"I always feel like, in terms of my career, I'm a little bit behind," says singer/songwriter J.M. James, whose public concert as a Quad City Arts Visiting Artist takes place on December 12 at Davenport's Redstone Room. "You know, it wasn't like I was writing songs and singing at 18. I didn't have a band in high school, I wasn't a 22-year-old trying to get my music out there ... . I didn't do my first solo gig with my own stuff until I was, like, 27."
It's easy enough to empathize with the Iowa native, even if, at 32, James is hardly over-the-hill. Yet near the tail end of our recent phone interview, when discussing the release of his new, four-track EP Jukebox, the musician lets this little factoid slip: "I've been lucky to actually develop a friendship with Justin Timberlake ... ."
Um ... Justin Timberlake?
"Yeah," says James, sounding somewhat embarrassed by the name-dropping. "Well, through a couple of other relationships I've gotten to know him. It's been really valuable and inspiring to watch him perform and create in the studio. He has been really great about introducing me to other folks, too, as a violinist and a songwriter. So I guess there are a lot of really good things happening right now, you know?"
Indeed. Beyond, obviously, knowing some of the right people, J.M. James - the artist formerly known as Jon Aanestad - appears, at present, to be making all the right moves. He's a working singer/songwriter in Nashville who's also currently a fiddler for country musician Drake White. He made his national-television debut performing at the 2011 CMA Awards. He has earned a "Writer to Watch" citation from the Nashville Songwriters Association. He has toured nationally as a serene and accomplished acoustic-blues musician, and did a 180 for Jukebox's more electric, if equally thoughtful, presentation.
And just when you think you have James pegged as a soulful blues-folk artist who's most comfortable with relatively downbeat material, there he is on YouTube, singing and dancing and grinning in a bunch of self-produced and -directed videos - oftentimes alongside his wife Jesse - covering everything from Blackstreet's "No Diggity" to Carly Rae Jepsen's "Call Me Maybe" to Justin Bieber's "Boyfriend."
"I have a lot of fun with those," says James of his "Cover Friday" video series. "Doing something with a groove. And yeah, there are times when I think, 'I should just be paying someone to do this.' But at the same time, I like it, and it saves me money in terms of doing basic promotion ... . I may have been really late in the game, but I'm working my tail off, that's for sure."
A Strange Kind of Mix
James may be "late in the game" professionally speaking, but as a youth growing up in Iowa City, he did have a leg or two up in terms of musical practice and awareness.
"It's definitely in the family," he says. "I started playing violin when I was four, at Preucil School of Music in Iowa City. My sister plays viola and piano, and my mother plays harp and piano - she used to accompany me at home when I was at Preucil. One of my uncles was a classical singer.
"And my other uncle," James continues, "is a jazz-piano player down in New Orleans. He's been there for about 30 years and plays with Dr. John, and he used to send me records as a kid. There was one by a blues artist named [Clarence] 'Gatemouth' Brown - he played violin, too, but it was more grungy-fiddle stuff. I kind of wore that one out. And he used to send me a lot of [Stéphane] Grappelli, and Django Reinhardt ... . You know, gypsy-jazz-violin stuff, to get that in my ear. Because everything I was doing was classical.
"That's kind of where I come from: a lot of blues, and jazz, and old R&B. And I was into it and listened to it all - but kind of privately, because that's not what was cool then. It wasn't like 'Gatemouth' Brown was on everyone's minds at my grade school.
"So influence-wise, it's been a strange kind of mix, between that and the classical and what everyone was listening to - like Eric Clapton's Unplugged, which was one of my favorites. I know every nuance of that recording. And I like good pop. Like with the videos I do. I'm not one of those musicians who thinks, 'Oh, I don't like that 'cause it's on the radio.'
"But over the last couple of years, I've been doing a lot of soul-searching in terms of what it is that makes me run. And I think if I pick up a guitar or a violin, inevitably, I wind up playing some sort of blues thing. That's definitely at the root of who I am as an artist. Definitely."
Although James continued to play violin in Iowa City's West High School orchestra, getting his first guitar ("which I was just kind of plunking around on") during his junior year, the artist says that it wasn't until after enrolling at Decorah's Luther College that he began exploring the idea of making music his profession.
"I got into it because a couple of my buddies played," says James. "And the left-handed, solo-y stuff kind of came faster for me because of the violin. But I didn't know how to play chords at the time. So I would play with my friends and they'd be like, 'You play this lead part because we don't know how to do that.'
"So I was playing in early college, and singing with some of my roommates, and at first, I guess, I thought it was just kind of a thing we were doing that wouldn't stick. But I went to Luther to study music and biology - and eventually decided I didn't want to study biology." Instead, James decided to apply to Boston's Berklee College of Music, which he attended after auditioning in Milwaukee and receiving a scholarship.
"I didn't have much of a clue about what I wanted to do when I first went," he says. "I got there and joined a band pretty quickly - I was playing violin in a sort of progressive-rock band. But in general, the plan was to get a lot of information quickly in terms of a non-traditional music path, because I realized I wanted to be on the stage."
Specifically, James wanted to sing and play his own material, and admits to landing on his passion for songwriting in a rather roundabout way.
"When I moved to Boston, I had written a few songs. They were horrible." With a laugh, he adds, "And it's not that I don't write horrible songs now. I do. But the way I started working at that, and realizing 'Hey, maybe I can do this,' was because of my nieces and nephews. I missed my family because I'd never been that far away from home before. So when my nieces and nephews were really young - some of 'em were babies - I started writing personalized songs for them. I'd send them these songs with their names in them.
