James Sullivan Vital Signs

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.”