When 27-year-old London-based 12-string prodigy James Blackshaw first turned heads five or so years ago with his deft, blisteringly fast fingerpicking style, you couldn’t read a review of his music without John Fahey’s name dropped in there somewhere. Now seven albums later, his music – blending Robbie Basho’s East-meets-West modalities with the modern minimalist compositions of Steve Reich and Terry Riley – couldn’t be further away from Fahey and the Takoma school of solo acoustic guitar he was so often lumped in with.

The Glass Bead Game, his forthcoming album – the first on Michael Gira’s Young God Records – follows on from last year’s Litany of Echoes in expanding the use of piano in his oeuvre while still confirming the solidarity and singularity of his guitar playing. Blackshaw talks to Real Groove from his home in East Sussex about the making of the new record.

RG: So how are things going with the release of the new album coming up?

JB: Yeah it’s going good. I mean everything’s all set. I even got some copies of the albums a couple weeks back.

RG: Have you been doing much touring to push the album?

JB: No, I haven’t been any sort of touring, not since I got back from the US 5- 6 weeks ago. I’ve done a couple of shows and a few interviews, and it looks like the next lengthy tour will be in the US and Canada in June.

RG: I just want to start off by talking about how the new album came about. You’ve switched from Tompkins Square to Young God Records. I’ve always found Tompkins Square a good fit for your music, and you’ve done two albums and several reissues on the label – what’s the story behind the move?

JB: It’s sort of um… I don’t know if I’d say it’s a long and complicated story, but I first signed a contract with Tompkins Square about three years ago now, and I think it’s a really great label. I really respect Josh (Rosenthal, Tompkins Square founder) and a lot of the music that he puts out. So it’s been really great to release my albums on Tompkins Square. But when I spoke to Michael (Gira) it was coming to the end of the two album contract and I felt like I was moving further and further away from what I felt was the aesthetic of Tompkins Square is. It’s not a case of not wanting to be pigeonholed but a lot of the other music on there is solo guitar music, and I’ve got a lot of other ideas. Talking to Michael I felt much more comfortable about going other places with those ideas. I felt a little bit more at home in the sense that Young God is a very eclectic label and I love Michael’s music and I trust and respect him as a person, and it seemed like the right move to make at the right time.

RG: After hearing the album, I can see the progression you’ve been making from Litany of Echoes with the inclusion of a bit more piano in your compositions. How are you finding the transition from playing guitar to piano? It sounds like you’ve mastered it at some level, like on the track Arc. It sounds pretty amazing, especially the confidence and dexterity of your playing.

JB: Thank you. I played a little bit of piano when I was a teenager and again I never had lessons and it was in a different way. Over the last few years I just got really into solo piano music, and the sonority and the tonality of the instrument itself is really amazing to me. In the same sense I fell in love with solo guitar music, I started to fall in love with the piano. It was kind of unintentional. When I recorded Litany of Echoes my friend John Hannon, who’s recorded all of my albums thus far, had just bought an upright piano for the studio and I just felt compelled to do something with it and it was pretty spontaneous. The pieces on Litany were very kind of simple, repetitive, little motifs with not too much forethought, but I like them that way. After doing that I felt like I wanted to play piano. I didn’t necessarily think that I was going to learn or practice with the intention of making pieces to record but what I found was that more and more I was able to transfer that ideas I have for guitar to piano, I felt they worked. I still feel less confident as a piano player than I do a guitar player but I think my ability serves its purpose in a way. I think if I was a more virtuoso piano player the pieces wouldn’t sound the same way. What’s interesting is that a lot of the guitar pieces over the last few years have almost been like informed by piano playing. I kind of wanted the guitar to sound like a piano in my head so then moving from those guitars back to piano there’s a kind of weird degree of separation and blurring of those lines.

RG: That’s what I found when I first heard your music on O’ True Believers. It almost didn’t sound like a guitar to me. There’s this flowing, drifting quality which somehow transcends the guitar.

JB: I don’t know how much of that stuff is intentional but I think if you’re a guitar player and all you listen to is other guitar players or other guitar music, almost by default you’re going to end up sounding that way. I guess I just liked listening to a lot of piano music and different things at times, and bringing those ideas to guitar.



RG: For the first time in your recordings, there are vocals, as on the track Cross. Is that a direction you’re exploring a bit more?

