James Blunt Goes Back To Basics
James Blunt shot to stardom thanks to his smash hit single "You're Beautiful" from his debut album "Back To Bedlam."
The ballad and the accompanying video, featuring a lovelorn Blunt traipsing barefoot through the snow, received heavy rotation on radio and music video channels.
With his new album, "All The Lost Souls," Blunt faces the challenge of avoiding a sophomore slump. He's decided to go back to basics, instead of bedlam.
"For me it was really important to have the album, as a whole, a standard album. That's what I set my heart to make, to record. Write 10 songs that were strong, that were a concentrated description of the last three years of my life, to record it as a body of work," he said.
Photos: In Concert
Blunt realizes that he has plenty of 21st century fans who are used to getting digital goodies with their music, so he's also releasing an MVI (Music Video Interactive) DVD, in addition to the standard CD.
"I recognized that also some people would like to discover more, will want to find out more, want to go deeper into the songs, go deeper into the recording process and the album as a whole," he said. "So we also put out an MVI for those people who would want to have something more tangible, I suppose, than just those 10 songs."
So far he's holding relatively steady in the U.K., where he debuted on the charts at No. 1 and stayed in the top 5 for three weeks. In the U.S. she debuted on the Billboard 200 at No. 7 and is currently at No. 40 after four weeks.
The MVI features include the lyrics to all the songs, a photo gallery, video about the making of the album, a music video for the album's first single, "1973" and a preview of his upcoming documentary DVD "James Blunt: Return to Kosovo."
Blunt, a former captain in the British Army and NATO peacekeeper, filmed his return trip to Kosovo where several years before he had lead a column of 30,000 troops into Pristina.
"I went back to Kosovo seven years after the war and I played a concert for some soldiers there and some Serbs, and some Kosovo Albanians," he said. "At the same time I took a film crew and we went to the places I'd been to when the war was on. It was to find out if things had developed, if it had progressed. If we'd actually made any difference. It was quite an emotionally experience."
While there are many artists who express their point of view about war on the songs, Blunt has the unique perspective of having experienced it directly.
"I think it makes certain things really clear," he said. "Before I went into the environment over there we were being given information from politics and press and it became very obvious that neither were telling the truth and I think that's a pretty good lesson in life. When we got there it didn't really matter what the politicians or the press were saying, what mattered was the human catastrophe that was unfolding."
Blunt says the lesson he learned in Kosovo was a simple one.
"Two people fighting achieves nothing," he said, "One person trying to achieve something achieves a certain amount but two people trying to achieve the same thing as each other and working alongside each other do more than just double the one person. Why we don't apply that to life as a whole is beyond me."
By Judy Faber