James Blake on the Weird Vision of ‘Playing Robots Into Heaven,’ a Dystopian Future of AI, and Returning Dance Beats to His Sound
For the past dozen years, British singer-songwriter James Blake has been one of music’s most influential and compelling outliers: a classically trained pianist with an equal love disruptive beats and electronic noise; a heart-rending singer whose high, reedy voice can ace a Joni Mitchell song and light up hip-hop hits by Travis Scott, Kendrick Lamar, Frank Ocean, Beyonce, Kanye West and Jay-Z; a serial collaborator who’s worked with singers from SZA to Rosalia and beyond.
His music shifted dramatically in 2013 with the release of “Overgrown” and the song “Retrograde,” bringing a more-soulful groove to his previously cold and static beats, and for his next three albums he pursued a more songwriter-y muse, continuing with electronic experimentation while showing the influence of the masters he’d grown up on, like Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen. However, as he says below, he felt he’d reached the end of that particular thread and brought back the clattering noise and angular beats of his earlier work, fusing it with his more-refined songwriting on his latest album “Playing Robots Into Heaven,” which actually is a solid impressionistic description of what the music sounds like. His round of concerts this fall have been much livelier than the ones in the past few years, with extended dance segments merged with more introspective material.
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In a sort of follow-up to an expansive conversation nearly four years ago, Variety caught up with Blake at a downtown New York hotel on the morning before his concert at the Knockdown Center — he was seated cozily on a couch with his longtime partner British actor and activist Jameela Jamil, who gave an effusive and very friendly greeting before leaving us to it.
The new album is awesomely weird — it’s like the strange dance tracks you used to make early in your career combined with your newer, more songwritery songs. Why did that happen now?
It actually happened naturally, because I had been making dance music for many years but I hadn’t been releasing it. The generally accepted idea of album culture or album creation is you go in the studio, you make an album, you tour it, and then you go back in the studio. It’s not really how a lot of the music I make really works. I’m constantly making music and then compiling things, and when I feel that it’s the right time for a certain type of thing, that’s when I release it.
So some of these songs are from the last four or five years?
Well, during that time I’d [focused on] learning to craft songs in a more traditional sense. I became very enthralled by traditional songwriting and I was listening to a lot of Leonard Cohen and Carole King, Don McLean, Joni Mitchell, some of the stuff I grew up on — but going deeper into the craft of doing that. It’s great to have internalized that music, but then to actually take those songs apart and figure out how they were actually doing it is something quite different. And that became a challenge. For me writing “Say What You Will” [a highlight of his 2021 album, “Friends That Break Your Heart”] was probably the pinnacle of that achievement. Finishing that was like, Okay, I’m done, I can move on.
I was also getting into modular synthesizers, the more intricate electronic side of things. And a little bit of that ended up on that “Friends That Break Your Heart” album, but in the background, although I would say that spirit is definitely there.
Was there anything you were listening to or anything in particular that inspired this album?
Not really, but the initial conversations I had with Jamila were pretty instrumental. As I said, I felt like I’d got to the end of what I needed to do with songwriting, and she was like, “I think your fans would really love it if you explored this other thing that you’re always doing at home. In the live shows, the fans love it when it starts getting dancey and it kind of goes nuts — that’s a side of you that hasn’t been flexed for a number of years. Let them hear it.” So that definitely sowed the seed, and she kept pushing for it, in a supportive way.
Did you know, as you reached the end of this classic songwriter phase, that you had the stranger music to move toward?
I think with the songwriter stuff also coincided with living in America and being in L.A. and being around people who were writing a certain way. I did a lot of collaboration, and it was great, but I did find myself giving a lot of my energy to other people. And I think this album represents a protection of that energy and having a singular vision that doesn’t really involve that many people. I think that’s part of what you’re hearing on this album, is just that I didn’t have to accommodate the sound of anyone else. When you do a collaboration, you’re basically saying, “How are we going to coexist on this music?”; you’re not saying, “You’ve got to fit into my world.” It’s never negative, but it’s just that the exchange of energy has to be kind of equal. And that’s different from writing on your own.
But you have a lot of songwriting collaborators and coproducers on this album.
