“The record’s about turning the darkness and pain I’ve experienced in my life into songs that can inspire others to make the best of hard times.” Shawn James wasn’t kidding. His new album, appropriately titled The Dark & The Light, has turned his inner turmoil into a volcanic eruption of soul, passion and, in the end, hope. It’s like a purge that was a long time in the coming, not being able to find it’s way out through the myriad of pulsing veins and dark chambers that kept knocking it down dead ends and false paths.
With all this seriousness, you might not expect James to laugh so much. During our interview several days ago, his voice was bright and friendly, his laugh sometimes just jumping out of nowhere like the proverbial barrel of monkeys had just tickled his funny bone. It’s what happens when you finally feel a culmination, a weight lifted off your heart and sunshine has at last fertilized new seeds. It’s taken some years to be at peace with his life but James has and he is using it to birth songs with genuine light and dark, helplessness and salvation, never allowing the human soul to die without a fight. From the rapturous “Orpheus,” with his voice dark and sinister, to “There It Is,” where his instrument is closer to southern soul, James utilizes his vocal ambidexterity to get across what he is trying to say.
Raised within the Pentecostal church, losing his father at a very young age, leaving home to find the real man beneath the layers of who all the “theys” wanted him to be, the struggles of adulthood with the baggage of youth still clinging to his back, James found his secret bunker in music. “Without music, I honestly don’t know where I would be right now,” admitted James. “I was lucky I had something to bleed into, to cope with the struggles of my everyday life.” He’s been making recordings since 2012, both solo and with The Shapeshifters. He is currently on a tour, about to hit New Orleans on Wednesday, April 10th, Houston on the 11th and Austin on the 12th.
Although we were both having sinus issues – “I woke up and I was like, ugh, I got all this mucus and snot and my throat is sore!” he said before breaking out into one of those big laughs I mentioned – James was open and honest and insightful when it came to both his music and his life experiences that led to it
You are a singer who has different voices – you can be dark and bluesy and you can be light and angelic. When a new song comes to you, do you know immediately which voice will go with it?
You know, not necessarily, because the writing process is not always the same for me. Sometimes it will be based off a story or a tale, an old myth or legend that I want to recreate in my way; or, it might be based off of like a phrase I’ve got in my head; or sometimes it’s off a melody. Normally, if it’s a melody one, then yeah, I do know which one I’m going to go with. But the story ones, not necessarily. It kind of depends on where the writing goes and the kind of emotions I’m putting through in the song. That has a lot to do with which kind of voice I will decide to use. And the story.
Which voice is most natural?
They all are, honestly. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned to kind of mix them altogether and be able to pull from all of them just as easily as the next. I wouldn’t say that there is one that is more natural than the other at this point. Maybe back in the day it was more of a standard singing voice, you know, because I hadn’t developed how to distort my voice and growl or anything like that. But at this point, it’s pretty much a cohesive thing that I don’t have to think about anymore and I can just execute.
As a songwriter, are you more interested in human emotions or human actions?
My initial reaction to that is emotions. But the actions have affected me just as much in my life, other people’s actions and stuff, which in turn influences the songs. So I would say definitely emotions right off the bat and then actions, as I’ve gotten older I’ve realized, have giant consequences.
Do you like your songs to have so much turmoil?
That’s an interesting question. But I do. I think it has to do with conflict and I just think life, in general, is ups and downs and darks and lights and traumatic experiences and dealing with them. Maybe it’s because of how I grew up, but yeah, I like my songs to have a sense of stating things that are wrong and things that have happened and then translating those things and learning to rise above them, or translating bad things into something that can inspire and you can get some good out of; turning dark into light; translation of trauma really. So yeah, for me, I guess I do, when I think about it, because that’s life and life isn’t always perfect and sunny and amazing. But then again, I do write songs in the other sense but the majority of them it’s the turmoil like you said.
And when you do cover songs, they’re not exactly the stereotypical happy-go-lucky guy songs either
No, no and that’s the thing with the cover songs is a lot of times those cover songs I choose, and some of them will be pop songs, but when you read the lyrics, they’re some of the saddest, darkest things they’re saying but they’re not portraying that musically or vocally. So when I hear them, I’m like, oh man, let me twist this around and kind of interject a deep, heavy emotion on these lyrics because what they are really saying is not something that is bopping and super catchy melodies or something like that; they’re heavy lyrics. Macy Gray’s “I Try,” for instance, or Frank Sinatra’s “That’s Life,” or even “Ain’t No Sunshine” by Bill Withers. All those songs are not happy, you know. BUT, when you hear the songs they have this kind of vibe that is happy but that’s not necessarily what they are writing or what the lyrics are portraying. To me, at least.
