With most of his career spent walking the dusty roads of country music, singer-songwriter Adam James is bearing left and wandering into blues territory.
“My roots are certainly within country music, that's where everything for me began,” Adam says, “but I feel as though the time is right now to explore and to go back to something that I really enjoyed as a teenager, and what gave me the love of guitar more than anything is blues music.”
Adam has spent the first half of this year working with famed songwriters Stuie French and Allan Caswell on a collection of new music for an album to be released early 2020.
“When I released my first EP ['Hit & Run'], which was after two full-length records, we'd written about 12 songs to only put out 5, but those other songs were sort of experimenting with the idea of some R&B and blues,” he explains.
“I wanted to finish another record and I wanted to finish within that vein of R&B and blues music, something that I really love and I am really passionate about as much as I am about country music. I think the time is really right to create something authentic and something that is going to get people's toes tapping, and music people are really going to enjoy.”
Adam, who comes from Mindjerribah (North Stradbroke Island) and the Quandamooka community, will be road-testing his new material when he performs as part of the NAIDOC Week celebration showcase being held at Redland Performing Arts Centre in early July.
“It's seven days of everything that's synonymous with Indigenous Australian culture,” Adam says of what NAIDOC Week means to him.
“Whether it be performance or dance or artwork, or even food and business – but it's also an opportunity for people to engage in a conversation and be a part of a celebration that's all great things about Indigenous culture.”
With a collection of new songs that reflect a different aspect of Adam's musicality, he's particularly excited about the RPAC performance and gauging how the crowd responds.
“It will give me an opportunity to probably showcase a few of the songs from the new record and test to see what that's like, so I certainly encourage and hope a few people will get down to hear it. I'd be very interested to hear people's feedback,” he says.
At the halfway point of the year, Adam says the next few months will see him focussed on completing the next album in time for release, he hopes, around February or March next year. “The songs themselves aren't a work in progress in terms of writing, that's now complete and that phase is now finished,” he says.
“It'll involve a trip to Nashville to produce this record and working with some talented session musicians that are based in the US; people that have cut their teeth and perhaps spent their entire life in one of the greatest music cities of the world.”
