Finishing that was like, Okay, I’m done, I can move on. For me writing “Say What You Will” was probably the pinnacle of that achievement. It’s great to have internalized that music, but then to actually take those songs apart and figure out how they were actually doing it is something quite different. I became very enthralled by traditional songwriting and I was listening to a lot of Leonard Cohen and Carole King, Don McLean, Joni Mitchell, some of the stuff I grew up on - but going deeper into the craft of doing that. Well, during that time I’d learning to craft songs in a more traditional sense. So some of these songs are from the last four or five years? I’m constantly making music and then compiling things, and when I feel that it’s the right time for a certain type of thing, that’s when I release it. It’s not really how a lot of the music I make really works. The generally accepted idea of album culture or album creation is you go in the studio, you make an album, you tour it, and then you go back in the studio. It actually happened naturally, because I had been making dance music for many years but I hadn’t been releasing it. The new album is awesomely weird - it’s like the strange dance tracks you used to make early in your career combined with your newer, more songwritery songs. In a sort of follow-up to an expansive conversation nearly four years ago, Variety caught up with Blake at a downtown New York hotel on the morning before his concert at the Knockdown Center - he was seated cozily on a couch with his longtime partner British actor and activist Jameela Jamil, who gave an effusive and very friendly greeting before leaving us to it. His round of concerts this fall have been much livelier than the ones in the past few years, with extended dance segments merged with more introspective material. However, as he says below, he felt he’d reached the end of that particular thread and brought back the clattering noise and angular beats of his earlier work, fusing it with his more-refined songwriting on his latest album “Playing Robots Into Heaven,” which actually is a solid impressionistic description of what the music sounds like. His music shifted dramatically in 2013 with the release of “Overgrown” and the song “Retrograde,” bringing a more-soulful groove to his previously cold and static beats, and for his next three albums he pursued a more songwriter-y muse, continuing with electronic experimentation while showing the influence of the masters he’d grown up on, like Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen. For the past dozen years, British singer-songwriter James Blake has been one of music’s most influential and compelling outliers: a classically trained pianist with an equal love disruptive beats and electronic noise a heart-rending singer whose high, reedy voice can ace a Joni Mitchell song and light up hip-hop hits by Travis Scott, Kendrick Lamar, Frank Ocean, Beyonce, Kanye West and Jay-Z a serial collaborator who’s worked with singers from SZA to Rosalia and beyond.
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