"And once I started doing that," James continues, "people around me would hear them, and friends of theirs would hear them, and people started asking me, 'Hey, can you write a song for my father?' Or for an anniversary or whatever. So I actually kind of made that a business for, like, a year and a half. I wrote personalized songs for people. I had a Web site, and had developed a little online form for people to fill in names and interesting anecdotes - all these different categories I would pull from to create a song."
Yet despite the project earning him "some decent money ... which was probably how I bought my first really nice guitar," James says he "slowly realized that wasn't what I wanted to do. I was into the learning and the writing of these unique songs. But it wasn't a sustainable business in terms of the time I was spending on it, and I knew I would either have to hire more people or make it this canned, pre-packaged thing. And that really wasn't of interest to me. I wanted to write my own songs and perform them."
Just Figure It Out
At age 26, James finally got his chance. "My first full-band gig as a singer/songwriter," he says, "was at this really dingy place called the Cantab, which has been around for a long time in Cambridge [Massachusetts]. It's a complete dive, it's tightly packed, it's sweaty and nasty, but it's just one of those places, you know? The vibe was killer, and they actually have a bluegrass night that's kind of nationally known, because really great players come in.
"So one night, I walked to the downstairs space, and I talked to the guy who'd been booking the place for years, and I said, 'Hey, I want to do a gig here.' And he said, 'Well, do you have a CD?' And I gave him something I'd put together, and he said, 'Do you have a band?' And I didn't have a band at the time, but I just said, 'Yeah. I have a band.' 'Cause that's what you have to do, you know? Just kind of figure it out."
He spoke with "a bunch of guys that I'd played in other bands with as a violinist, and kind of recruited them to come play with me. And there were a couple local guys who I knew had gone to Berklee. And, you know, if you have that kind of common thread, people are like, 'Oh, okay, cool - you must know what you're doing.' Even if you don't."
Consequently, "we played a Thursday night there, and drew a pretty good crowd. So I started playing some weekend stuff. Again, it was a pretty dingy basement, so it wasn't super-ideal. But I was doing mostly originals and playing for these cool crowds ... . I'll never forget it."
Not long after, James - still working under the name Jon Aanestad - produced his first EP, 2009's Songs from a City. "That title is really kind of apropos, because it was just some songs I wrote," he says with a laugh. "From the beginning, there wasn't really a cohesive vision for it. It was just kind of a necessity thing - needing something to give people that looked like a professional product, to help get gigs. To let people know, 'Yes, I have a band. And I don't really know what my sound is going to be or who I am yet, but they're songs I think are kind of cool.'"
Yet that EP and its similarly self-produced follow-up Trains, Planes, & Automobiles were enough to secure further engagements in the Boston area, which led to out-of-state bookings ... which, in 2011, led to James catching the ear of a Nashville-based CMA Awards representative.
"I came to town and met a girl at a party," says James, "and she found out I played violin. So I sent her some clips of me playing, and then she had me down to meet her boss, who's a big arranger in town who books all those shows. And a little while later - I was still living in Boston at the time - she called and said, 'Hey, we want you to play in this Glen Campbell thing, and you're going to be playing in the string section behind Keith Urban, Brad Paisley, Vince Gill ... .' So that was my first gig in Nashville. The CMAs."
Since moving to Nashville 20 months ago, it has hardly been his last. In addition to recently releasing Jukebox - which, according to its musician, showcases "a much different, more pop-oriented sound" than admirers of his blues-folk stylings are accustomed to - James is currently "playing fiddle for the country artist Drake White here in Nashville. He just got signed to Big Machine, and we were just doing a stint down in Miami with Lynyrd Skynyrd." And although it wasn't the first time J.M. James toured, it was the first time he toured as J.M. James.
"That's a super-recent change, yeah," he says of the stage moniker he now goes by. (How super-recent? When Quad City Arts announced James' booking as a Visiting Artist in mid-August, he was still billed as "Jon Aanestad.") "My name 'Aanestad' is great, but it's just impossible for people to remember. And spell. And I kind of tapped a few industry people in town and they all said, 'You know, your name's unique, but it's tough. You gotta think about finding something that's easier for people to latch onto.'
"So my first name is Jon and my middle name is Michael, and my grandfather's name is James, so that's how that came about. I'm still the same guy, but I had to move forward. And while I have a small following, it's obviously not yet big enough that I needed to worry about doing it and people not following me or recognizing me or whatever."
And while James may still feel "late in the game" career-wise, his present professional ascension suggests that the key phrase in that last sentence is "not yet."
"I'll never forget when I drove up to the Bridgestone Arena for the CMAs," he says. "As a player for the show, you just drive up and they valet your car. Of course, this was all new to me. But I drove in and my GPS said, 'You have arrived.' And right away, this guy came to my door and said, 'Hello, sir - would you like me to take your car?' And I thought, 'Hmm. I have arrived. I've definitely arrived.'"
Quad City Arts Visiting Artist J.M. James will perform a public concert at the Redstone Room (129 Main Street, Davenport) at 7 p.m. on Friday, December 12. Admission is $10 to $15, and more information and tickets are available by calling (563)326-1333 or visiting RiverMusixExperience.org or QuadCityArts.com.
For more information on J.M. James, visit JMJames.com.
