James Bryan Interview

words Andrea Caldwell

Through my position as a talent booker in Toronto, I got the opportunity to meet and work with James Bryan, best known as the guitar player in The Philosopher Kings. While I was booking the artists he produced, I witnessed a very interesting and inspirational story unfolding before me. With three major label releases this year alone, several successful production and songwriting projects, and four very talented artists in development, James Bryan has achieved a very respected status in the Canadian music scene and beyond.

Today I am sitting down with James at a funky little coffee shop in Toronto’s trendy Queen St. West district. We are here to discuss the many different facets of his successful music career and to reflect on his deep respect for the Toronto music scene.

What would you say most inspired you to choose a career path in music?

When I heard The Beatles, like so many musicians—that was the first band that inspired me. I think I was like five years old when I started banging on pots and pans. I started begging my parents for guitar lessons and I got a drum kit off my uncle. I had music all around me when I was a kid, so that’s what started me off. The Beatles had great songs and that is still the most important thing to me today—the song.

Beyond playing guitar in The Philosopher Kings, you just released a solo record, Beautiful World, on Universal Music. There seem to be many diverse influences on this record and you feature several guest vocalists. How did you choose the vocalists on the record?

Actually, many of the people I have on this record are from Toronto and even though I recorded a lot of it in LA, I feel that there is so much talent in this city, plus, a couple of the artists are friends of mine. I wanted to expose the great talent in this city so I chose to take this route instead of going with bigger names.

With all the projects your involved in, it sounds like you are building quite a music community around you. Is that the main goal?

You know what? It’s just sort of evolved over time. I am open to a lot of things musically, so things just tend to fall on my lap once in awhile. In this business a lot of it has to do with luck, being in the right place at the right time, so throughout my career I have had luck involved for sure—even though I have worked my ass off! So yeah, right now there are a lot of amazing musicians doing different kinds of music in Toronto, and it’s a good place to be and an even better place to build a community.

Your solo record is incredibly diverse. What was your inspiration recording such a record?

I had been doing a lot of production. I think the last major record I had spent time on was Fefe Dobson, which was very different from my record…but there was all this music that meant a lot to me that I hadn't been exploring, like old Carlos Santana and George Benson, various forms of Latin salsa music and soulful house—that I really wanted to get out. I also hadn’t been on stage for a while. I toured a lot with The Philosopher Kings but since I had been stuck in the studio, I wanted to get out in front of people again. I also wanted to get all the music I love and put it together and whatever that happened to be—that’s my sound.

You have also achieved success writing for a lot of other Canadian artists. You co-wrote “Old Skool Love” with Divine Brown, which is the number one add-on to Canadian radio right now. How did that one come about?

Once again I have been really lucky—I produced that song and Divine and I wrote it together from scratch. It was a case of what happens a lot when you work with an artist like that—you just find out what they are feeling at the moment and you write about it. In this case Divine had a concept about this relationship she was going through and we came up with the concept of Old Skool Love and we just wrote the rest of the lyrics around that. And yeah, it turned out to be a great song.

What was your first experience as a producer and what inspired that direction?

Well, it was The Philosopher Kings actually—that band was made up of six producers and we just didn't know it in the beginning, but all the records were co-produced by us and our engineer at the time, Lenny Derose. We were all really young and had never made a record before but we all knew what sounds we wanted and what parts we wanted to play and what to take out. I think from early on we had that instinct and it’s just like anything that I’ve learned—writing and production came naturally, but I’ve worked at it really hard and not given up until it’s right.

You have obviously developed a strong songwriting ability—were you writing songs before The Philosopher Kings?

It’s funny—at the time I didn’t think of myself as a writer. In The Philosopher Kings there were two main writers: Gerald Eaton, the singer, and Jon Levine, the piano player, and they kind of dominated the whole writing process. As far as lyrics and melody, they would go in a room and they’d come out and we would all write our own parts around that. But as a kid I was writing weird songs in my room, and I wrote some pretty weird originals in my first high-school band, but it wasn’t until a couple years into the Kings that I wanted to write more. That sparked a writing partnership with Jay Levine, which resulted in Prozzak, and from then on it’s just been non-stop writing.

