[Cover photo credit to Amanda_Valentine]

New York area singer/songwriter, composer, and pianist Shayfer James released his new album Summoning in June via Nettwerk, and several original videos have also been released spotlighting songs from the album. Having completed a Canadian tour, Shayfer is now looking ahead to a Fall tour in the UK, bringing his album to even wider audiences. This very personal album’s creation stemmed from an impulse that Shayfer had to put himself in a certain kind of creative isolation, in this case in a remote location in Canada, to really dig deep creatively. The title Summoning suggests the kind of work this entailed.

However, in a secondary phase of songwriting, he really let his imagination loose to build on textures and new musical ideas suggested by the songs themselves and this led to some of his most experimental work to date. As is his inclination, he also supported the songs with careful work on vibrant videos along with a small team of talented friends, building intriguing new stories from elements suggested by the songs. Themes of isolation and connection arise on the album, and also through the videos, making us question how we discover and define our identities and whether we can build bridges to the sources of light we find in others, too.

I spoke with Shayfer James about the experience of self-isolating to write the songs on Summoning, the stages of his musical work, listening to the “background work” of our creative minds, and how he manages to consistently release such mesmerizing videos for his music.

Hannah Means-Shannon: When I hear that someone has gone away on a retreat to write an album or some kind of creative project, I assume them going to an island in a warm place. What made you go to the polar north and be surrounded by ice for this album-making process?

Shayfer James: [Laughs] Firstly, I’m a terrible grump in heat or humidity, so that is off the table for me. I become like an alternate version of myself that I despise when I’m hot. But for this, it was a feeling. I really wanted to be someplace cold. I was thinking of Vermont, but as I was looking, and thinking, and talking with my booking agent, he said, “What about the Maritimes?” I was looking for something secluded, and I found this amazing cottage in New Brunswick, right on the channel across from Prince Edward Island.

I wanted it to be wintery, and I knew that I wanted to be far from things. I didn’t want to be able to grab my keys and go to a bar or restaurant. I wanted it to be a concerted effort to do anything but create. The nearest grocery store was 45 minutes away, and the nearest restaurant an hour away. It forced me to stop, and not be distracted by all the things around me.

HMS: Those are the comforts of modern life, just being able to go somewhere ambient, around other people, even if you’re by yourself.

SJ: As a pretty significantly introverted person, that is my socializing. I go out, sit at a bar, observe some energy for a little bit, then I go back home. But I had some things with me, like jigsaw puzzles, and I rewatched some of Breaking Bad, I think, so I had things to do if I didn’t feel like I was in a creative space, but not much.

HMS: It’s a fine line between the right kind of pressure on yourself and the unhelpful kind of pressure on yourself to create, I’m sure. Were there times where you had to just sit with yourself and think, “Maybe I’m just sitting here for an hour, but it’s leading to something.”?

SJ: Yes. And I think that’s a huge part of the creative process, to allow yourself to understand that if you’re tapping into your own creativity, there’s always background work going on. You don’t have to put pressure on yourself, and say, “I have to write a song right now!” In collaborative workshops, you have a sense of timing, and you write in a completely different way, but at this time, I was able to do something different.

I’ve been telling this story on tour, about writing “Winter Hymn.” I wrote the progression and I was really into it. Then I went for a walk on the beach in the snow, which I was doing every day, to see if lyrics would come. If they didn’t, I wasn’t saying, “Oh, I’m going to abandon this idea.” If lyrics came, great, but if not, I’d go back and have breakfast, and maybe dig in a little bit deeper, or let it go and move onto something else, or, as you say, just sit with myself and stare at the ocean. Because it’s always happening if it’s your life focus, you’re always creating, in a way.

HMS: Going there so intentionally is like telling your unconscious that you’re available, too. Do you find that there’s stuff going on in the background of your mind, even if you’re not paying attention to it? So it’s then a process of just paying more attention?

SJ: Yes, I first noticed that that was going on in the background, probably in college. I was walking from the train back home, since I commuted to college. There was this generator on a pole, and it was making this particularly strange buzzing noise, an electric sound, with a harmony to it. Pretty naturally, my body started to move to a groove with this tone in mind. It was this really beautiful experience, because I noticed that this was just happening. I hadn’t even really dabbled in songwriting at that point, I was just psyched that I kind of wrote a song. I realized, “This thing is happening to me, and I’m just now tapping into it.” Since then, it happens to me all the time.

With “One Foot in The Grave”, there’s a percussion sample in it, and that’s actually a sample of a pile driver in Jersey City that I had recorded on my phone. I thought it just had this really cool sound to it, so I recorded it from three different distances, came home, dragged it into Logic, looped it, and left it. Then, I was able to incorporate that into the final arrangement. That made it even cooler to me, because there’s the concept of digging your own grave, and then there’s a digging device looped into the percussion. If you’re always listening, your brain in always doing some sort of work, even if it’s later.

HMS: I think you used some unconventional percussion on a few of these songs. I noticed that you seemed open to that. It makes me think of organic music-making, like tribal music-making. That fit for me with the whole idea of the album as being a remote and enclosed creation of yours, self-generated.

