, and Tin Pan Alley crooning, anchored by his unmistakable voice that sways from gravel-filled shouts to pained, forlorn whispers.

The sophomore album from Early James, Strange Time To Be Alive is the sound of an artist sublimely out of step with the world. With all the charmed eccentricity of a true poet, the Alabama-bred singer/songwriter takes in the endless absurdity he sees around him, then alchemizes his unease into a glorious patchwork of musical idioms: forsaken blues and contemplative folk songs, brooding murder ballads and lovestruck piano tunes. Produced by multi-Grammy Award winner Dan Auerbach, Strange Time To Be Alive ultimately extracts a certain magic from the madness, imbuing even the most painful truth-telling with a wild-eyed joie de vivre.

“I think it’s okay to admit you feel crazy or uncomfortable in your own skin - those are very human feelings that we need to say out loud,” says James. “I hope this record reminds people that everyone feels crazy sometimes, and that the real crazy people are the ones who won’t admit self-doubt.”

The follow-up to 2020’s Singing For My Supper (hailed by MOJO as a “luminous debut”), Strange Time To Be Alive came to life in three whirlwind days at Auerbach’s Easy Eye Sound in Nashville. “James is very particular with his lyrics and makes such uncommon choices, so I wanted to keep it raw and let that shine as much as possible,” says Auerbach. “His writing is so idiosyncratic; there’s not one song that feels like anything you’ve heard before. But then there’s also something in his sound that feels carved out of stone, like it’s from another time - it’s a very strange mix.”

Recorded live with many of the same musicians featured on Singing For My Supper (including his longtime bandmate Adrian Marmolejo on upright bass), Strange Time To Be Alive embodies a much heavier and more mercurial sound than its predecessor, thanks in part to James’ frenetic performance on electric guitar. “Last time I didn’t even bring an electric guitar but this time I’ve got a pedalboard,” he notes. “Back when it was just me and Adrian everybody thought we were a bluegrass band for some reason, and I’ve always wanted to play louder.” In shaping the album’s eclectic selection of songs, James also joined forces with such esteemed musicians as guitarist Tom Bukovac (Willie Nelson, Keb’ Mo’), drummer Jay Bellerose (Sharon Van Etten, Allen Toussaint), and keyboardist Mike Rojas (Tyler Childers, Yola). The result is a prime showcase for James’s singular voice, an element that proves infinitely captivating whether he’s assuming a growling ferocity or crooning tenderness or the dazzling theatricality of a cabaret singer.

A fitting counterpart to his chameleonic vocals, James’s lyrics contain equal parts poetic observation and candid introspection and fantastically warped humor - a dynamic established in the very first lines of the album-opening “Racing To A Red Light” - “Oh Lord, I think I just might/Be betting on a thrown fight/Between a man and a mannequin/Just lost to a banana skin.” Sparked from a bit of dialogue from True Detective season one, “Racing To A Red Light” unfolds in languid rhythms and spectral guitar tones as James quietly vents a litany of frustrations (e.g., the dearth of original thought in online discourse, the showboating behavior of billionaire moguls). “At the time I was getting fed up with seeing the same comments copied-and-pasted from the safety of anonymity on the internet, from people who can’t think up their own response to anything happening in the world,” says James. “That song’s a subtle dis to all that, and also to the people who think it’s a better idea to race to Mars on a rocket than to try to fix the planet we actually live on.”

Another piece of world-weary commentary, “What A Strange Time To Be Alive” slips from sighing resignation to soulful intensity as James laments the insidious chaos of modern life (“No boundary left to cross in this God-forsaken snow globe”). “I know that every generation probably feels like they’re going through the toughest of times - but, damn, it really is a weird world to live in right now,” says James. Co-written with Matchbox Twenty’s Rob Thomas and White Denim’s Austin Jenkins (whose co-writing credits also include Kacey Musgraves and Leon Bridges), the track’s heavy-hearted mood is profoundly brightened by Bukovac’s resplendent slide-guitar work. “There’s a uniquely Southern haze to that song, where James feels completely in his comfort zone,” Auerbach points out. “The take we got felt just right, kind of like a worn-in baseball glove.”