And that makes me think of “Orpheus.” Although it’s Greek Mythology based, what else is in this song that the listener may not pick up right away?
I would say dealing with the death of a close one that was unexpected and not necessarily being able to accept it at first and not really accepting it at all and thinking it didn’t happen or there’s a way to bring them back and blah, blah, blah. That’s one aspect of it but that comes from like a childhood mindset, personally, where that one was written from my perspective.
Then also, I think it can do with a lot of things. I like the idea of that tenacity of not giving up, in the deepest sense of that, like, no matter what the odds, no matter what the logic or realistic perspective would be, you’re not going to give up, you know, and I think that’s something that I miss in the world today. I just feel like it’s gotten to the point where, oh, if it didn’t work out then there is something else, don’t worry about it, keep going and keep moving. And that’s not a bad thought but the story of Orpheus is exactly what I’m saying: he lost his wife and nothing is going to stop him from getting her back and he went through the gates of hell and played music and won her back only to lose her at the end. So it’s that aspect as well.
And then a third one that I thought of is addiction or someone that is brought down by something, it can be anything really, that they are literally going through hell and you will stop at nothing to save them and bring them back up out of that. That’s another one. So those are the main three that I think you might not get from the direct translation of the lyrics.
This group of songs, are they all newer songs that kind of all came together at the same time or are they more of a patchwork of new and old?
I would say the majority of them are newer but I wrote them at the end of 2017. I recorded them at the beginning of 2018 and stuff happened that they are only being released now. But eight of them were pretty much written around the same time. The only two that weren’t were “Love Will Find A Way I & II.” I’ve been working on that song for ten years and I’ve never had an experience like that with songwriting, or a struggle like that with songwriting.
Why did it take a long time?
You know, I’ve been telling this story live so I can tell it a little bit better (laughs). I’ve kind of pin-pointed it to a more quick tell. But essentially, you know, I knew the story, I knew Part 1; Part 1 was there all day, I could have released that ten years ago. Part 1 was the story of what happened and a little bit of me dealing with it, but really the story of what happened. It’s a sad story and that was always there but I never wanted to release it until I had a reason or purpose behind it. A lot of times for me, if there’s not a reason, a lesson or a purpose in a song, then I tend to not like it very much. A lot of my songs have some form of that in them and this one I just couldn’t get because I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t know why I went through those things. I didn’t know why I had that kind of traumatic experience and how it affected me and made me the person I am now.
Then after years of touring and seeing how music that I create has affected people, it gave me a little bit more of an insight of, I am the way I am and I can do what I do with music because of the trauma I went through. Growing up, music saved me and gave me an out and gave me therapy and gave me a release. So now when I create music I find myself injecting so much emotion and passion and kind of heaviness into it because that’s who I am, that’s how I was raised, it’s who I was made to be, because of the things that happened.
So essentially I finished that song around the time that I wrote the other ones but I had been working on it for so long and I think the reason why I finally got it was because I matured and was able to look at the things that had happened because of the touring and because of the music and realizing some things about myself over the years as I got older to look at it and find the purpose and the reason of why I do music in the first place and why I travel and why I do any of this. And that’s really a three-part thing for me: to help someone release emotion, to inspire them and then to make them feel something deep. Those are the three purposes. I’ve gotten hundreds and hundreds of messages through the years like, I would have killed myself or I wouldn’t have been able to get past this or you gave a voice to something I couldn’t put into words and hearing the way you put it released me from it. So it gave me purpose. And once I realized that, realized the reason and accepted it and kind of leaned into it fully, I was able to finish that song.
Part 2 is not very complex. It wasn’t a thing about the complexity of the lyrics or the complexity of the chords or the structure or anything like that. It was solely because I had reached a place in my life where I could examine that story and kind of give it meaning and give it a purpose in the sense that love will find a way and there is always hope and no matter what you’re going through you can find a way out and don’t give up. That’s why it took so long and that’s kind of how I got there.
Who plays piano on that?
I play it live but that is done by a studio musician named Max Hart and he is an incredible musician. He kind of gave life to the recording of the track. I’m a very simple piano player and I can do it live but on the record it just sounded better and it felt better and it gave it a breath of fresh air to have him play those parts. I mean, I was playing it at first and it wasn’t bad but it was very simple. I’m not the best piano player. Then when we brought him in to just try it out, I was like, oh man, yeah, that’s night and day! (laughs). That blows it out of the water.
Do you think that your father’s death will always keep showing up in your music?