That’s true, but they mostly are people I would consider my main collaborators for many years, who are not a vocalist that comes in and sort of has to have a world built around them. That’s a whole different challenge as a producer, and it’s a joy as well, a lot of the time. But on this one it was easy to not have to do that. On “Friends” it made more sense because of the feeling of the music was different. I think it would have made less sense to have a bunch of features on this album.
Were you doing the L.A. thing of bouncing from studio to studio and working with a different groups of writers all the time?
I’ve done a bit of that when it comes to other people’s music, but I find that process pretty unfulfilling, I have to say. The collaboration process for me is better when it’s two or three people just enjoying making music. I think when you start kind of industrializing it, it definitely loses some of the appeal.
Have you ever felt like you were doing that?
Oh, absolutely. I’ve been in I’ve been in Los Angeles for nine years and have definitely been in a lot of studio situations where I was sure that whatever I did that day was gonna go through multiple stages of production afterwards. And then later on, I’ve ended up taking my name off music — I don’t even want the money or the credit, because I don’t like this.
Your contribution was sidelined or overshadowed by other things?
Yeah, it had gone through another bunch of producers who just thought it should sound different, which is okay — but it’s also not, when I listen to the end result. I don’t want to upset the person by being like, “I don’t like this and take my name off,” but if it doesn’t even feel like my work — even if I’ve actually put hours or days or even sometimes weeks or months into it. But this isn’t to complain — the vast majority of collaborations I’ve done, I’ve been really happy with the results.
What is the song that Kanye West teased on your birthday? When did you record it?
I think that’s the only place that it’s been played. We made it a year and a half ago, I think?
Are you still friends?
We haven’t seen each other for a little while. (Sighs) I think it’s probably a no-comment from me… and I say that with sadness.
Are a lot of your bigger-name collaborators, like Travis and Kendrick, friends that you hang out with?
Yeah, but the bigger the name, the busier the person. It’s a bit like when people talk to me about the early scene that I came up in, around dubstep and post-dubstep DJs and producers — “Are you still friends?” And yeah, we’re friends, but as soon as those people got successful, they all started DJing all around the world, and how do you really stay properly close? It’s lovely to still have those friendships, but there are people I wish I could see more often.
How did the “sleep” album come about?
They just reached out — they’d already done thing with Grimes and a couple of other artists, and they wanted to have a kind of AI-type algorithm that will take source material, like piano notes or chords or vocals, and spit them out in a sort of euphonic way that is scientifically engineered to kind of ride the contours of your sleep cycle. They also do meditation versions of it.
So you give them the stems, and it’s licensed by Universal so there’s no copyright issues?
Yeah, what I like about Endel is that they’re working with artists — it’s for a reason. It’s not using AI for some random application; it’s to help people’s mental state, give people some something to calm their nervous system and help them sleep — and they want to pay the artists. That’s the thing that’s missing in some of the models, and that’s the thing I’m most concerned about, not just for myself, but for all artists.
Of the many sticking points with AI, the main one is the fact that it is trained using copyrighted material, which it then uses to create “new” songs. In one way it’s not so different from what people do with influences — but in most ways it’s very different.
It’s an interesting philosophical debate, isn’t it? Because we train ourselves on music that is copyrighted when we’re looking for inspiration. But I think ultimately, it comes down to how much you value human beings. What scares me is that after the pandemic, everyone’s locked into their phone screens, anger is high, we’re seeing the repeal of rights, and the value of human beings doesn’t seem like it’s at the forefront of a lot of people’s minds — especially ones who are going to be making money from this. So that worries me.
There was a similar feeling when streaming was first invented, that everything’s up in the air. And if you talked to anyone at a label or in an executive position, they’d say, “Well, we just don’t know what’s happening,” but behind the scenes, there were deals being done that ultimately fucked us out of royalties for the next 10 years. So we are massively vulnerable here as artists, and they know that, and they’ve actually gotten away with it before. I think artists have every reason to be extremely worried.
I think the main concern for a lot of artists isn’t actually that there isn’t just that their likeness will be used. It’s that we’ve been trained by an increasing lack of quality in musical production, over the course of however many years, because it’s been more automated over the years — so every year that goes by, it feels like more of the processes that previously were from the chemistry of creative people in a room, those processes are more and more automated. And as that kind of chemistry fades into the background, and fades in importance, we become more trained to not care if the music is AI-generated or not.
