![]() A lot of people might think, oh well, if I had those achievements, I would move past this. I think the point of the video is to say, however successful you get, there'll always be someone who can elicit that kind of feeling in you.Įspecially interesting to hear that coming from someone, who from the outside, is as successful as you are. Do you know what I mean? It's like, it doesn't matter. If you're surrounded by people who on paper doing better than you in any environment, it could be in LA, it could be in Reading. But yes, it certainly can rub off on you. As well as being a beautiful, wonderful healing place is kind of a weird paradox, I think LA. And I think moving to LA probably didn't help cause everybody here is so driven by success and it's a work town, it's a very success-obsessed and financially-obsessed place. I have definitely contended with that feeling a lot in the past. I don't know if I've a hundred percent completed that game, but I feel as if I reached the boss level of it last year and maybe there's some side quests still to clean up. And there's a quote that you gave around the release of that song, "Comparison really is the thief of joy." Can you tell me about your journey to reaching that point? If indeed you have reached that point? I'm not sure if that's the case. That's kind of about acknowledging your own worth outside of other people. "Say What You Will," which is the first single you released from the album. ![]() And then there's also acceptance and there's love and there's, I tried. And I was definitely, when I wrote that song, I was in that head space and there's a little bit frustration and anger in there. And I think because of that, here's me with a slightly different angle on it, but whatever it is, it fucking hurts. I can say that doesn't feel great, but what people describe to me as romantic heartbreak, I'm not sure if I've experienced that. I've kind of been the one to leave relationships in the past. If I'm honest, I haven't experienced heartbreak, not what my friends describe as romantic heartbreak. In your experience does that kind of, the heartbreak from a friendship, does it feel different to a romantic pain? And I think that's kind of unusual in a way and sets this out apart from some of my others. And I think that has been one of the themes of this album is to actually talk about that and to say that, I mean there are love songs on this record, but the ones about heartbreak are not about romantic relationships. I've actually had my heart broken in friendship far more times than in romantic relationships. I was always told, and I say this in the song, "friends that break your heart and they tell you only love can break you, the more you care." What I'm trying to say is, I just grew up with, maybe it was the unspoken knowledge or maybe I inherited it from society or whatever, that it's romantic relationships that can break your heart, anything outside of that is kind of fair game. It's a breakup with a friend, of a certain number of years, like someone who's just so central to your life and it's hard. So what we're saying it is that kind of friendship split. I had my thought changed by people's reaction thinking, oh no, I've got this wrong. Last month Blake sat down with The FADER's David Renshaw to discuss Friends That Break Your Heart, speaking openly about the concept behind his album and why you rarely hear a break-up song about a friendship. It’s a collection of reflective songs that captures an artist who has arrived at a new stage in both his life and creativity. Here he steps away from the immediacy of writing about romantic relationships, as he has done in both warm and desolate tones in the past, looking more widely at relationships with others in his life and attempting to come to terms with them all. This week sees the release of Blake’s fifth studio album, Friends That Break Your Heart. Whether it’s JAY-Z or JPEGMAFIA, James Blake has been right in the middle of it all. In addition to his own work, Blake has proven himself to be a genius collaborator with credits on some of the 21st century’s defining records including Beyoncé’s Lemonade, Kendrick Lamar's Damn, and Frank Ocean’s Blonde. It was a revelatory move that he built on with subsequent albums Overgrown, The Color In Anything, and 2019’s Assume Form. A year later that same electronic innovator shocked the world by revealing himself to be a traditionalist releasing an intimate self-titled debut album featuring sparse piano in place of beats and his vocals entirely untreated. In 2010, when genre terms like “post-dubstep” were bandied around freely, James Blake established himself as an innovative producer with a love of jazz chords and a tendency to mask his own vocals with chopped up ‘90s R&B samples.
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