British soul and R&B artist James Hunter offers simple advice when it comes to songwriting — aim for the common touch.
“Rather than trying to write in a style, write what you’re thinking,” he explains about his process. “It’s like what John Lennon said — put down what you’re thinking and make it rhyme. That’s pretty much it.”
Hunter is calling from his home in Brighton, the English seaside resort. At 53, the singer-songwriter and guitarist is enjoying the fruits of a hard-won career. His well-received current album Hold On! was released in February on the respected Brooklyn-based indie soul label Daptone Records. He’s on tour now with his band the James Hunter Six.
An arresting vocalist with a grainy timbre, Hunter draws deep inspiration from earlier musical eras. His songs are steeped in the blue-eyed soul and classic rhythm & blues of the 1950s and ’60s. He’s also adept with meticulously arranged pre-rock pop and electrifying bursts of nascent rock ’n’ roll.
A talented wordsmith, Hunter writes all of his songs. His musical education kicked into high gear at 20, when he fell for the music of rock ’n’ roll legends Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran as well as musical giants Ray Charles, James Brown and Sam Cooke.
Hunter was also influenced by the songwriters of the Brill Building, the hallowed songwriting and publishing hub in New York City that became a hotbed of pop hits in the late-1950s through the mid-1960s. It was a scene that produced an astonishing list of writing teams including Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, Burt Bacharach and Hal David, and Carole King and Gerry Goffin. This golden age of commercial music produced scads of enduring hits including Ben E. King’s Stand By Me and Dionne Warwick’s Walk On By.
“A big influence was listening to the old records written by all those duos,” Hunter says. “It’s a funny thing about that particular time. They were doing stuff that wasn’t supposed to be high art. It may have been disposable pop, but they put their souls into it. A lot of it was quite personal and quite deep.”
Hunter has paid plenty of dues in the music business. He came up in the London club scene in the 1980s, originally performing as Howlin’ Wilf and the Vee-Jays, a name inspired by blues great Howlin’ Wolf. Eventually he began making music under his own name, recording and touring with his band and soaking up the lessons of live performance.
“Sometimes it’s unconscious learning,” he says about being on stage. “The more a gig is going along, the more you try to communicate with the audience.”
A fortuitous break came in 1991 when Van Morrison heard Hunter and his band. A mutual friend who was a promoter introduced the men.
“It was like meeting some unassuming bloke at the pub,” Hunter recalls about his meeting with the Irish rock and soul legend. “We sat down and had a cup of tea and a talk about music. I was surprised how unassuming he was in certain respects. It was like meeting anyone, really — a dustman or a plumber.”
Morrison asked Hunter and his band to back him at an awards show in Ireland. Hunter went on to contribute backup vocals on a couple of Morrison’s records, and Morrison returned the favor by singing on one of Hunter’s albums. Hunter toured with Morrison as an opening act and did a few numbers with the legend on stage.
“I was the guest singer that no one had heard of,” Hunter laughs. “We’d open for Van, then I’d get up and do my bit with him. There was a point in the set where he would go into a blues medley and I’d amble on stage for that. We did that regularly from 1993 until about 1995, then sporadically after that. Every few years we might hear from him.”
Despite that exposure, Hunter’s career hit a bumpy patch by the early 2000s. “The gigs thinned out,” he recalls. “We were doing some very badly paid and poorly thought-out tours, mostly in Germany. Those tours honed us but they also nearly broke us up. We ended up at the end of those with not quite enough money to pay the rent on the houses we weren’t staying in.”