nicholas james

This summer in Salt Lake City has given us many more rain storms than the previous year. If you’re looking for complaints, you’re reading the wrong newsletter. I haven’t yet missed the chance to soak my clothes and wash away thought loops with a long walk among these recent downpours. I hope you’re doing the same.
 

I am going on tour this weekend with my band and am spending most of today prepping the merch so we can afford the gas it will take to visit the cities of Boise, Eugene, and finally Corvallis before returning home. This will be my first non-solo tour of shows across multiple states and I am looking forward to that peaceful boredom that overcomes me when driving long distance. Those repetitious highway lines that hypnotize the novelty seeking mind and divide the country into quick blinking inches feel like a real place and not merely repeating strips of paint. 

In the winter, I refurbished an old album. By this I mean that some old songs now have new, fresh elements. It’s called ‘Tales Of The Fall’ and is full of romantic yearning. The album will be available everywhere on Thursday the 18th, but I’ve uploading the whole thing to Youtube so that you can listen to it right now.

There is a strong feeling that this time in my life is extremely precious and will be looked back on very fondly. Thank you for being a part of it.

In the fall of 2019 I gathered a few musicians, a handful of thinkers, and some designers to help create a live album of original songs. We recorded the entire album over the length of a waning autumn day in a Logan Utah backyard. Because there were no walls for the vibrations to bounce off, the sonic flavor of the album is unique. I wasn’t always sure that this was a good thing. But I knew that it FELT good and contained within it the spirit of the outdoors.

A few overdubs (electric guitar, violin, and trumpet) were added in the following weeks and by 2020 I had a finished album in hand. Good start to a great year. Things are looking UP at this point. Nothing can possibly go wrong, life is great.
 

There were many preparations made to release and tour the album in the late spring before all aspirations were forcibly abandoned. So I held onto this album, (Or rather my hard drive did) while not knowing what to do about anything, let alone these tunes. 
 

Well here I am now on the precipice of packing up all my shit and moving to Portland with Megan to live out a new, fresh part of our adult lives. This relocation is 5 years in the making and is one of those things you’ve just got to do, lest you get older and suffer insomnia by proxy of regret. So It is time to release this project along with other music I’ve been holding onto for ages so that I can move forward. 
 

Below is a mini documentary we made for the album. Please subscribe to my Youtube Channel and follow me on your favorite streaming service so you can hear the whole album for free this weekend. I will also be performing live with my band at Whysound in Logan Utah on Saturday July 30th to celebrate the release.

Love, Nicholas

Recently a friend put me on to this podcast about the duo of wellbeing that is our bodies and the sun. As you can probably guess most commercial sunscreens are full of weird shit you can’t pronounce and they pose hazard over the long-term. You’re best off not using any, (or maybe some naturally SPF containing oil) and just listening to your body when it tells you to seek shade. For me this under 20 minutes. The main point though was about how delicious sunlight is to our nervous systems. When you make contact with sunlight, there is an impossibly complex chemical dance between your porous skin and the life giving rays of our hostile star. 
 

It’s good for you.
 

So let’s please try to give ourselves this basic element in healthy intentional doses so none of us get cranky enough to hurt someone - pushing them into a sadness, possibly indoors where they will get less sunlight and perpetuate cruelty on our bright, hot planet.
 

There’s something else I want you to know about light. When I learned this, it floored me. Due to the actual union of time and space into this one thing - spacetime - and the properties of relativity, time passes more slowly the faster you’re moving. It also moves slower at lower elevations but we won’t get into that now. As you approach the speed of light, time slows and stretches until… there is none. 
 

No time passes for a photon. This means that wherever a light particle is headed, from it’s perspective, it has already arrived. The sheer queerness of this condition gives me a tingly feeling of wonder, fear, and magic.
 

Below is an unrelated piece of music that I created a few days ago. I produced this beat in about two hours and could probably expand on it some more but it’s just so juicy and short - I feel like that beckons the listener to replay the track. The mid section features this cool pulsing choir/string progression that has inspired the use of some plugins (effects) very foreign to me. I titled it ‘Grass Fed’ because I’ve been putting a little bit of grass fed butter in my coffee this week along with some coconut oil. I think it’s a keto-diet thing but I like how it tastes.

Friends! People of this world - people from this particular plane of existence. You are receiving this letter because at some point you gave me your email address expecting the occasional concept / piece of music to drop in on your inbox from time to time. This is one of those times. I have been going through a LOT.
 

For fear of reaching information overload right out of the gate, I’ll deduce what is absolutely necessary to the reader. I will create a hyper-concentrated extract of the the past year of my life - no, the last ten years - neigh, the entire history of the planet, into a single digestible electronic pill that my subscribers will swallow with their… eyes. 
 

This is the kind of obsessive, compulsive planning that my mind plays out and ultimately keeps me from

-D O I N G  T H E  W O R K- 

The sweet simple work of showing up to the journal, the keyboard, the yoga mat, the canvas and letting the truth of expression, however potentially mundane or disturbing it may be, out. Since there are infinite things to consider and endless events to recall, we will take it one grain of sand at a time.
 

My wife calls to me from the other room at this moment and asks if I want to dye my hair brown on a whim. I decline because I am actually very pleased with this orange situation, despite the rate at which it is steadily abandoning the crown of my head. Of course she herself is dying her hair on a whim. Her whimsies are the best. We got married last September in the mountains embraced by a DIY oasis that she designed and constructed out of beautiful thrifted materials. She never weighs the coffee and it always turns out great. I can’t imagine how bleak these last two years would have been without her.

“The Sweetness Of Doing Nothing With Her” could be the extended title to this recent part of my life.
 

I made this video to show you the lullaby that I wrote and produced for her on our wedding day. It’s something I would come back to on the guitar every once in a while over the past few years. Once I decided to surprise her with some music during our ceremony, this arrangement fell together and it made for a great sonic decoration in time. (Recently, someone I was chatting with likened music as the decor of time in a similar way that visual art is the decor of space. I feel this on many levels.)