James Dixon’s ‘Good Ground’: A Journey of Growth, Raw Honesty, and Musical Evolution | Interview

1 month ago 5

It’s going fine, actually. Really well.” And after the experiences that surrounded his debut album, and everything that he’s obviously learned since then about the way the music industry operates now, in this day and age, singer, songwriter James Dixon was obviously worried about the reception for his upcoming and highly anticipated new album, but judging by his expression and his still slightly tentative tone as he chats to me across the table, he definitely seems pleasantly relieved.

Sitting in Rose’s cafe in his beloved Bude, and pondering my questions over a large cup of coffee on a particularly cold winter’s morning, the biting wind blowing in from a feisty grey Atlantic that crashes angrily in and over a beach deserted apart from a few hardy dog walkers and a couple of brave and hearty surfers, James sounds somewhat more experienced, more knowledgable.

Yet, surprisingly fresh and reinvigorated by his highly successful European tour supporting the iconic Seasick Steve, (“Steve told me that I’m the best support act he’s had!”), he is in something of a philosophical mood in which to reminisce on experiences shared, and to regale on all the things he’s learned, and to now, at last, spend time revelling proudly in his brand new album, Good Ground, released on the 7th February.

“The last two,” the Bromeliad Acoustic Sessions and Trespassing Light, “I didn’t really release properly,” he reveals, talking honestly of his early releases whilst staring at that coffee now stirred to within an inch of it’s life.

“The first release was just a demo really, just me in front of a mic, no mixer… It was just too, ‘off-the-cuff’,” he recalls now. “But I sold it at shows for a fiver, so?” He smiles whilst shrugging his shoulders. A lesson learned.

“The second,” 2017’s Trespassing Light, “was recorded in a studio, and it was, ‘Great! Let’s see what we can do’. And it does sound cool,” he says, rightly proud of it, “but it’s unreproducible live on stage. Definitely what you’d call over-produced,” he admits.

“It was all new to me, I was jumping into the unknown. But, by the end, I had worked so long on it I just thought, fuck it, you know? I’ve moved on, so I’ll just get it out there. With this one though,” with Good Ground, “the more I know about the music industry the more I realise how… how fixed it is,” he concludes after careful consideration. “It’s all about buying that ticket to join that club! About winning some sort of weird lottery! Playing the game,” as he puts it succinctly, frustrated.

“I put a load of emails out,” he reveals, “just saying that the album was out there, to the local press, that sort of thing! Just saying, this is out there, this is what I’ve done, and this is what I’m doing, you know?”

And did he get a reply?

“No,” he tells me, frustration all too evident. “Nothing. Not even a simple bloody call. And you’re going: ‘What? You know! I’m local. This is what’s happening, like really happening at the moment, here in the south west, in Bude!” But nothing!

Undaunted, he did it all again though, for Good Ground, “knowing that I probably wouldn’t get anything back. But this time they were all like, ‘Oh yeah, well you need P.R.!’ I mean?” Again, all he can offer up is a frustrated, bewildered expression, no matter that he had, deep down, come to expect it.

“They told me that I need to write a Press Release, and I’m thinking, but I just have? I’ve just given it to you?

“Surely they look for you, don’t they? They look for the news, don’t they?” Isn’t that their job?

“The artist has to go knocking on all the doors now, instead of the agent. Shouldn’t it be the other way round?” And James Dixon is, literally, on their doorstep! To be found nightly on stages in local venues all over Bude and the South West. And his is a story that is fascinating, highly original:

“Local boy makes new album!”, the headline should read. And it is a good new album at that, with reminders of early Waterboys, and Johnny Cash, with nods towards Joe Cocker whilst foot-tapping early Led Zeppelin and Robert Plant tunes?

Good Ground has heart-tugging stories centred around love – “I don’t normally write love songs, not even to my fiancé… and she doesn’t really like love songs.” – and of a devotion to the people and this place he proudly calls home. It’s diffused with original, interpretational covers of folk songs perhaps forgotten but no doubt still inspirational: odes of endearment towards the beauty of nature and the longevity of fertility, all coloured with an organic, natural depth.

“This album is more about who I am now, especially playing live… Whilst trying hard not to make it sound like a ‘live’ recording. And that was really hard! Some of the tracks I like to completely dial back when I play them, make them feel like they’re being played there and then for the first time, but you can’t do that on an album, as it will just come out sounding like a shit demo again!” A lesson learned the hard way, from valuable experience!

Produced by Dixon and James Bragg, who also mixed and mastered the album, Good Ground sounds crafted, carefully sculptured, in order to resonate with James’ story-like, “flow”. But he has made sure not to hide any of the passion he originally found in these songs that continue to inspire him still.

“When I’m singing the title track I can really feel it, I can really lean into the mic and feel it, and slam the guitar as hard as I can!” and he mimics the actions from across the table.

“It’s a song to my fiancé… I don’t write many love songs so it’s more of a growth song, I suppose,” he says, thinking carefully, maybe somewhat uncomfortable about the song’s revealing, personal nature?

