Ok, I think the by far most frequent question I get is, "When is the solo album comming out?"
I can only respond, "soon."
I am workin in the studio whenever I have time to finish the basic tracks. The biggest issue I am facing is I keep wanting to change what the sound of the album is going to be.
Q2) The new Elysium album?
A2) God only knows...
Q3) Can I borrow $5?
A3) No.
If you have any questions not answered here, feel free to contact me.
-James
NEW AS OF 04.09.2008: The Background to all my recorded songs!
A Song About You:
The first, and actually only fully completed trio song from my Miami days (the trio being Myself, Jason Gentile, and Christopher “Hatchet” Jenkins) I wrote the tune over the course of about twenty minutes while we were sitting in my room messing around with some guitars trying to come up with song ideas. The funny thing about this song is that I didn’t have any specific “you” in mind while writing it, which is in almost direct contrast to most of my other music, which even when the song doesn’t imply it, has a specific person or incident in mind. Chris Jenkins is responsible for the almost painfully high harmonies in the chorus, but I really like them.
Ali’s Song (Wonderful to Love):
Song #1 in my songbook, the first song I ever wrote beginning to end. It’s a tune about a high school crush, fairly basic. The real meat of the lyrics comes from the expression that even knowing I would never end up with the girl, it felt so great to care abut someone that I didn’t mind the distance. The theme comes up in several of my later tunes as well.
Catching Raindrops:
Another one of my earlier tunes, also written during high school, the name of the song comes out of an online convo I was having with a friend, Rachael. I had this cool guitar lick, but couldn’t think of anything that seemed to go with it, so I told her, and she recommended, among other things, the idea of running in the rain with somebody. At the time I wrote it, my left hand wasn’t strong enough to play the song all the way through (the guitar part is rough, even though it doesn’t sound like it) so the first time I was actually able to hear myself play the whole song was during my sophomore year of college.
Closer:
This song is about a date I had with an ex. It’s about how, after being apart for a semester, and distanced both physically and emotionally, it felt amazing to just be close for a night, even though it was purely platonic. This is by far the most popular tune I’ve ever written.
Flowers ‘Round The Flagpole, A Song For Nora Kress:
Nora was a girl I grew up with. She died of spinal meningitis during our senior year of high school. The day of her funeral the whole school brought flowers and laid them around the base of the flagpole in front of the school. The song is about the experience of watching everybody I had grown up with simultaneously come together and look past the petty differences in the face of such a tragedy.
Just Another Day:
This song is montage of my freshmen year at Miami University of Ohio. I actually wrote the song over the course of the year, with each verse representing some significant aspect of each passing season. The line in the first verse about the chefs leaving town has a double meaning: first that the dining hall staff really did suffer on the weekends, and second, about a month into the year the staff went on strike, so most of the cooks did in fact leave. Ultimately the conclusion of the song is that the school, nay any place we go, we are just a temporary inhabitant, and each day is, well, just another day.
Looking Back:
This song came out of a quote by John Wittier, which reads, “Of all the words of tongue or pen, the saddest are, ‘it might have been’.” The whole really is about having no regrets. Or at least living life as much as possible.
My Inspiration:
This song is an almost verbatim transposition of an AIM conversation I had with an old crush during my freshman year of college. It has been somewhat encrypted, though, for the sake of poetic license. Unfortunately, even though I had saved the original conversation, it managed to disappear in the annals of cyberspace.
No Place To Go:
This is a song about sitting at home during my high school days, and during my first two summers home from college, when all my friends were busy or not around. Sometimes I’d just get in the car and drive around just to get out of the house, which is the general premise for the tune. The chords of the song are rather blatantly ripped off of an outro that Jack Johnson does for the song “flake” when he goes “Please Please Please don’t let me, Please please please don’t let me, please please please don’t let me down.” But I made the vocals run a bit faster than his because, well, I don’t know why. This is my first attempt at a blues song, despite having been a blues enthusiast for years.
Not Like Me:
This song is about the fourth of July, 2003. As we did every year, I went to the town fireworks with my high school friends. We had all just graduated, and a lot of my friends were talking about how anxious they were to get out of this town. I spent most of the night thinking how much I liked being here, and how I disagreed with their sentiments. Hence, they were not like me. The tune itself came out of a little jam I recorded called “just like me.” I have the recording somewhere, I’ll make it public if this song ever becomes well know.
Open House:
This song is about choosing which fraternity I wanted to join, the school called the process, ‘open house.’
Opening Sequence:
I don’t especially enjoy waking up in the morning. This song is about not wanting to get out of bed but doing it anyways. I wrote the guitar part first, the words came a few days later, after waking up from a nap.
This Girl:
A song about a girl in high school who was more interested in me than I was in her. I always felt kind of bad about the last line. It just seems kind of harsh. This song was written for a punk band, not acoustic guitar, like most of my music.
Whos’ At The Door:
This is by far the most ridiculous song I ever wrote. I was sitting in my room at the Sigma Tau Gamma house with my guitar when someone knocked on our front door. Being ever the responsible person, I started strung what became the chorus and shout down the hall, “Who’s at the door? Who’s at the door?” I finished writing the song in the next fifteen minutes. I ended up keeping it because I like the melody…I think it’s catchy.