Early James - The New York Times

Early James - the Alabama-born singer and songwriter Frederick James Mullia Jr. - just sidles his way into the first song on "Singing for My Supper," his debut album. "Blue Pill Blues" has an instrumental intro that lasts more than a minute, with its riffs bubbling out of what might be a late-1960s Jefferson Airplane jam, before James starts singing. His first lyrics are, "What's roiling and churning in my poor mind."

He maintains that uneasy, oblique approach throughout the album, presenting himself as both a throwback and a character living in a fraught, uncertain present. Early James is 26, but his music has much older underpinnings, glancing back to the 1`970s, the 1960s and before. (In the album's last song, "Dishes in the Dark," he does some ragtimey acoustic-guitar picking.) He's decidedly self-conscious about looking back, but also unapologetics; "Lord knows, I love to borrow/Never stolen, I'll agrue that,' he sings in "Way of the Dinosaur," which has a chorus that concludes, "Originality up left, and went the way of the dinosaur."

 

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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/11/arts/music/early-james-singing-for-my-supper-review.html