We haven’t heard a lot from Prozzak lately, but you’ll be releasing a new record soon. How's that going?

We did two records and a Disney pilot a few years back, then when we started work on Fefe, we kind of lost interest in it for a minute, but about six months ago, Jay and I got together to write a few songs. They sounded like Prozzak songs, so we decided to put out another record, which will be released in November—at the same time, we are releasing a Philosopher Kings record! I am also still supporting my solo record right now. As an artist, I have three projects I am a part of this year. It’s been a crazy, busy year.

That means you have three record deals?

Yeah (laughs)…that's true. Sometimes, you need more than one to make it work, especially in Canada.

The Philosopher Kings was the first band that Chris Smith signed as a manager.  He has gone on to be one of the most successful management companies in Canada…how did that come about?

That is another example of having a family and building a community—Chris saw the second Philosopher Kings gig at Clinton’s and started working with us right after that. He managed to propel that into a big career. The strength in that is that he managed to find a band that spun off into many other successful projects.

So it's safe to say that The Philosopher Kings is the core of Chris Smith Management?

Yes (laughs), we are the foundation in which everything else was made. It is a great relationship. It’s like a family…he stood by us and we stood by him so when I have a choice, I would immediately go to Chris with a project, like when we were developing Fefe. Because of Nelly Furtado, who I worked on with Gerald and Bryan, Chris was already in a good shopping position and I knew Fefe would be well taken care of. Now, I would like to do the same thing with UMI entertainment, which is my new artist development company I started to support two artists I am working with, Clifton David and Gavin Bradley. Basically, I was inspired by the idea of creating a family where I can help build an artist’s career from the ground up with production and management, and bring talented people together to make it all stronger.

Let’s talk about the company you formed with Jay, and the artists you are producing right now, Gavin Bradley and Clifton David, who are on UMI Entertainment, and Tyler Kyte and Jesse Labelle who are on Lefthook Entertainment. They are all very diverse—what attracted you to each specific artist?

Well, diversity is my style because I listen and love a ton of different kinds of music. It comes down to a great song and a great artist, and if they have something original to say, I don't care if it’s dance, if it’s rock or if it’s country. I think I can still figure out what a great song is. Each of these artists has a different spin on how to write a great song and like I said before, Toronto it is so diverse, culturally, etc., that we’re influenced by many different scenes and styles of music. Jesse Labelle on the one hand has an American pop-rock sound, like Matchbox Twenty. He is just an incredible writer and a great singer, and what is very important to me is he means every word he says. Then someone like Tyler Kyte—his voice is what drew me to him originally. It was just so fresh, and he sounded like an old soul. He just has that quality that I haven’t heard in many singers. The same thing goes for Clifton. He was Fefe’s guitar player on the first tour, he is an incredible guitar player, and I knew he had talent that way…then I heard some songs he had been writing and I was just blown away. With Gavin, I had met him working behind the board and realized his talent extended way beyond being a talented remixer. He also has a really original emotional voice as a singer/producer and he also writes great songs. They all had talent in their own way—they had that spark and they had originality and I think that’s the key. When I am developing a company, I really don’t want four artists that are doing the same thing, because then they would be competing with each other. What is really amazing for me is that each of these artists inspire each other and me when I do my own music. It’s really great working with so much talent.

It's seems you have a strong focus on artist development and the concept of longevity. Since it takes so long to get an artist to the financially stable stage, do you ever feel pressured to take the more instant route?

A lot of people take the opposite approach, where there is a fad going on or something is hot. A lot of people will try to pick up an artist and catch the wave, then they will drop the artist if it doesn’t work. If it works it will only work for as long as it lasts, ’til the next “wave” comes along. I am not really interested in that. It’s hard to succeed in this industry, and especially with illegal downloading, I feel live performance is a very important part of an artist’s career. The artists I work with have to be able to hold their own, live. You might have to work on other areas, like maybe the songwriting isn’t as strong, but there are many artists who might have good songs yet they are scared to play in front of 10 people. Regardless, as long as I know the artist is willing to work as hard as they have to, then I know I have the skills to work on the other areas that need the strength. As long as the music scene in Toronto keeps growing, more and more people will get into all the great music coming from here, and I feel very blessed to be a part of that.