All songwriters have quirks. This past year, James Blunt shut himself up in a villa on the Spanish island of Ibiza, famous for its all-night parties, to write his sophomore album. And, occasionally, he dressed like a monk.
“The majority [of the album] was written in the winter, when it was very quiet and wet and cold, and the clubs were closed,” says the British singer, who releases All the Lost Souls on September 18th. “There was no one around, except the odd local Spanish farmer.”
And when one of the locals stole his furnace, Blunt coped with the lack of heat and hot water by bundling up in a hat and overcoat.
“The builder would turn up and say I looked like a monk,” he says with a laugh over the phone from a hotel room in London.
Blunt’s current view — a series of unspectacular grey roofs outside his hotel window — differs greatly from the one he had in his villa’s writing room, where he looked out “over a rural valley of Spanish countryside and Ibiza old town, beyond there, and the sea, all the way to the island of Formentera.”
Before his winter solitude, Blunt spent the summer in Ibiza’s renowned nightclubs, writing songs in the early morning after partying all night. He titled the album’s first single “1973” after the year that one of the island’s most popular clubs, Pacha, opened its doors.
Once he finished writing, he travelled to Los Angeles to work with producer Tim Rothrock. They invited Blunt’s touring band into the studio to capture the live feel of recordings from the ’70s. Listen closely, and you can hear the sound of fingers sliding across guitar fretboards, or “skin on string,” as Blunt puts it.
After achieving worldwide success in 2005 and selling more than 11-million copies of his debut, Back to Bedlam, the Grammy-nominated performer says he’s not interested in beating that album’s numbers.
“The pressure comes from doing an album that one’s going to be happy with,” he insists.
Blunt says that all the songs on his new album are relevant to each other, that they all stand and fall as a group — a mentality that perhaps stems from his past experience in the British military. He says that the absence of one song, or the favouritism of another, would upset him.
“It’s an album,” he emphasizes. “If you said to a writer, ‘which chapter are you happiest with?’ he’d say, ‘Please don’t tell people just to read chapter five.’ They’d be missing out on the book. It’s an album.”