I think that no matter what the trauma is, in anyone’s life that they go through, you never forget or unlearn the trauma. You find a way to react to it better or not react at all. It’s always going to be there, it’s never going to go away, but it’s learning how to have those thoughts and feelings and stuff pop up but not automatically react to them on the basest level of the sense. So in a way, yeah, it will always affect me and it might show up in the songs in terms of the heaviness of the emotions that I put into things because of what I learned and how I learned to play music based off that when I was younger. So yeah, I think it will always be there but in terms of lyric-wise or storytelling that story again, I think there might be some things that come up but, to be honest, by writing “Love Will Find A Way I & II,” a huge weight was lifted off my shoulders and I feel like I finally was able to let go of a lot of that so I don’t feel the need to keep repeating myself, doing it over and over. Like I said, there might be some things or some phrases or some inspiration to come from it. But no, I don’t think I’ll be writing a lot more songs just on that subject, even though a lot of songs will be affected by it, if that makes sense. I think that was kind of the last few nails in the coffin for me to move past it.
I think you can feel that in those two songs, this weight coming off
The first part is like the weight of what happened and telling the story and the heaviness of it. Then the second part, it’s the weight being lifted and that’s what was missing cause I didn’t just want to tell this heavy story without the purpose of the second part.
What can you tell us about the song, “The Curse Of The Fold”
The title is a play on words for poker, when you fold you’re essentially giving up, whether it’s good or not, and sometimes it’s a strategic thing, I get it. But in this sense it’s basically the curse of giving up too easily or people that give up much too easily and constantly when things get too tough, kind of, oh well, I’m not doing it, I’ll move on, I’m done – when in fact if they would have stuck through it and maybe paid the dues of earning something and going through a little bit of suffering and making it happen, they would have gotten the greatest treasure of all by doing it. I believe there’re not many things that feel better in life than having to struggle for something and finally achieving it. It’s like, you EARNED it, you DESERVE it because of everything that you did FOR it and now you’re holding it and you can say, yeah, I DO deserve this and I went through something for it – rather than if something is given to somebody or a connection provides something for someone that may make something happen.
The best feeling I always get is when I struggle for something and it takes some time and I finally get it. So that song is at it’s core about that, about not giving up and actually working and earning the things that you want and how easily it is to get caught up in a mindset of giving up when you don’t get what you want and kind of moving on to something else. And I see that more and more in the age of instant gratification with social media. Not that I’m any better, I’m not saying that, but I just see it more in people, like if I can’t get it now then I don’t want it, let me pay more to get it, let me pay a fee and I can get it quicker, and that’s not always how life works.
Which song would you say changed the most from it’s original composition to it’s final recorded version?
Oh, that’s a good question. Let me think on that for a minute … I would say “There It Is,” actually. The lyrics are exactly the same as I wrote it but when I wrote “There It Is,” it was even more of a pop song than it is and there wasn’t like chords in it, it was more like single notes and very boppy and bouncy. I loved singing it and I loved what I was saying but I had this internal struggle with it because I was like, man, I like playing the song but when I listen to it I hate it! And that was one of the first ones me and Jimmy recorded and I was like, that is just not me, it doesn’t sound like what I want it to. Jimmy Messer, the producer, really helped me flesh that one out and provided some depth to it in the sense of the chords. He took a lot of the major chords that I was playing and made a minor and added some new chords and added a groove to it and horns and all this stuff that made me feel like, oh there it is, that’s what I was looking for! That’s not what I wanted to say but that’s the feeling I wanted to come across with the song, rather than the original way that I had it, which came off as a very, very pop song.
I just don’t see you as a very stereotypical pop guy
(laughs) Not at all! And that’s why it bothered me so much. I was like, man, I love this song and I want to put it out and I’m saying what I want to in this but I can’t put it out like THIS! (laughs) And Jimmy helped me flesh it out. Because I wrote it so simply, with single notes, I didn’t realize the chords that could be made out of those notes that would kind of add depth and a little bit of broadness and less of that pop aspect to it. And he helped me see that and realize it.
You’re talking about minimization. Is that how some of your songs start out, real simple?
Oh they all do. I’m not a very complex musician. I admit it (laughs)
Son House was very minimalistic as well
Right! I think that when you focus too much on being a technically good player sometimes you lose the heart and the soul of what someone can achieve by being so bare and so simple and so minimalistic. And you called out the perfect person, Son House. Like, right there, “Grinnin’ In Your Face,” “John The Revelator,” a lot of his stuff, when I first heard those songs, I got chills to the bone, and it was because of, I will say, the minimalism of the music but it didn’t really have to do with the music for me. It was his vocals. There was one mic in that room and there’s no effects on his voice and the control and the emotion of his vibrato and how he injected so much emotion and soul into what he was saying, just shook me and taught me so many lessons about how to sing a song like you mean it and how sometimes if you overcomplicate things you can lose that aspect.