“I’ve learned so much about the world through travelling and playing, and there’s an earthy feel to it. I’m a really keen gardener,” James suddenly reveals excitedly, “so it’s about the good ground of my life at the moment? It’s also a religious thing,” in many aspects this theme runs through the new album, “a parable; if you sow on good ground what you reap will be good, hopefully?” Fingers crossed.

The album was made with the vinyl format always at the forefront of his mind.

“You’re supposed to flip it,” he tells me purposely: he loves the idea of people taking it off the deck and physically flipping it over, again that sense of audience participation?

“It works as a C.D.,” he reassures quickly, “but it just has that vinyl ‘feel’.”

The listener is supposed to “flip it”, between the tracks Eve Of A Valentine and the gorgeous Corey’s Song.

“The second side is brilliant, but that first side, when you sit and listen to it for 22 minutes… It flows. It’s got direction,” and it’s got style. “Probably unlike anything I’ve done before,” he muses. “Trespassing Light was more a compilation, whereas this feels like an actual story. I guess because of the process of first finding the songs? Lough Erne Shore might be my favourite?” and his thoughts wonder back to the version he first heard whilst mowing his lawn some years ago.

“Paul Brady’s version came on and it just hit me,” he recalls now. “What am I listening to, you know? I didn’t know what it was, like something coming out of my genetics? I had to sit down, I was overwhelmed. I knew I just had to record it for this album… I feel if a song does that to you, you should pay great attention to it.

“It’s not in 4:4, it’s in a totally different time signature, and I almost always play 4:4… It took me a while to get my version right… Just trying to get my version off a solo guitar was hard. I was delighted, am delighted, with how it came out!”

One of my favourite tracks from the album, Clyde’s Water is, as James explains, a traditional Scottish ballad, sometimes known as Drowned Lovers, and again lots of versions exist, although, after some consideration, he decided to leave out the third verse where the doomed lovers, Willie and May Margaret, drown. Along with the track Regardless of Ability, Clyde’s Water was recorded at St Swithin’s Church in nearby Launcells, and the atmospheric ambience echoing from those cold stone walls, and the hint of some choral presence, lends itself perfectly to this story of doomed and blighted love.

“There’s no extra layering on it, or to it,” James tells me, “they were both good enough, from that performance, on that day, to go straight on the record.

“Every Saint Every Sinner I played through once. It just flowed perfectly, and that first performance is on the record. It falls over itself,” he explains. “It falls over itself over the bridge part and stumbles to get back to the last section, because I don’t know where it’s going, which was great fun,” he insists, “Real fun… And completely out of control. But I liked that. It’s natural, like we talked about before. It’s organic!

“It reminds me of Zeppelin’s, Black Country Woman,” of when songs weren’t airbrushed to someone’s idea of manufactured perfection: the studio telephone left ringing at the end of Bowie’s Life On Mars?. It encourages those heady emotions of rawness and vulnerability.

“Like Cornwall My Home,” to me the album’s perfect closing track, again for all those reasons above: a song that sums up James Dixon wholeheartedly, but this version of which he was so unsure of at first, to say the least.

“It’s the point of the record?” But yet he sighs, still doubtful. “Every time I listen to that track, that first two and a half minutes…” I watch the uncertainty return. “Even when I was choosing the songs to go on the album, I was thinking, that’s not going anywhere near this record. My guitar’s out of tune,” he’s convinced. “My vocal is terrible, maybe the worst I have ever sung?”

But now he can laugh about it, albeit something of a nervous laugh, and he seems sincerely reassured when I tell him that I really like it, honestly! I like the way it’s intimacy brings the album to it’s conclusion; those words “organic” and “natural” revealing themselves, yet again. Once more there’s the participation of an audience, albeit more evident here though, and more excitedly vocal. That endearing feeling for this place that is now an adopted home for the both of us.

Cornwall My Home was recorded almost as an after-thought: “At the end of a very, very long day recording things to go on my YouTube channel,” James reveals.

“I took the guys on the record to The Barrel -” a very popular but intimate micro pub in Bude that simply must be experienced when you’re next in town, “- to do the Open Mic Night, and at the end, at about 11 o’clock, I am absolutely shattered, you know? ‘Guys, let’s just do this thing and go home’,” he laughs as he describes the moment for me. “And it’s the second take we got,” he adds. “Despite everything, the technical side of it and whatever, we got to the end of it. Just a pub full of people who love each other, just singing of those they love, of a place they love.”

Maybe he was simply too close to it at the time, as well as being admittedly shattered? But Cornwall My Home really is that perfect final act on which to bring the curtain down. The finale, paying homage to the wild Atlantic Ocean that crashes remorselessly along the coast, and bearing a soul-filled testimony to the dark, rugged, jutting cliffs that seem to constantly change under this wild force of nature.

“It’s that last verse and chorus, where everything gets lifted. You get to the end… feeling like, Yeah, actually this really works.” It really lifts everything on high, to actually mean something.

Good Ground by James Dixon

The album Good Ground is released on 7th February