James, the British pop band, will be touring the U.S. again for the first time in two years.  Each night the band is planing to feature different set lists.

Singer Tim Booth, speaking form his California home said, expect the unexpected.  We will play some of our old stuff, however there will be plenty of new stuff also.  Every night we will change the set out.  We like keeping things unpredictable and fresh.  We have a huge pool of songs every night to choose from.

The new stuff Booth is referring to are songs from “The Morning After the Night Before,” their two CD collection.  The set started out as two separate mini albums.  The release of “The Night Before” occurred in April in the UK.  “The Morning After” will be released this September to stores.  On “The Night Before” the strangely uplifting songs of James that deal with mental illness, disaffection and insecurity are featured.  “The Morning After” has a more low key feel to it, with dark, sad lyrics.

Booth said, we recorded them as two mini sets.  In England that’s how they were released.  For America, they’ve been combined into one set.  “The Morning After” is certainly more mellow.  Those songs were ones we have been unable to release for quite a while.  We wanted up-tempo songs to be released that we could do onstage.  Our set “The Morning After” allowed us to do some pieces that were darker that won’t work necessarily live.  However, once we were inside the studio, the character of the pieces changed anyway.  A number of them now will work live.

Not only do the two mini sets have different feels to them, they also were recorded very differently also.

Booth said we recorded “The Night Before” using the internet.  The band is known best for their hit songs “Sit Down” and “Laid.”  The songs were improvised by me, Jim Glennie on bass and Larry Gott on guitars.  Then we placed them on a FTP website on the internet.  Band members then downloaded the songs, chopped them up, messed with them, put in their parts, then uploaded them back to the website.  Another band member then would do something similar.

Eventually our producer Lee Baker pulled them together to see if there was a song there.  We did that album without being in the same room playing together.

By contrast “The Morning After” was recorded by James following their early 2010 UK tour.  It was recorded without any overdubs in a large room over the span of five days.  They had a view to help capture something spontaneous.

Booth said, “The Morning After,” the second album, we recorded in a studio.  Everyone was there together, and we had a tight deadline for making the record of around five days.  We were very fast.  The two sets were done differently on purpose so we could see what we could bring out of ourselves.

The band also includes Saul Davies on violin and guitar, David Baynton-Power on drums, Mark Hunter on keyboards and Andy Diagram on trumpet.  For their mini albums, band members came up with over 120 ideas.

Booth said, we then whittled things down to just the ones we really wanted to work on.  We gave the universe the songs back that we didn’t want to work on right now.  We’ll let most of them go.  For our next album we will write another 100.

However, we don’t fully write them.  We improvise.  It’s quite easy.  We have always done that and loved doing it.  Certain songs just jump out at us and want us to work on them, while other songs hang back.  It’s very surprising if you just pick them randomly how things work out very well.  Potentially I think they are good songs.  At a certain point in time I think you need to make decision in terms of which ones you will work on.

During sound check the set list for each night is decided on by band members.

Booth said, our sound checks are long.  Thats’ when we work on old or new songs.  Then they are thrown into that evening’s set list.  We have a new album coming out that is great.  A number of the songs on the set work quite well live.  Some of those we will use.  Each night we will mix things up.

Further Reading: