James Blake released his seventh album, Trying Times, last week. But according to the Enfield-born producer there’s a whole lot more of his work that hasn’t yet seen light of day – indeed in a new interview with Rolling Stone he’s revealed that “at least” three albums he’s made with other artists are still unreleased.
When asked how much of his work ends up on the cutting room floor, Blake said: “If I think about that, I’ll probably cry.
"There’s at least three albums with people who are a few of my favourite artists of all time that haven’t come out…. I’d say 99 - not 99 - 95 percent of the work I’ve done was unpaid.”
That makes it sound as if Blake is tied into some horrendous zero hours contract by his employers (he’s produced for the likes of Beyonce and Frank Ocean amongst others). But, as he explained, it’s simply that coming up with ideas is a bit hit and miss: “As a producer, you’re throwing stuff at a wall and seeing what sticks. And sometimes a lot of things that people don’t put out or that sits on a hard drive for a long time.
"And that includes my own stuff, by the way. If I was including my own stuff, the percentage would probably be higher.
“But yeah, I’d say the 10,000 hours that we talk about arriving at some kind of mastery of something, I probably spent that just doing things that never came out, which is nuts really.”
“It’s not even a complaint,” he continued. “It’s just the way the industry kind of is that producers don’t get paid by the hour. It’s more like hours spent on things, right? So you can spend a lot of hours on a piece of music, and then the direction of a record can change. And that can happen with me too. I can just wake up one day and just realise, ‘Oh shit, we’ve been going in the wrong direction.’ And then five to 10 songs just disappear.”
Trying Times is also notable for Blake stepping away from the electronics and voice manipulation that has characterised his previous records and using more traditional instruments – he even plays a guitar on it. “I’ve always tweaked my voice and made it sound disembodied and alien, but I think now so much of music sounds like that anyway.”
“The novelty has worn off,” he suggests. “The process of production has veered so far into the automated, the compressed, or the flat-lined, and especially with AI techniques, that it almost feels rebellious to just pick up a guitar. It’s kind of weird how things come around like that.”
