Jim James – Come Again
Jim James has announced his fifth solo album, “Wowed Out”, due August 28 on ATO Records. It’s his first solo release since 2018’s “Uniform Distortion” and “Uniform Clarity”, and the lead single “Come Again” makes the eight-year gap feel deliberate rather than accidental.
The backstory is unusual. In the early 2010s, James composed a large body of music for two film-scoring projects with longtime collaborator Brian Reitzell, the composer behind “Lost in Translation” and “The Virgin Suicides”. That music sat untouched for years until last fall, when James went back through the archive and found it finally clicked. “Come Again” itself started as a cue written for a scene set in a teddy bear factory, which is a strange origin for a song that ended up this direct. James produced the album himself and mixed it with Emily Lazar, who’s worked with David Bowie, Beck, and David Byrne.
What got me is how plainly James talks about where the song comes from: feeling discouraged by the direction things are heading, and choosing to keep looking for beauty anyway. That’s the whole song in a sentence, and the track doesn’t dress it up much beyond that. There’s a churning, insistent quality to the arrangement that backs up the sentiment without overplaying it.
I’ve followed James through My Morning Jacket for a long time, but a solo record built from a decade-old film score archive is a new angle even for him. Worth paying attention to where “Wowed Out” goes from here.