That is where music itself is under attack in the sense that if a streaming service decides, Okay, we’re just going to basically [create] music and no one else owns it, and we flood the platform with this functional music… eventually, who knows whether it is a real voice? Or whether it’s a new artist or some new hologram-like AI model that suddenly starts to become accepted, because we’ve been trained to actually disconnect the person from the music? The human behind the voice becomes less and less represented because of the techniques used in the production. Do you see what I’m saying?
Yes — you’re painting a rather alarming picture of an artistic dystopia.
I’m not saying this is what will happen, but this is what we’re worried about, and I’m noticing that the conditions are right for something that disempowers artists. My whole job is to empower artists, to make artists feel like they can express themselves — as a producer, that’s, that’s what I consider my purpose. And if the art of expressing yourself is less valued, because there is a system being developed that doesn’t require it — I find it alarming.
But when it comes to the positives — because I know I’ve painted potentially the worst-case scenario — I think that human beings are actually much more perceptive and much more sensitive to the disembodiment of the process, and I don’t think people will accept it. In my heart, I believe that the power of music is in the communication between human beings and our feelings in that moment. I think people are already rejecting where tech is going. What I’m seeing in younger generations is that they’re looking at some of their older friends’ screen time and going, “That’s insane, I want to experience the world and actually see stuff and hang out with people.” And music falls under that category. Can you imagine a disembodied version [of music] where you can’t ever meet the performer or go to a show?
Actually, since the pandemic lifted, the connections I’ve seen between performers and the audience have been astounding.
Honestly, my live performances in the last few years are some of the best I’ve ever experienced. I’ve absolutely loved performing — the connection I’m having with audiences feels completely out of touch with this AI shit that we’re talking about. When I go to shows, people really want to feel connected to the artist. Because we’ve been starved of it for a long time and not only just post pandemic, but in general the way tech has pulled us apart. I think it’s made people more hungry for that connection.
And you know what, I’ve noticed a lot less phones. It’s been great, like people are engaged. I get to the end of the show and I’m like, we all experienced something really cool. And I love playing the new music. It’s been really fun, fun to just have more danceable moments in the set.
Anyway, that’s why I’m actually very optimistic for the future. I know I painted a grim picture there, but I think that is the that’s what happens if we don’t pay any attention. I don’t actually think about AI very much, because a lot of us have been using generative processes in music for quite a long time — some of this album was. For example, the track “Playing Robots Into Heaven,” once I set up the parameters, it just kind of played itself.
It sounds like a music box.
Yeah, exactly. It’s like a music box that’s been slightly randomized. And that can create a feeling and a vibe that is … I wouldn’t make all my music that way, but for that track, it worked.
Is the theme of the title about digitalization and spirituality, or am I overthinking?
No, you’re not. There wasn’t really a concept so much as that track just made me conjure an image of an organist that plays robots into heaven. Weirdly, as I was listening to it, I was just like, okay, that’s what it looks like to me. So I posted a video of that modular ambient thing and that was the caption. And two years later, when I came around to collate the album, I was like, that’s what all of this music sounds like to me — a kind of an exercise in spirituality through technology… or potentially the technology granting me that kind of spiritual connection? The meaning of it loops.
What is the music you’ve been making recently like?
I haven’t made music for about four months, because… I haven’t wanted to, for the first time in a while. Maybe it’s because I’ve been touring and traveling and I’ve not been in one place for very long. But also, I think I’ve been more embracing my personal relationships. I had this realization the other the other month, I have a friend who’s always busy, and I’m always busy, but we could see each other. We have this really strong intellectual connection and make each other laugh all the time, and I said to him, “I know that we both have in our minds this imaginary day where we stop working and we’ve achieved everything we want to achieve and that’s when we’ll hang out — I just don’t want to wait for that.” And he said, I’ve been feeling exactly the same thing, so we’ve kind of reconnected and started chatting more. I feel like I’ve been missing people’s lives sometimes, so in the last six months or so, I’ve been kind of becoming more of an invested person.
If you hadn’t written a song for four months when you were 23, would you have been concerned?
Absolutely! I probably would have thought there was something wrong with me, and I probably would have felt a massive sense of purposelessness. And now, it feels like waking up.
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