JB: Earlier on in the process I decided that I wanted to do something with vocals. It’s kind of different for me ‘cos usually I will write the basis of the composition for guitar and after I’ve written the music I listen to it and I decide what I hear in my head that isn’t there, and for string parts and things that’s how I come about to do that. But even before I started writing the music for The Glass Bead Game, I was aware that I wanted to do something with vocals but I just didn’t really know or how to do that. I was toying with the idea of lyrics but when it came down to it I couldn’t actually see that working, it became too distracting for me. I think people naturally always focus on words because it’s part of our everyday lives. When somebody is talking in a bar where there’s background music, more than likely we’ll listen to people talking. I just didn’t want to take that focus away from the music. I listen to a lot of classical music that have wordless vocals. The biggest influence for that vocal part was Meredith Monk and also the early Philip Glass ensemble pieces. I was lucky to have Lavinia (Blackwell), I’d known her for a little while and I felt it was something she could do quite naturally. She’s a classically trained singer and I was really happy with this piece.

RG: I read somewhere that you were toying with idea of yourself singing on the record too.

JB: Yeah I was actually. This was really something I threw around, and it’s something I’ve very aware of. I’m not a particularly good singer, but I thought that’s not necessarily the be all and end all. Again I think sometimes things only have to work in the context that you put them in. I think this was at the point where I was considering using words and I knew that I didn’t want to write in a conventional singer/songwriter way but I thought there might be some way of incorporating that into what I was doing. In all honesty, I didn’t find what I was looking for. I even did some recordings of those songs with the some kind of singing and words and I guess I felt that the pieces which were so much powerful and interesting without it. The one good thing that did come about was I got some ideas for melodic lines and things from doing that, and also getting used to the sound of my own voice again. I’m not sure if I’ll ever sing on my recordings, but I guess that’s quite nice.

RG: How did you come to reference Hermann Hesse’s novel in the album title?

JB: Like a lot of things I really don’t try to think or analyse too much why. It’s an amazing book and when I read it a few years ago, it had a really profound effect on me. It’s actually a book I hadn’t read in a few years. I guess certain kinds of themes and ideas in that book just really seem to kind of ring true with me. I can’t sort of really say much more than that.

RG: I also noticed that the track titles have become one word minimalist titles – is this approach also hinting at a direction you’re moving into?

JB: I dunno… again, I think sometimes I make decisions more on what I don’t want to do or what I don’t want to repeat. I’ve come to dislike some of the floweriness of the some of the titles, not all of them, I’ve chosen in the past. I really wanted to strip away almost any kind of association between song title and song by just having one word. I felt that that were so ambiguous and they could mean different things to different people. It becomes almost impossible to have any sort of image to associate with anything. I didn’t want to go down the route of naming pieces numerically and not having titles, like just having the length of the tracks, it just seems a little pretentious. I can’t really explain the titling of the songs either, except they were this random process of associational things I was thinking or feeling at the same time boiled into single, blunt one word titles.

RG: What’s the compositional process like for you? You seem to be fairly consistent putting a record every 12 months. Is it a very disciplined thing or does it just come naturally?

JB: I think I do deliberately impose on myself a rule of making a record a year. There are big periods of time where I’m not writing at all. The reason for that is I’ve become sort of obsessive about it when I do write and I think it’s actually quite unhealthy to be this way. Not necessarily counterproductive, but I genuinely need to step back from it when I can. Though I do tend to try to set aside a specific period during the year to do it, I’m not saying I’m going to do it within this record amount of time but I do have an idea of at least when that process will start. What I think is interesting is even if I weren’t making myself write within a time, I tend to get the itch around that time. 

RG: Do you prefer writing at home or going on the road performing?

JB: I think even if I was asked that question a year ago, I would have said I much prefer writing to playing live. I find now that most of the time that I actually need to do both things equally. One without the other just wouldn’t work - it would be unbalanced. Naturally I’m compelled to the writing side of things. I’m not a very extroverted person, and I’m not really a showy performance kind of person, I never really have been. My thing has always been writing but I really genuinely enjoy playing live most of the time, and I think it’s important for me to do that. I think everybody needs some kind of feedback and some way of relating what they’re doing and seeing how that relates to other people as well. I think if I was just doing this and never playing in front of people, it would feel kind of lonely and purposeless or something. I guess both things are kind of equal.

RG: I’ve got a strange question for you now – your fingernails. I’ve seen videos of you playing live on youtube and you play with your nails instead of fingerpicks. How does that work when you play the piano? It seems a bit difficult playing piano with your long nails.

