James Bay talks to Absolute Radio about dreaming of Paul McCartney Collaboration, open to talks with pal Ed Sheeran, hats and new material.
As James Bay’s star continues to rise he has set his sights on a dream collaboration with Sir Paul McCartney and also cites Ed Sheeran as a top candidate for a future team-up. Bay caught up with Absolute Radio at Abbey Road studios just before lighting up the Studio 1 stage for an intimate session with the station. He also spoke about potentially changing up his look and ditching his trademark hats and looked to the future with new material in the pipeline.
After meeting Sir Paul recently, James described the experience “It wasn’t the longest conversation, it was kind of brief because he was on his way somewhere. There were a lot of other people around for ages and then I got a moment to myself and I think it was a jaw to the floor moment after having actually met him.”
James continued by dreaming of working with McCartney saying “Who wouldn’t want to work with Paul McCartney? Especially when you see what he’s done with more current artists like Kanye and Rihanna.I’d be open to discussing it. I suppose I wouldn’t want to predetermine anything because the cool thing about working with someone with such a huge array of musical content from over so many decades is that he could kind of come at you with anything and I’d want to be open to all of that.”
On making the first move “I’m not going to have the guts to go to him! I don’t know! I think obviously it would be a total dream, you know, for someone like that to come to me. It’s hard to even think about it as a real thing but dream-wise, it would be amazing.”
James spoke about developing his career with more collaboration options including Ed Sheeran “Ed Sheeran is totally a candidate. When you look at all the stuff he’s done and how creative he is, I’d totally work with him. As a musician, it’s really fun getting to know another musician by not exactly involving actual music at first, not pressured, just chatting and if it naturally, organically grew to something like collaborating, then fantastic. Fingers crossed.”
James hinted that he might soon ditch his trademark hats “I mean the hat is no be all and end all. It’s certainly not a thing I need to perform. I’ve just made it a bit of a thing and I might change that soon but I certainly will when there’s a strong wind.”
James looks ahead to planning new material “I will create a timescale in terms of delivering new stuff. I don’t want to take years and years, I really don’t. So I’m going to have to go away for a bit and work on that and not play live for a little bit but I just don’t want that to take long. The beauty of song writing and is that you can’t rush it. So I’ll try not to rush it but I’ll certainly try to get on with it too.”
