Photo by Nina Corcoran
It’s barely been a year since James Blake released his excellent third album, The Colour in Anything, but already he’s got new music in the pipeline. The British producer-crooner plans to release some of this material within the next few months (!), as he revealed in a new interview with The FADER.
“I have some new music, and I am going to release some of it this summer,” Blake told the publication prior to performing at last weekend’s FORM Arcosanti festival. “I’ve just been making tunes. Is it going to be singles or a project? I think I’ve probably got a few single tunes but I don’t know if they’re singles. [Laughs].”
“At some point I would like to release a record but at the moment I feel no need to rush myself,” he explained further. “I’m not in part of a touring cycle. We’re doing this Radiohead support tour, which is great. I’m writing as much as I can. I’ve been producing hip-hop things but I can’t talk about those ye — they’re collaborative productions and beats.” Elsewhere in the exchange, Blake spoke about his current creative state of mind, saying: “I feel very good. I feel very free…I feel like I have license musically to go wherever I want to and that is an unbelievable privilege.”
In addition to mentioning those forthcoming “hip-hop things,” Blake talked about his recent collaborations with Kendrick Lamar (“ELEMENT.”) and Frank Ocean (“Godspeed”, which Blake happened to cover at FORM Arcosanti):
On K. Dot:
“I did send him a bunch of music and I was just hoping that he’d listen to it. I’d met him a few times before and they came to our show in L.A. We’d been in touch various times and he’d come to the studio and listen to stuff and we got on and I sent him some music while I was on the road when I was in Mexico. I got an email and he said, “Can you turn something in tonight?” I sent him a thing that I’d done and he took the chords and that became a part of “ELEMENT.””
On Ocean:
“He’s such an idiosyncratic. He’s so instantly recognizable. It’s not just his voice it’s turn of phrase. That’s just something remarkable that I have learned a lot from…We’re quite different in a lot of ways. But the songs that I’ve had input to on his record, I don’t really know in what part of the middle we met. He’s an anomaly, it’s quite hard to describe that relationship, so I’m not gonna try. [Laughs]”
Read the full interview here.
