Changes All The Time

Following the more pop- and electronic-influenced pivot that was second album *Electric Light* in 2018, 2022’s *Leap* found James Bay planting his feet back on the rootsy, singer-songwriter turf of his 2015 breakthrough *Chaos and the Calm*, a debut album that helped earn the UK-born artist a BRIT Award and three Grammy nominations. For Bay, though, fourth album *Changes All the Time* is the fullest, and truest, representation of who he is as a musician. “Guitar playing has always been a central part of who I am as an artist,” he tells Apple Music. “I had a go at standing up on stage without a guitar, but I felt too naked. I’ve come a bit of a long way round to the making of this album to say to myself that, more than ever before, I want the songs to come first, and I want my guitar playing to be the center of those songs. I wanted the art and the musicianship to really come across and be elevated from what it had been before.” *Changes All the Time* journeys from the soulful, front-porch stomp-along of “Up All Night,” featuring Noah Kahan and The Lumineers, and “Hope”’s gospel-inspired soul-searching to the widescreen rock ’n’ roll drama of “Easy Distraction,” co-written by The Killers’ Brandon Flowers, and the glowing Muscle Shoals spirit burning within “Speed Limit.” It’s a record with all the integrity and searing musicianship of the classic albums Bay has drawn from across his career. But, thanks to the confidence which comes with knowing exactly who he is, he’s revealed more of himself than ever before. “I hope I can keep unearthing and discovering new layers to who I am as an artist as time goes by, but I’m less self-conscious about how it comes across,” he says. “I’m more like, ‘Well, this record is me. This who I am right now.’” Discover more as he takes us through the album, track by track. **“Up All Night” (feat. The Lumineers & Noah Kahan)** “Mark Broughton, who engineered the album, played piano on most of the tracks. We’d finished a take of something else and he was just mucking around, playing some notes, and I picked up a guitar and played the same thing back, added a couple other chords and the song started to be born. We spent the next two hours writing it and recorded it that evening. It sounded like such a party and I thought, ‘Who shall we share this with?’ I’ve known The Lumineers and Noah \[Kahan\] for years, he used to open for me, and they were kind enough to come onto it after we’d recorded it. There are no drums on that song at all. It’s all stomps and claps.” **“Everburn”** “My relationship plays a part in so many of the songs that I write. We’ve been together for a very long time, navigated so much and continue to, and that is always something to explore and express in my writing. So many of my songs are centered around matters of the heart. I don’t know what my life looks like from the outside, but it’s as real as anybody else’s and full of obstacles like anybody else’s. ‘Everburn’ looks at the reality that perhaps sometimes things can get heavy, but one way or another, love can conquer all and keep you strong.” **“Hope”** “I’ve always been really moved by gospel music. Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles came from a gospel background and they’re two artists who massively inspired me growing up. It’s always been something I’ve adored but this was the first time I really felt like I had a song that suits me as an artist that also lets me stretch those gospel-inspired limbs of mine. I enjoyed pairing that with telling a story in the song. It’s quite a broad notion, having hope. But boy, is it relatable. I can be quite a pessimistic type and I wrote this song as a battle against that, because it’ll kill you if you don’t.” **“Easy Distraction”** “Bruce Springsteen has been a thing for me pretty much since I was born. My dad loves Springsteen so much and passed him on to me and my brother. I wrote this song with Brandon Flowers who I’m a huge fan of as well, but boy, is that man a massive fan of Bruce Springsteen! It really shows on this in the most glorious way. It was really special to be in those musical waters, and it was such a wonderful experience. It’s every bit as Killers-influenced as it is *Born to Run*-era Springsteen.” **“Speed Limit”** “I wrote this in Nashville with the fantastic Natalie Hemby \[singer-songwriter and member of The Highwomen\], who was raised on that sort of Southern soul sound and writes on a lot of gospel and country types of music. She does this sort of song very naturally, and so do I because a lot of my influences are American: country, blues, gospel, and folk. I’d been driving a little bit too fast to that session, and I was thinking about my daughter and everybody at home. I had this line without a melody to it: ‘I broke the speed limit to get to you...’ Once I walked into Natalie’s house, I said, ‘Can I just grab a guitar and sing this into my phone and see how it comes out?’ I’m really proud of my collaboration with Natalie, there’s something effortless about it.” **“Talk”** “I find it difficult to say the things I do in songs in real life. I’ve learned to be a performer to avoid vulnerable encounters. I love performing, I don’t just do it to hide, but sharing personal things in personal scenarios doesn’t come as easily to me as writing a song. For all the angst and emotion of that song lyrically, it’s so fun to play. Like, ‘Yellow’ by Coldplay is quite an angsty song, but you know they’re having a fucking blast every time they play it.” **“Hopeless Heart”** “I wrote this song a couple of years ago in the gap between the last album and this one. It’s a bit dumb in the most beautiful way. I remember being inspired by Fleetwood Mac. I just wanted to open my chest and my heart and belt it out. It was a fun, brilliant thing to say: ‘You tore out my hopeless heart, I never want it back.’ I’m trying to get some shit off my chest and those are the words I chose to express it. It’s nice to get things off your chest sometimes. Something difficult happened to me, but actually, in the grand scheme things, that was OK.” **“Some People”** “It was the last thing we recorded. We ran all of these cables out into the stairwell and plugged some mics in. It was a bit of Led Zeppelin-inspired move, because they’re famous for putting the drum kit in the stairwell and getting that giant sound. It was a place where we could stack these harmonies and get an ethereal feel like Fleet Foxes or Crosby, Stills & Nash, all those stunning harmony groups. It pares everything right back and goes vulnerable and intimate. It felt so good at the end of such a busy and noisy recording experience to do that. It’s like taking that last breath before we shut the book on the making of the album. It could easily have been the last song on the album, but it’s nice to drop it in the middle and have this whisper moment while there’s so much of a hurricane going on.” **“Go On”** “The meaning of this song is very particular. I lost a family member very suddenly just as the pandemic was starting. It wasn’t because of the pandemic, he had a horrible cancer that just whipped through him and took him away. It left a hole, as it does in any family. I wanted to send him off. I wanted to salute him and say, ‘Go safe, go on, get out of here. You’ve been fucking awesome. Thank you. We love you. All the best.’ It was a very moving thing to write and record.” **“Crystal Clear”** “This is me trying to do that thing that a painter or a photographer does when they capture a subject in the present moment and then it’s set in time, so every time you go back to that painting, or that photograph, you see that moment. I was on tour when I wrote this song. I’d just become a parent, and life gets so difficult and can feel uneasy and unsettled when you’re trying to be present for such a giant shift, but also maintain a career that involves you going away all the time. I tried to speak to those emotions and speak to that reality in the song. It’s a snapshot of life at that time.” **“Dogfight”** “I wrote this with Phil Plested \[who’s written with Lewis Capaldi, Mimi Webb, Bastille, and Niall Horan\] and Holly Humberstone. Holly is brilliant and already has this timelessness to her sound and her approach, but she’s a newbie otherwise. The anxieties of being a performer exist for both of us, regardless of one person having so much experience and the other one still being in that initial shock of this new, exciting limelight. I wanted to talk about how hard it can feel to just be myself and she said, ‘I know about that. It can feel like a fucking dogfight.’ As soon as she said that we were off. We tried a few productions on that one. It started out a bit synth-y, but as soon as we started trying it this way it just felt like it would end the album. I really lost myself emotionally in the outro of that song, the way the band play in the final moments of it is just incredible.”