It feels great to be back with a new album completed. I’m so excited about it and I really can’t wait to start hearing what you think of it all.
It may feel like a long time since Undiscovered came out, but I feel I’ve been working pretty much solidly since then. At the end of the last touring stretch I only had a couple of weeks off….actually I went camping to France with my brother and sister, but I’ll save that story for another day 
I pretty much got back into writing as soon as I could because I had a lot of ideas and wanted to get them all out. I started way back in October with a trip to L.A. and a song called Precious Love was born.
I’d never intended to write songs with ‘love’ in the title, but sometimes it just feels right and you know it’s good to go where the love is.
I wrote a ton of songs because I wanted to make this album even better than the last, who knows maybe I wrote too many. There were certainly a few avenues that got explored that didn’t quite work, but the results that we mixed in London last month are something that I’m so proud of.
I hope by now you’ll have heard, and liked (?) the first single You Make It Real. When I wrote it I was thinking how crazy my life was becoming and how unreal my life started to feel. But having someone who knows me inside out really cements my reality into something concrete and without that life would seem like a dream. Out of this idea came the song.
The album has 12 songs and is called Songs For You, Truths For Me. I chose that because I just feel that all the songs are honest, it’s the only way I write successfully…..everything else doesn’t quite make it for me. So here we are again with my life, my family and friends and all the things and places that surround me, songs but also truths written from the heart.
I got to work with some of my friends from the last album again and also with some new people. I wrote a song called Please Don’t Stop The Rain with Ryan Tedder from One Republic. He was amazing to work with, not least because he was on tour with a snapped achilles when we were in the studio in London. I also went to Toronto to record with Nelly Furtado. I read some of the blogs about that one and all I can say is that I think you’re going to love the results, she’s an amazing singer!
I’ll save some of the stuff I want to tell you about the album until a bit closer, but in the meantime enjoy the other new song that’s on my Myspace. It’s called Once, When I Was Little. It’s about my growing up, from childhood to now….and beyond, and it’s a really personal feeling I wanted to get across. I was thinking about what it was like when you were little and all the good things about it, the innocence. But also the sad fact that you lose that free feeling when you grow up.
It’s very personal and I hope you like it as much as I do.
OK, I have to go for now. I’m going to try and be in touch a bit more often now and I hope to see lots of you again before too long.
I’ve put a brand new band together for this album and they’re wicked! I can’t tell you about live dates just yet, but watch this space. Playing live is something that I always look forward to as much as anything, so I’m desperate to get out there again .
Meanwhile I do really hope you enjoy the single and the live footage we shot last week, which will be up on the site.
I’m getting out and about to do lots of promotion, so I hope to hear and see more of you along the way.
I’m doing something a little bit special on 13th……but I’ll tell you more about that nearer the time
Much love
James