Like I said earlier, I’m not the best guitar player. Most people in a room that has come to watch me can pick up the guitar and in a few minutes I can show them what I’m doing and they’ll be like, “Oh, that’s it?!” and I’m like, “Yeah, that’s it!” (laughs) I’m not a great guitar player and this is something that I’ve come to terms with over the years, and that is I don’t want to be. I don’t want to be a shredder. I don’t want to use super complex chord structures and all this other stuff and think about things. I don’t want to overthink the music cause the moment I start overthinking the music, that’s when I’ve noticed it starts to lose it’s heart. And that’s not for everybody and I’m not calling out that everybody should be this way. But that’s for me and I think that was for Son House as well back in the day and I think it’s for some people.
Everyone is different, everyone’s got their processes, but for me, I don’t want to be an incredibly technical, proficient musician, to be honest. I’m not seeking that. I’m not wanting it and I don’t really feel bad that I don’t want that. That’s not my goal. I want to be a soulful, over-the-top, full of heart and passion singer and I want to be able to write songs that tell a story that makes people feel something, that have a message in them, that have a purpose. That’s my goal and that’s what I’ve done and that’s what I want to continue to do, because that aspect of what I’ve done has done what it’s done for people. It’s something that I’ve had to come to terms with but I don’t want to be this amazingly technically proficient musician and I’m okay with that.
That being said, what is your live show like?
When you come to see me, a lot of people over the years have said they never know what to expect and it’s been different every time. Sometimes you’re going to see me and it’s going to be me and an acoustic guitar with a stomp pedal and a tambourine on my left foot and kind of just executing it, raw and straight to the point. The tour before this one was me with that aspect but with a fiddle player doing leads and stuff, who is amazingly, technically proficient. I think what I meant with all that, not that I can’t play with amazingly proficient musicians, they add something very big, but the moment I personally start to focus on that I lose the ability to easily get into that zone and just lose myself in the music.
So now we’re on a tour where we’re executing the songs from The Dark & The Light, which are very technically proficient in the musical aspects of them but my contribution is very simple, very heartfelt, very raw and very passionate. So when you come out to this tour, and we’ll be touring on this the rest of the year, you’re going to get a full mixture of blues, rock & roll, soul, folk, all these aspects. You’re going to see around five people onstage – a drummer, a key player, a bass, a lead guitar and then me on vocals and guitar. Again, I don’t have to focus on all those other things as the other musicians are executing their part which builds it up in a way to where I’ve never had that aspect and I love it. It’s so much fun. I don’t have to think about what they’re doing, I can still lose myself in the music and yet it has this built up complex sound to it.
The religious imagery can sometimes be very strong. Is that a subconscious thing that just shows up when you’re writing?
You know, I was raised Pentecostal and I was forced into that and I was made to stay there for eighteen years. I don’t hold any grudges or anything against that but it definitely affected my psyche and I think it’s why I’m so much into legends and folklores and stories and how that is integrated into my music now. But the religious aspect, I don’t look at it as a religious thing. I look at it now just as I would Orpheus, the Greek Mythology, or a really good story. I look at them as lessons and parables and things that are really just amazing stories with a good structure and purpose behind them. Now that I am older, I look at them, like “Delilah,” that song is telling the story of Samson & Delilah but that’s what it is, it’s a story with a lesson. I don’t look at it with the religious aspect of it. So I think I’ve taken that out of it and I’ve just kind of condensed it to the lessons. And that’s another thing, like the Bible has so many parables and stories that have this complex lesson behind them and message and if you take away the spiritual side of it and the religious side, it’s just an everyday thing, a principle of life that everyone should know. So yeah, I would say that it has affected me and it does show up but not necessarily in the religious aspect of it.
Was your Pentecostal environment really strict?
I oftentimes tell people, you know those churches that handle snakes, imagine taking the snakes out, and that’s the intensity, without the snakes, of the Pentecostal I grew up in. I’ve seen people speaking in tongues. I was told by my mother that if I didn’t get the Holy Ghost I might not be accepted into Heaven, at eight years old! I would wake up afraid to die because I might go to Hell! Like fire and brimstone to the core.
So what were you like in high school? Were you intense because of what you were going through?
