While Friends That Break Your Heart is obviously influenced by the lockdown in which it was created, Blake has been spending his time more recently doing something that was deprived from him during that period. I invited them specifically because I love what they do.” “They are fitting into a fabric that hopefully becomes congruent, but I don’t want to clip their wings in some way and I don’t want to change what they do. “I’m not really looking to mould them into my vision,” he says. For Blake, it’s important that each guest brings their own approach to the project. Two of the breakout tracks from 2019’s Assume Form featured Travis Scott and ROSALÍA, while Friends That Break Your Heart features an appearance from SZA, as well as guest spots from Monica Martin, JID and SwaVay. “Who wouldn’t learn by sitting in a room with some of the people I’ve worked with? The wealth of knowledge and the different backgrounds and the different perspectives on life, it’s enriching.”Īs well as working with other artists on their projects, Blake has also welcomed guests to his own albums. “I’ve been lucky to work with some of the best of the best,” he says. All of these artists have shaped Blake’s work. I think this is a versatile record, I don’t think it’s one mood.”Ĭollaborations are an important part of Blake’s work, and he has previously worked with names including Kendrick Lamar, Frank Ocean and Kanye West (who, in 2013, called him “Kanye’s favorite artist”). “I talk about a lot of things on this record, and I want people to be able to put it on whenever. might be the most collaborative city in terms of the kind of music that I wanted to make.” I was becoming more collaborative, and for me, L.A. changed me, it was more that I needed a change. and the kind of sessions I was doing there fit with my new direction,” Blake explains. “I was already changing, and I think moving to L.A. is the other side of the world from his early years in London and the influence that had on his work. His more-recent projects show how he has left the “post-dubstep” label often attached to his work behind, while his base in L.A. Over that time, Blake has come a long way both musically and geographically. “We were in lockdown and there was almost no outlet for dance music in that period, it would have felt like a cruel joke.”Īs well as being his fifth studio album - a milestone in itself - Friends That Break Your Heart also comes out a decade after James Blake’s self-titled debut album. “I decided that if a dance music album was going to be the main record, it probably wasn’t the time to put that out,” he adds. Originally, Blake had been planning to release an entire dance album, but the timings didn’t feel right. It had an effect, too, on the songs that made the album, which led to the earlier release of Before. I had a support system that I was grateful and lucky to have.” I think what that meant was that the album coming into fruition was guided by these people. “It restricted the amount of people working on the record,” Blake says. The restrictions in place also had a more rudimentary impact, including on the personnel involved with the process. “I completely get it, but also it drove us further into a comparison culture and it worried me, and I fell victim to it. “I think the lockdown exacerbated it, because we were just looking at our phones all the time, I certainly was,” Blake continues. Lockdown and its impact are influences across the album, including the first single “Say What You Will.” At the time of its release, Blake explained that it was about “finding peace with who you are and where you’re at, regardless of what other people seem to be doing,” nodding particularly to the impact of social media. “Who wouldn’t learn by sitting in a room with some of the people I’ve worked with? The wealth of knowledge and the different backgrounds and the different perspectives on life, it’s enriching.” This was as good as any that we had available to us.” I guess we got into music in some way through lack of a better expression of our emotions, and then the lockdown brought out a lot of stuff for a lot of people, and I think a lot of us needed to process it in our own way. “Lockdown probably did play a part in the making of this record,” Blake tells HYPEBEAST, “because I was processing a lot - I think a lot of people were - and it was maybe things that we’d all been working too much to process until that point. Unsurprisingly for an album that was largely written and recorded over the past 18 months, it is heavily shaped by Blake’s experience of a tumultuous period, including lockdowns and restrictions in his adopted L.A. On the back of those two projects, Blake has now released Friends That Break Your Heart, his fifth studio album.
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