Just like Withers, he lets go of any idea of conventional song-structure, letting the lines bubble up whenever it feels right.
And yet Blake, through his own process, manages to evoke a similar sense of deep, crushing isolation. It would be ridiculous to say that Blake’s reading of those Withers lines is as good as Withers’ version nothing is as good as Withers’ version. His own voice drops in and out, sometimes massing into a platoon of James Blakes, sometimes flitting around in the corners of the track. Instead of that one spare guitar, he’s got this beautifully arranged minimal ice-sculpture of a beat. It sounds different coming from Blake, of course - a beautiful, young white Englishman with this frozen, clean tenor. James Blake opens The Colour In Anything, his new album, with those same two lines, taken from Withers’ song. It’s one of my favorite performances ever. “We lived and loved with each other so long.” On “me” and “long,” he stretches the words out until they’re wounded-foghorn sounds. “I can’t believe that she don’t wanna see me,” he sings. “Hope She’ll Be Happier” is a grown-up song, a song about acceptance and desolation, about realizing you were a chapter in someone else’s life and that chapter is over. So by the time he got around to releasing that first album, he sounded like a man, like someone who’d been through some things. Up until three years earlier, he’d been a factory worker, and before that, a sailor in the Navy. He’s already 36, but he’s new to this R&B-stardom thing. He’s on a stool, picking out a little three-note melody on an acoustic guitar and singing “Hope She’ll Be Happier,” one of the songs from Just As I Am, his debut album. He’s up there by himself, showing no sign that he even notices the thousands upon thousands of people watching him. It’s Bill Withers, onstage in a stadium in Zaire in 1974.
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