It’s been a notorious few years marked by a pandemic, wild politics, confrontation, and no small amount of social upheaval. So when Early James croons in a voice of the finest grit, “Oh Lordy, what a strange time to be alive,” it’s the kind of truth that makes and breaks smiles.
The native Alabamian (born James Mullis) had barely tuned his guitar in support of his Easy Eye Records debut, “Singing For My Supper,” before COVID-19 wrecked the best-laid plans of promoters and bands in March of 2020. But in the wake of loss grew opportunity, and the songs for James’ latest effort, “Strange Time To Be Alive,” took shape.
“I would say right when we got vaccinated, we immediately started talking about it,” James remembered. “By the time the (“Singing For My Supper”) album had come out, it had already been done for six months. I guess we started talking about getting in the studio toward the beginning of 2021.”
Even with about half the album conceived before the pandemic, James nevertheless captures the absurdity and anxiety of the moment. The title track itself sprung immediately from the experience.
“That one was written in late March of 2020… That was the weirdest one because I got to write that one with Rob Thomas and Austin Jenkins. It was the very first of many Zoom meetings I did,” James said with a laugh. “We all were just talking about how, ‘Ah, this’ll blow over. Hopefully, gonna see you guys out in the real world soon.’ We had no idea.”
“Strange Time To Be Alive,” which has recently been re-released in a deluxe edition with three additional songs, vacillates between the evocative and the nightmarish, cruising right up to the edge of dissonance while relying on dark melodies that swirl around raw sugar and woodchip observations. In the album’s opening track ‘Racing To A Red Light,” James places himself squarely in the maelstrom, namechecking some of the era’s polarizing figures while poking the proverbial bear with lines like, “Internet ideas are all stolen, it took ’em all from Joe Rogan,” and “Elon built a hearse in hindsight…”
“I was worried that people would hear that line the wrong way. And I’m still not completely sure what I mean by it,” James chuckled. “I think I was just so damn tired of hearing their names at the time that I wrote that line. It wasn’t really anything against the two of them, it was just that sometimes it seems that the world’s way to deal with that is to put them at the top, like, ‘Let’s build their audience. Let’s make more people aware of them so that they have more power.’ It just doesn’t make any sense to me.”
A proud Southern artist acutely aware of the hypocrisies of the Bible Belt, James also explores his own questions surrounding faith.
“‘Dance In The Fire’ has a lot of harkening back to some religious things that had happened in my childhood,” James said. “I hate to cast any stones because I have a lot of religious friends, a lot of good Christian friends, but you’ll hear a disembodied opinion on the internet about how children are being pulled into a cult, indoctrinated, and it’s like, ‘That’s how I felt when I was kid being forced to go to church.’ The best way I put it is religion is a lot like a tool just in that way that a hammer’s a tool. You can use a hammer to build a wonderful house to live in; you can use a hammer for truly despicable things.”
In “If Heaven Is A Hotel, James delivers one of the album's best and most vulnerable lines when he growls, “Don’t believe it when anybody says they’ve been doing fine, so I guess I’m doing fine,” a desperately current notion that also harkens back to “Singing To My Supper” and the artist’s candor surrounding mental health.
“I remember when it rolled around that [“Singing For My Supper”] had been out for a year, that was just mindblowing to me that a whole year had passed and we hadn’t gotten to do very much with it. [“If Heaven Is A Hotel”] was an attempt to joke about dark thoughts in my head, to perhaps get me out of thinking about them,” James said. “I was extremely lucky. I don’t know what I would’ve done if I’d been alone. I spent the entire time with my girlfriend Cammie [Windley] and my roommates, which are musicians. We were able to livestream and still play, still write together, and Cammie and I were able to spend time together. Honestly, other than it appearing for my career to be ending, it was a pretty good time.”
For many, the sudden end to touring and live events was a blessing in disguise offering a never-before-taken (or offered) opportunity to slow down and make sense of their own next steps.
“To have that little bit– lot of bit– of time to think about everything and what was happening definitely helped. I never thought I would be saying this now, but I’m definitely a whole bunch more relaxed about what it entails to do this for a living,” James said. “I’m definitely thankful for the time off within my romantic relationship, within the band and us having some time to get tighter. Communication goes a long way in life. I’m weirdly thankful for that.”
When James entered the studio with Easy Eye impresario and Black Keys frontman Dan Auerbach to record “Singing For My Supper,” it was with the producer’s handpicked band of studio ringers. This created a new challenge for Early and his longtime time bandmate Adrian Marmolejo to figure out how to translate the finished studio product for the stage, a continuing, but now welcome, endeavor as James and his band tour to support “Strange Time To Be Alive.”
“I knew we’d be able to do it. Honestly, that first record was harder to do as a four-piece band than this new one for whatever reason,” James said. “Adrian, first of all, who’s been playing with me for years, he was the bass player on the new record, so that was nice. I think Adrian and I were both all the wuay through recording, we were talking about, ‘Ah, that’s gonna be fun to do with four and pedal steel or four with mandolin.’ It’s nice with four because he plays three different instruments.
“I used to think that you should sound exactly like you do on the record because that’s what people are expecting. For whatever reason, I don’t know why I thought this. Eventually, I realized, ‘Why would you want to give the people what they expected?’ So now I’m like, ‘Cool, let’s do whatever we want in the studio, and then with whoever’s in the band at the time, we just come up with a new way to play it.’ We don’t really stick to time signatures or sometimes not even the same chords. That’s a lot of fun for all of us to put our heads together and figure out how to make it work with a four-piece band instead of an eight-piece band in the studio.”
