James Sullivan Vinyl, CD & Tape 3 Items

With another lockdown hitting London in November 2020, James Sullivan knew he had to do something to stay sane. “The year was a total car crash but I knew there was a way to save it. I set myself the challenge of writing 10 songs in 10 days and recording them – with no intention of anyone ever hearing it. It was a move away from writing songs for a touring live band – More Kicks. I wanted to make something based entirely on instinct – trying out new styles and not thinking about anything for longer than a few minutes. Write it, record it, move on.” (The fact you’re reading this of course proves things took a slightly different turn, but hey...) Light Years is a whistlestop tour of blitzed-out fuzz (‘Totally Bored’), paranoid drum machine twitches (‘Getaway’), stadium-sized reflections (‘In The End’) and lo-fi 60s pop nuggets (‘It Won’t Do You Harm’). Take lead single ‘Lea Bridge’, a Velvet Underground, Modern LOVERSstyle paranoid stomp which blends saturated guitars and a swirling organ with a spoken word account of a fatigued journey across town, breaking stride only to say: “All I wanna do is laze around and lie beside you.” “That song laid the foundations for the whole project,” James says. “I’m usually so obsessed with chasing melodies but this time I wanted to free myself completely and just speak directly. I’d been keeping a journal after having some CBT during a particularly rough patch last year. That was part of the advice they gave me – to try and track what was going on in my head. The lyrics for that song are lifted almost word for word from that diary.” The record was self-recorded on a half-broken Tascam 8-track. “This record is full of horrendous recording practices. You can hear saturation, tape reels whirling, me pressing stop too early. But none of that stuff sounds out of place. This record is the antithesis of overthinking. Everything is live takes on to tape from start to finish. How could I even overdub any ‘mistakes’? It’s just me in the room and I only have two hands.” Light Years may have been born of frustration, but showcases an endlessly productive musician – a snapshot of an innately melodic writer holding a microphone up to a beating heart and a restless mind. Definitely worth being heard by more people than just the musician himself.

With another lockdown hitting London in November 2020, James Sullivan knew he had to do something to stay sane. “The year was a total car crash but I knew there was a way to save it. I set myself the challenge of writing 10 songs in 10 days and recording them – with no intention of anyone ever hearing it. It was a move away from writing songs for a touring live band – More Kicks. I wanted to make something based entirely on instinct – trying out new styles and not thinking about anything for longer than a few minutes. Write it, record it, move on.” (The fact you’re reading this of course proves things took a slightly different turn, but hey...) Light Years is a whistlestop tour of blitzed-out fuzz (‘Totally Bored’), paranoid drum machine twitches (‘Getaway’), stadium-sized reflections (‘In The End’) and lo-fi 60s pop nuggets (‘It Won’t Do You Harm’). Take lead single ‘Lea Bridge’, a Velvet Underground, Modern LOVERSstyle paranoid stomp which blends saturated guitars and a swirling organ with a spoken word account of a fatigued journey across town, breaking stride only to say: “All I wanna do is laze around and lie beside you.” “That song laid the foundations for the whole project,” James says. “I’m usually so obsessed with chasing melodies but this time I wanted to free myself completely and just speak directly. I’d been keeping a journal after having some CBT during a particularly rough patch last year. That was part of the advice they gave me – to try and track what was going on in my head. The lyrics for that song are lifted almost word for word from that diary.” The record was self-recorded on a half-broken Tascam 8-track. “This record is full of horrendous recording practices. You can hear saturation, tape reels whirling, me pressing stop too early. But none of that stuff sounds out of place. This record is the antithesis of overthinking. Everything is live takes on to tape from start to finish. How could I even overdub any ‘mistakes’? It’s just me in the room and I only have two hands.” Light Years may have been born of frustration, but showcases an endlessly productive musician – a snapshot of an innately melodic writer holding a microphone up to a beating heart and a restless mind. Definitely worth being heard by more people than just the musician himself.

In Spring 2022 and with a new record from his band More Kicks in the can, James found himself waiting. Release dates scheduled for nine months in the future, nothing much could happen beyond tour planning for the following year. “To be honest, I was scared” says James. “I’d been writing and recording like a man possessed for the past 18 months, writing the More Kicks album ‘Punch Drunk’ and my first solo record ‘Light Years’. I was worried what would happen if I stopped. So I headed back to my cupboard-sized ‘studio’ and plugged in my halfbroken tape machine.” ‘Vital Signs’ was written and recorded over the next couple of months, dragging a handful of friends into that cupboard studio for a lending hand here and there. Written, recorded, mixed, mastered and then back to the ‘day job’ of More Kicks touring across Europe, USA and UK. Stuff. To. Do. But something wasn’t quite right. “It took me a long time to realise that I didn’t want to make another record with More Kicks. I was obsessed with making us as good as we could be but suddenly I didn’t feel like writing new More Kicks songs and I had this finished record sitting there doing nothing.” ‘Vital Signs’ expands James’ musical palette to include blitzed-out fuzz (‘Dronify’) and chewed-up chamber quartets (‘La Rochelle’), while never entirely abandoning the more familiar turf of sneakily self-lacerating melodic nuggets (‘All I Wanna Do’, ‘Endless Summer’). Take the first track, ‘It’s Good To Be Wrong’, a Modern Lovers, Alex CHILTON-style stomp that blends heartbeat drum crashes with psychedelic organs and swooning Replacements guitars. “That song was a deliberate attempt to do as little as possible. My tendency is to overthink structure so I wanted to make a song that was essentially a mantra. Just hammer myself over and over with only two chords. It almost worked, there are three. “I recorded everything on an 8-track by myself and there are unhealthy amounts of tape hiss over everything. But for me, the whole point of these solo records is to get out of my head, don’t think twice, press record, keep going. It’s not that I don’t care, quite the opposite. But if I’ve learned nothing else from playing music, it’s that I should trust my instinct far more than my brain.” That brain almost left this record languishing on a tape before the instinct to put it out into the world took over. If what comes next isn’t immediately obvious, it’s certain that more music will continue to emerge from this innately restless writer. “I’ve accepted my fate that I’m a lifer.”