JB: Yeah this was something that really put me off trying to approach playing piano again (laughs). It’s such a ridiculous thing but it’s true. I think that any piano teacher in the world would absolutely berate me for trying to play piano with the nails I have on one of my hands. On the other hand I can’t cut off my fingernails and that’s something I’ve considered – could I play with picks, like a lot of other guitar players do. But I think it would really mean going through a process of relearning fingerpicking and adapting the style. I think there are certain things you could do – well with either one of those things –playing fingerpicking guitar with using your nails, and one of the those things is the dynamics of playing guitar you have much more feeling in terms of what’s loud or what’s soft. It’s just my opinion and some people will disagree but I think you can have more dexterity with your nails than picks. The upside of picks is that you can play much louder basically and more solidly and also you don’t have to walk around with three really weird long fingernails (laughs). I sort of adapted the way in which I play piano – I play thereabouts the kind of correct hand posture with my left had but with my right hand I tend to play basically quite flat-handed so the nails are never really in contact with the piano keys. I play more with the flat part of my fingers rather than my finger tips. And that’s something a piano teacher would go crazy at, but what the hell (laughs). It might be slightly hindering, but it works okay for me.



RG: On the topic of the fingerstyle guitar, there have been quite a number of artists in the last few years ushering in a kind of renaissance of the American Primitive tradition - do you think it’s a bit of short-lived thing? There are people like Jack Rose who’s said that he’s done all he can with a 12-string guitar, that he’s pushed it as far as he can go, and with yourself moving towards more piano-based music. Do you think there are limitations with what you can do with an acoustic guitar?

JB: It’s interesting. Sometimes I think yes there’s only so much you can do with a guitar and I think that’s one of the reasons – aside for my interest in playing other instruments, and writing music for different instrumentation – I felt like I’m approaching a point where I don’t know what I could possibly add to what I’ve already done with the guitar. I think there doesn’t have to be necessarily huge development each time you write a piece. There’s the kind of saying when somebody learns you learn incredibly quickly and in a way you learn the most you will in the first few months or years, and the learning process slows down. In the same way with playing guitar these huge developments that happened for me happened to me in the first couple of years and then it feels it’s been more like a refining process since then. It gradually pushes you further and further away from the place you started at. I think there will always be possibilities and it may not seem like these huge things, and little things that can be done differently, new tunings that can be used or unusual picking patterns in different timings.

I think it’s important that it doesn’t get stuck in things that are so genre specific. But if you’re writing guitar music and you try to play flamenco guitar or blues or gypsy jazz then I don’t know what you can do differently. You’re locked into something where the doors are already closed. I already think that some people who would be quite enthusiastic about solo guitar a number years ago, because it seems like this fresh and interesting development – even though it’s based on the Takoma label stuff in the ‘60s and ‘70s – now have grown quite tired of it.

RG: So what’s your stance on the whole internet piracy/music leakage thing? I know when I asked you for your album you said please don’t share it, which I haven’t.

JB: Yeah, oh my god, it’s an issue that’s completely unavoidable at the moment and something that you deal with on a daily basis. I really don’t know. If I were to get philosophical about it, there are new and interesting developments that happen in the world that happen all the time and every few years, and the birth of Internet was one of the hugest things. It’s really changed the way we live. It’s absurd, the way in which it’s happened in the last, not even 10 years. When something happens like this and people are uploading links to download albums, and sharing albums in this way, it really seems pretty futile and pointless complaining about it or trying to do anything about it. I just don’t think there’s anything you can do. It is a bit of an ethical thing really, because for me somebody copying an album for their friend a couple of years ago through CDR or tape years ago seems on a totally different level to somebody uploading an album to the internet anonymously and just everybody downloading for free. I think the people who do it, their intentions are often good, and I don’t think these are the kind of people evil sinister people chuckling to themselves because they are fucking people over. They are doing it because they actually really like the music and they want to share with people. But I just don’t think the people who are doing it really consider what the impact is particularly on smaller labels and musicians who aren’t actually earning that much from music and are kind of struggling doing what they’re doing.

I mean somebody like – and I’m not advocating it and when you’re making these statements you can’t really make these distinctions – Metallica will have enough people buying their album and will able to afford their houses and cars and stuff. A lot of underground musicians who are trying to make a living on music – this will probably sound kind of stupid and whiney – but I mean literally people downloading your album could be your rent money or something to eat. It really does boil down to that. It’s like anything, I think the internet is great, the idea of sharing and having this information available and being able to share it immediately, is a wonderful idea. But unfortunately there are consequences to doing that, beyond to what they can see. A lot of small labels are going under because of it; I wouldn’t even say to anybody stop downloading music illegally but you know when do it there is a consequence. That’s all really.

James Blackshaw - Cross (Edit)

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WANT MORE?
Latest: The Glass Bead Game releases May 26 on Young God Records.
For Fans of: Robbie Basho, Terry Riley.
Web: myspace.com/jamesblackshaw