Pitchfork: How did the Lemonade feature go down? Blake has now arrived at a moment in his career where his music resonates powerfully enough to soundtrack the cultural moments of the biggest stars on Earth. In addition to helping pen the record’s opening track, he also co-wrote and sang on the song “Forward,” which shows up at the visual album’s most sobering stretch, as images of the mothers of Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown-each holding a photo of her late son-flash across the screen. Whether in the studio with Ocean (who he names as Colour’s biggest influence) or Staples (for whom he’s been producing beats), or back in the outside world catching up on lapsed friendships, Blake has spent the last three years consciously removing himself from the dark, moody hole he dug for himself following his instant success.Īnd if you believe in karma, you might say this personal evolution has rewarded him: Colour arrives directly after his appearance on Lemonade, Beyoncé’s latest world-stopping pop gambit.
His relaxed attitude today is as new to him as it is to me, and he’s eager to dissect the changes he’s undergone.Īfter spending nearly his entire adult life in the spotlight, he’s been making a conscious effort to keep everything in perspective, to get out of his own head and live a normal existence. Blake says the record is the result of some of the healthiest, most productive years of his adult life. And Rubin’s Shangri-La Studios here in Malibu was the birthplace of a good chunk of his new album, The Colour in Anything. Based on appearances, it seems like much has changed in the three years since his last album, 2013’s Overgrown.ĭuring that time, Blake has shared studio time with a cornucopia of top-tier talent: Vernon, Kanye West, Drake, Vince Staples, Rick Rubin, and even the elusive Frank Ocean. With his small, round, iridescent sunglasses-a pair that can only be described as “groovy”-he might even seem a little goofy if his tallness didn’t also give him an air of unflappability. Wearing a mint-colored floral shirt with birds on it, eating salad and drinking iced coffee, and making dry jokes about the toddlers screaming at the next table, he looks like a man who is perfectly comfortable out in the open, among humans. It’s the middle of April, and Blake is sitting in the afternoon sunshine on a restaurant deck at the end of the Malibu Pier. “ There are a lot things I thought I was-and that maybe I tried to portray myself as being-and one of those things was ‘serious,’” the 27-year-old says, emphasizing that last word dismissively, like he no longer believes it even exists. (No wonder the two men are now close friends and collaborators.) Blake knows his stone-faced public demeanor-or his phantom forest music videos-hasn’t done much to dispel that image, either. He gets the same jokes that follow Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon around-you know, the ones that suggest they’re actually magical woodland creatures. After two critically acclaimed albums’ worth of this, a Mercury Prize, Brit and Grammy nominations, and hundreds of worldwide tour dates, it makes sense that he’s now known as one of music’s most somber sad boys. His distinct falsetto-first used sparingly amid mysterious electronic tracks, now an inimitable hallmark of his sound-is often warped with reverb and digitization to sound hauntingly lonely, or robotic, or whatever else his meticulously assembled elegies call for. In the six years since his career took off with a major label deal, the British songwriter has become a master of his own style of melancholy, dub-inflected songwriting. Everybody knows the words every drunk guy loves to yell, “what’s cooler than being cool? Ice cold.”, and every drunk guy hopes that when the line “Shake it like a polaroid picture.” happens that every girl at the party will start twerking.It’s easy to understand where James Blake gets his reputation. I found some contenders, but nothing compares to Pursuit of Happiness Remix. The taste of shitty Skol vodka refills my mouth, and blurred images of me jumping up and down in a shitty basement come instantly to my mind.
I can’t listen to that song without reliving parties that happened the summer after my senior year of high school. That’s why when Steve Aoki remixed it and brought that EDM dance style to the song, it became an amazing party song. It’s too slow, and even though everybody knows every word, it doesn’t get the people going. Pursuit of Happiness is one of the best songs on that album but as a party song, it kind of sucks.
I’ve listened to Man On The Moon in its entirely, probably around 1000 times. In my opinion, Kid Cudi is my favorite rapper of all time. Skip to 2:08 for the actual scene with the songĪfter listening to that song about a dozen times as it brought me back to 2012, I went into a rabbit hole of party songs.
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