I was very, very to myself. I was very, very introverted. I didn’t have many friends, I was lost in books constantly, I was constantly distracting myself, constantly escaping, and that is the truth. I really honestly didn’t socialize until after I was eighteen years old and got out of that world. And for the first time I was experiencing life and socializing with people and learning how to even communicate or feel normal or to be in a social structure and not feel awkward. It took me a while, a few years, to fully adjust but it took me escaping from that world, that sheltered kind of inclusive where we are not of this world and we are special and we should not mix in with them, we’re going to hold true and be who we are. Even though at the time I was involved in it, I was always looking for a way to escape it. So back in the day I would say that I kept to myself and I was always looking for an out so I would distract myself with books and music and whatever I could to not have to be in that world.
Were you reading what you wanted to read, listening to what you wanted to listen to?
Musically, I wasn’t allowed to listen to a lot of secular music but after I got a little savvy, I found ways around that. My parents wouldn’t listen to my music and find out what it was I was getting so I knew the words they wanted to hear and I’d be like, “This is this album and this guy went through this and he’s of this church,” and blah, blah, when in fact, none of that was true (laughs). So I found out at an early age how to kind of get out of that mold. Now with books, I could read whatever I wanted. None of the rest of my family are big readers or anything so they just saw it as, “That’s good, he’s learning, give him whatever he wants.” I was very heavily into mysteries and legends and folklore and mythology and stuff like that. But yeah, I just distracted myself but I was a little held back from what I could experience and what I couldn’t. But like I said, as I got older I found ways around that. I got a little more sneaky (laughs).
With the Greek Mythology, who was your favorite?
Orpheus! (laughs). You know, I was never physically strong growing up and it was just beautiful that someone could have an affect over people through music and control emotions and bring down the biggest giants and the lord of the underworld through just playing songs and making them feel something. Besides that, your typical Hercules and Apollo. I was all over the place but really Orpheus was one of my favorites for sure.
When did you get to grow your hair long?
Ever since I left my family’s house (laughs). I was always made to keep my hair short, be respectful and have a certain appearance, blah, blah, blah. So as soon as I left, I was like screw all this, it’s growing out now! (laughs) You know, my family had a lot of that misogynistic, macho, a man should keep his hair like this, a man should do this and a man is this. So definitely when I got out I backlashed and never looked back (laughs). Nowadays it’s not so much a statement anymore as it was in the beginning. I just like the way it looks now (laughs). But you know, I thought about cutting it but every time I do, I think, oh man, I’m going to regret it, I’m going to miss it (laughs).
What got you into something like the Shapeshifters?
So after high school when I was in the church and classical music and opera and choir, I wanted to rebel so bad and to do anything that was the opposite of what it was that I was doing at the time. So I got into metal and hardcore music and I did screaming vocals and that’s where I learned how to distort my voice without actually hurting my voice. I count that as the sole reason of how I am able to do the growl and sing while growling and all this stuff night to night and not hurt myself. So I got into metal and hardcore music right after high school and did that and toured on that for a few years. And you know with the Shapeshifters, I started it as a singer-songwriter/folk musician solo and when I started adding musicians we were playing dive bars and kind of rowdy scenes and I was writing these emotional songs and playing these emotional songs and it wasn’t going off so hot. So I was like, man, I want to implement an aspect of that intensity of the metal and hardcore music BUT not play metal and hardcore. And that’s where the Shapeshifters came in and that’s what we developed over time based on the places we were playing and the crowds we were playing to and what we were doing. And it worked, it absolutely executed what we wanted because it had that aspect of intensity and entertaining to watch, fun, throwing guitars and banjos all over the place and headbanging. BUT it also had like a message, kind of similar to what I’m doing now, not as intense but it had that singer-songwriter aspect to it as well. So we had the best of both worlds and were able to make it work for where we were at and the places we were playing.
You’re on tour now, is that how you’re going to spend the rest of your year?
Absolutely. Last year was kind of a tough one for me because I wasn’t on tour as much and I like to tour, I like the road, I like to be busy, I like hard work. And last year because we were focusing so much on the new record and the creation of it and doing it in a new way that I’d never done before, it took a lot of time and I wasn’t able to tour as much as I wanted. So this year, absolutely, we are hitting the ground as much as we can. Right now we’ve been on the road about a month and we’ve got another two weeks left here and then I get two weeks off to recoup a little bit. Then we’re in Europe for a month and a half and then we come back and I get another two weeks off and then we hit the road again for another month and a half to two months. It’s going to be that kind of a balance: a long haul and then a little recovery period and then back on the road. So absolutely we’re doing it big.
Photograph by Michelle Mavrides
