Bitter Sweet Love
“With this album, I really feel like I’ve returned to myself as a singer-songwriter,” James Arthur tells Apple Music. “There’s a few songs that are pretty raw. I think that I’ve felt the demand for that in my fanbase.” The Middlesbrough-born artist’s fifth album *Bitter Sweet Love* isn’t all fan service, though. With work beginning before he headed out on tour in early 2022, he had a creative mission in mind. “I didn’t want to work with more than one producer, really,” he says. “Whereas historically, it might be a producer and then a cowriter, or I might just write by myself, or do the odd thing with a producer. This was very much just about finding somebody that could harness the vision that I had or understand it and help bring it to life.” During a month-long blitz—the musical equivalent of speed dating—Arthur wound up reconnecting with Steven Solomon, who he worked with on his second record *Back from the Edge*. “The fact that he had been a session guitarist for a long time was really helpful—me and him were just getting a couple of guitars out and jamming a bit,” Arthur says. Within a week after the tour wrapped they had written the core of the record. “It just felt very inspired. I wanted to capture where I was at in a live sense,” he says. “I wanted to go back to more rock instrumentation.” Working almost entirely with Solomon not only facilitated a cohesive artistic vision, but allowed for experimentation and emotional vulnerability in the music. Album opener “Bitter Sweet Love,” for example, sees Arthur straddle heartache, strutting late ’80s funk guitars, a driving Kings of Leon-sized pre-chorus, and layered gospel backing vocals, while “Just Us” is a gorgeous ballad about how parenthood affects life’s priorities. “This time, I feel like the floodgates were opened. It just felt like the possibilities were endless.” Read on to find out more about each track on *Bitter Sweet Love* in Arthur’s own words. **“Bitter Sweet Love”** “I kept singing it, ‘Bitter sweet love,’ in that cadence that you hear. It obviously has a bit of a The 1975 feel, but I wanted it to depart from that groove and that’s where the Kings of Leon pre-chorus came from. It was clear that I wanted to talk about love and heartbreak. Of course, if it’s really love, it ain’t going to be plain sailing. I thought it was a cute thing to do to ask if we just have that sweet love all the time.” **“Free Falling”** “I was sat at the piano and just started singing, ‘Jenny down the road’s got a new love.’ The lads were like, ‘Why do you keep singing people’s names?’ I just love that thing when \[the lyrics\] are very visceral. You can imagine what is going on and bring characters into the song. I guess where I was coming from was I imagined this story of a guy who is watching the world go by and is very jealous of people’s happiness. He wants validation. That fed a lot into my story, where I feel like I’m on the outside looking in and I’m not being recognized.” **“Sleepwalking”** “I thought the word ‘sleepwalking’ was a cool umbrella to write a song around. I actually started the song with the pre-chorus. It made absolutely no sense at all but sounded good to me. Steven was like, ‘That’s really sick, but should we try and find some lyrics that make more sense?’ But I thought why don’t we try and build the song around that pre-chorus instead? Luckily, that sleepwalking concept really married up. I wanted to prove I still had that singer-songwriter thing that I think a lot of my fans from a long time ago like, where it was very raw.” **“Blindside”** “I wanted to do a Springsteen type of vibe. The melody had a lot of movement and ‘blindside’ was a phrase that fit within that framework. It’s about falling in love at the wrong time. I was in a place where I felt like that’s what I wanted to talk about. I was unpacking some past trauma.” **“Just Us”** “I’ve been on a journey of looking for things outside of myself and not addressing what’s going on, not appreciating what’s going on around me, being desensitized. Having a child really changed my perspective on life. I never really had an anchor, and having \[my daughter\] was inspiring. It made me think about how really none of the things I’ve been doing up until this point matter.” **“Comeback Kid”** “\[‘Comeback Kid’\] was just something that the media put on me when I had the fall from grace, if you like, publicly. But this is a love song. It’s giving the credit to that other person and saying that, if anyone should take credit for the fact that I managed to bounce back, it’s you. And that just felt like a very lovely and sincere thing to say.” **“From the Jump”** “I love this song by Ryan Adams called ‘Come Pick Me Up.’ I really wanted to have a song that made me feel like that song does. We were jamming on the guitars and I arrived at the punchline in a very Nashville-type way: ‘I just want to spend forever with you.’ It felt very much like a walking-down-the-aisle-type thing. It felt like vows, essentially.” **“A Year Ago”** “I really felt this one deep down. There’s nothing more heart-wrenching than that feeling of ‘I thought you couldn’t love anybody more than me, and here I am having to look at you moving on.’ I’m singing about some really authentic stuff that I’d actually felt before.” **“Ruthless”** “I don’t know if you’ve ever been ghosted by anyone before, but it feels like someone’s pulled the rug. I didn’t think there was anything more real to respond to that feeling than, ‘Fucking hell. You are ruthless.’ I also wanted to have something that you could really rock out to and it was fun playing the character of a guy who’s disgruntled and bitter about what’s happened to him.” **“New Generation”** “I’m not adept at politics. I don’t really touch on those subjects very much. But obviously there’s a lot of things going on in the world that are just really hard to understand, like the division in the world. So I have a very simplistic view of all that. Why don’t we all just get along? I just wanted to have a song that expressed my honest feelings about everything and how it’s kind of on the new generation to undo a lot of this outdated way of thinking.” **“My Favourite Pill”** “I loved the idea of doing a sort of Talking Heads, grungy thing. I’ve also never really explored making the vocal gimmicky in a way. The song is about falling in love with the wrong people who I know aren’t going to fulfill me. Like with ‘Ruthless,’ I was playing a character where I’m a bit pathetic because I keep falling for the same traps all the time.” **“Is It Alright?”** “This song is about the last dance, I suppose. It’s about meeting up with someone who maybe you haven’t seen for a while and you know it’s over, but you want to pretend that it’s not for one night. We really pushed my vocal, because I felt like I hadn’t really \[done that\] on this record yet. I felt it was important to have a moment like that, where I was really on the edge.” **“Homecoming”** “Over the last couple of years, I’ve spent a lot of time up in my hometown. I tried to move back there and I wanted to try and reintegrate into my community and see my family again and stuff. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out, but it taught me a lot and did actually realign me with the universe or something. That place was very much the making of me, and I think my morals and values have come from growing up in that environment. This song was my opportunity to write a love letter to my home.”