SJ: Yes. I’ve always been really focused on groove and percussion. Really, when I started to develop my instincts as a composer, that started, and I think that comes from being really into Soul music and early Hip-Hop. A lot of that music is just groove. It’s really important to me, when I’m writing a song, that it can stand on its own with melody and lyrics, but I’m also always thinking about groove, and how to build these percussion concepts within the song. That makes it move in the way that it feels for me.

There are so many things that you can do that will completely change the feel of the song. Three different great drummers would probably come in and do three different things, especially if you don’t provide a template. I’m really interested in providing that template, especially for great drummers like Brian Prokop, who played on the record. He says, “This is a groove. How can I, as a drummer, make it better?” I more or less play the piano like a drum set anyway. Half the time I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing. It’s very much that my left hand is the kick drum, and my right hand is whatever feels right to me.

HMS: I interpreted that same information in a totally different way. I thought, “Oh, isn’t it cool how percussive the piano is on this album?” [Laughs] There was no judgement. Unconventional is good.

SJ: That’s great! I think that’s so true. I took a couple piano lessons when I was nine or ten years old, but I had to learn more theory and chord names, and things, when I started playing with other musicians. I’ve definitely met with other piano players and Producers who say, “Don’t change the way that you play piano.” That advice is like, “Get better, but don’t start clouding your mind with the idea that you’d be a great piano player ‘if…’”

HMS: I think that you also intentionally tried to do different things on this album, even if it was a little uncomfortable, making earnestness and directness the main thing. Is it fair that emotion came first on these songs?

SJ: I think I was really trying to be present in the moment for the writing itself. My process was that I would write the write the songs, and then I would do basic stuff like, “Oh, this is going to have percussion, this is going to have some strings.” I’d establish a groove, put some sample drums down. But then I’d revisit them. So the last week I was at the cottage, I listened to all the songs that I had there, and thought, “This is so cool, I’m going to try horns for the first time.” Now that I was listening to the song from this fresh perspective, I had ideas.

Like for “Imagine That”, I wanted it to feel like the opening to a superhero movie. I wanted the idea of your being the hero of your own story to be there. The song, for me, after stepping away from it, and relistening to it, was really about getting in your own way, right? As this unreliable narrator tells the story. And I’m also totally obsessed with comic books, and big fanfare, and big cinema. It was really delightful to write this song, and go from this very introspective space, that was very much tapped into my real emotions, to then layering on this new sound that I had never really dabbled in. I was writing a horn arrangement without any real concept of what a horn arrangement should be other than what I like when I watch Indiana Jones, or Marvel films, or whatever. So, in that way, the final polish of the record came very much after the bones of the songs were built, but still from the same environment.

HMS: That makes sense that some of the bigger flourishes on the songs are from a second phase. “Imagine That” is a retrospective song, almost rewriting history. But then you also have this definitely hopeful, insistently hopeful, ending. I think that makes a great opener for the album because it starts off the journey inward. If the narrator reaches this point of hope, then the question is: What is this hope about?

You give a huge amount of artistry to the video for this song, too. Similarly, “Lighthouse Keeper.” How do you manage such artful videos?

SJ: Videos are really fun to make, but I have to make them on the budget that I have, which many people wouldn’t believe we are able to do it for. First of all, I work with friends, and the director of photography is one of my dearest friends, Christopher Elassad. In the industry, he’s a dolly grip on major cinema and television, but as friends, we just get to play. We need to be able to film things small enough that we are able to pay attention to the things that matter most, like aesthetics and light, and storytelling. We don’t try to film a big thing that we don’t have the budget to create properly, so then it looks terrible. You see that a lot. So knowing the constraints is important, which is a producer’s perspective, since we’re a team of two or three people.

Then, there’s saying what I want it to look like, and the concept. I used to try to tell the stories all myself, but then one of my closest friends of many years, Meghann Plunkett, is a poet and a writer, and I’ll say, “Hey, I want to tell this story.” And she’ll do a treatment. She’s a brilliant writer, and we’ll go back and forth and edit. For “Imagine That”, I knew that I wanted to work with Donald Gallagher, who had already been in two videos of mine. I knew he was perfect for this, because I had this concept of an alchemist. We did what we could do, which was really hard, but great.

I called out a good friend of mine who’s an artist and a sculptor, who could help me build the set, Gail Boykewich. Then, this organization, Arts 14C, in Jersey City, gave me the space to put it up. Otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to do it on my budget. It’s really about resourcing, having really talented friends who believe in what you’re doing, and being able to pay those friends. You’re not asking, “Can I have a favor?” Hire talented people, pay them for their talent, get it tight and keep it focused on the creative vision. I’m just lucky to be surrounded by people who are generally brilliant and easy to work with. That’s how we pull it off!

HMS: I talk to a lot of artists about making videos, and I appreciate how clearly you just laid that out. For almost everything you just mentioned, something in that list is something that people will have difficulties with that stands in their way, or undermines the success of what they are trying to do. These are things people struggle with even though they really want to make their own videos. These videos are beautiful and really support the music.

SJ: Thank you. I appreciate you calling the videos out, because I think of them as very much extensions of the songs. They are also different interpretations of the songs, grabbing onto the symbols and nuances differently, almost telling a separate story from the song itself. I think that’s also important in videos with lower budgets. You find a way to make it special as a stand-alone piece of art.