Elsewhere on Strange Time To Be Alive, James looks inward to examine the darker corners of his own psyche, such as on the magnificently brutal “Harder to Blame.” “Sometimes when you’re young, you blame the crowd around you for all the bad habits you’ve developed,” says James. “But then the older you get, the more you realize that there’s really no one to blame but yourself.” With its blistering riffs and bombastic drumbeats, “Harder to Blame” made for one of the most explosive moments on the record.

"Early James released his first album, Singing for My Supper, just as the world slid into the turmoil of the COVID-19 pandemic, so if any singer/songwriter has cause to claim that it's a Strange Time to Be Alive -- the pointed title of his second album -- it's him. To his credit, he winds up delivering on the promise of his title, conjuring ghosts of the American South with his stylized soul and poetry -- a combination that can suggest Tom Waits in his beatnik poet prime crossed with a blues troubadour. This heightened Americana is quite appealing, especially in the hands of producer Dan Auerbach, who lets the ballads be painterly and gives the shambling numbers a colorful quality, letting Early James growl against guitar grit and thickened thump in the rhythms. At nearly an hour, Strange Time to Be Alive does indeed have a tendency to wander and linger, a characteristic that can be mildly maddening but also is ingratiatingly eccentric. Perhaps Early James can recall such inspirations as Waits, but the way he assembles American myths and music has an idiosyncratic signature that only sounds stronger and more authoritative with repeat listens." (Stephen Thomas Erlewine, AMG)

Early James

Early James
an Alabama native and the latest signing to Dan Auerbach's Easy Eye Sound roster, releases his debut album, Singing for My Supper, via Easy Eye and Nonesuch Records on March 13, 2020. The album spans hard-charging blues, wistful folk, and ages-old pop crooning, anchored by the singer's voice that oscillates from gravel-gruff shout to a honey-smooth whisper. James' inspirations run from Fiona Apple and Tom Waits to the Southern gothic poets, as heard in the album's darker themes and in the wry humor with which he writes about them.

Auerbach, who decided he needed to produce the singer's debut album after watching just two seconds of a video of James performing, says: "Some people are good singers, and some people are better than good singers; they just have this great form of expression."

Early James' debut features ten wide-ranging songs, co-produced by Auerbach and David "Fergie" Ferguson, is full of world-weary wisdom. "Blue Pill Blues" details a period when James, who was being treated for depression, quit his antipsychotic medication cold turkey. "High Horse" is a lament of the ways his adolescent excitement faded with the arrival of the vices of adulthood, while "Easter Eggs" finds the songwriter coming to terms with some of the darker sides of his heredity.

As soon as he was old enough, Early James moved from Troy to Birmingham, where he's become an integral part of the city's thriving music scene over the past half-decade. His diverse experience in the Birmingham scene has helped mold him into a singular talent whose sound remains uncategorizable. Mother Jones says, "Early James is the type of guy that might have walked into Sun Studios in the 1950s to record an unhinged rockabilly single with Sam Phillips … James sounds like an obscure, ribald 1920's crooner time-warped into a 1990s heavy-alternative band."

Coming out of a local music scene as first-rate as Birmingham has also helped sculpt James into a songwriter who obsesses over the craft and texture of every word he's ever sung. "Every line has to mean something to him, personally," says Auerbach. "It's not good enough to just write a good song, it needs to have a deeper meaning. He's unlike any person I've ever worked with. He's not writing a song to be universal; he's writing a song for him." Singing for My Supper is the thirteenth release on Dan Auerbach's Easy Eye Sound label, which is distributed by Auerbach's label Nonesuch Records. Easy Eye Sound is built equally around Auerbach's Easy Eye Studio in Nashville, where The Black Keys recorded their last three albums, as well as the collection of famous session musicians that have come to call the studio home. Subsequent releases have included records by Yola, Marcus King, Kendell Marvel, Leo Bud Welch, Jimmy "Duck" Holmes, Shannon & The Clams, Shannon Shaw, Sonny Smith, Dee White, and Link Wray. Auerbach says, "Sometimes I feel I created my own Field of Dreams. I built the studio because I knew something was going to happen. I built it to accommodate live musicians playing, and then all of a sudden the best musicians in Nashville show up, and it's happening."

This album contains no booklet.