In an airplane sometime last year, Nashville’s James Wallace was reading a book about con artists. The recording process for his current album was stretching on as far as the eye could see, much like the cloud cover below. In the space between the ground and the troposphere, Wallace read a story about a con man called Skyway Man. “When I read the story,” he tells the Scene, “I looked outside and saw clouds everywhere. In that space you feel like a skyway person, and I decided that it was the greatest name.”
After releasing the beloved-by-locals cult-favorite LP More Strange News From Another Star under the name James Wallace and the Naked Light in 2013, Wallace went to work on a follow-up. “I didn’t have any thought of whether it would be James Wallace and the Naked Light or Skyway Man or something different,” the singer recalls. “The length and time and process it took to finish it was so slow and all-consuming and broken up by long periods of waiting. By the time I’d gotten to the other side of it, I felt like I was doing a different thing. ... I transformed alongside the project.”Â
The singular aesthetic Wallace strives for made recording Seen Comin’ From a Mighty Eye (out this week on YK Records) a specific challenge. “I knew I wanted the core rhythm section to be [drummer] Pinson Chanselle and [bassist] Nate Matthews,” he explains. “We recorded More Strange News together and wrote out a lot of ideas together, and I felt like I had really found my people.”
The only complication? They both live in Richmond, Va., where Chanselle is a house player at respected indie label and recording studio Spacebomb Records when he’s not on tour. After Wallace took several separate trips east to record, it became clear that getting the new record off the ground would take more concentration. “Sometimes it’s a comical game of how not-impatient can you be,” Wallace says of the setbacks. “And when you lower that bar and finally get accustomed to a new level of patience, then something happens.”
In the meantime, Wallace kept writing. Lyrically, Wallace finds himself preoccupied with UFO religion on Seen Comin’. Though the songs don’t fit together in a single chronological narrative, the rarified world they inhabit is interconnected. “You’re entering the mind of a person who’s at odds with their own existence in life and trying to be a real, normal person,” Wallace says of the album’s cryptic lyrics, “but also has kind of formed an obsession with a fantasy religio-science based world. … Maybe that’s because he’s found that the world he was promised when he was younger wasn’t really enough to fulfill his imagination.”
Musically, the record is a progression from Wallace’s last. It sounds bigger, with fuller compositions and a richer palette of textures than his previous already-full-bodied-sounding efforts. Contributions from Jason Goforth, who played harmonica, omnichord and lap steel, provided “a foggy surface that the music settles down into.” Cameron Ralston, from the Spacebomb camp, composed the “beautiful, emotional horn melodies,” and Andy C. Jenkins, also from Spacebomb, co-wrote some of the tracks. And thanks to a decade spent contributing to the Nashville music scene, Wallace had a wealth of musicians and sound engineers to see him through the home stretch: overdub help from Ric Alessio, vocal arrangements by Dabney Morris, additional production from Joe McMahan (Wow and Flutter Studio), mixing by Kevin Dailey (Pioneer Sound).
With narrated elements and warm cosmic interludes, the album is a musical force not unlike a paperback sci-fi novel — imaginative and otherworldly. Early on, the frustration of losing a producer to a scheduling conflict gave way to another transformation when Wallace decided he’d take a stab at the role, which he’s since undertaken for several outside projects in recent months.
For Christmas, Wallace got a book called Rocket to the Moon: The Incredible Story of the First Lunar Landing. What interests Wallace most about the space program? “We always barely made it,” he says. “In astronomy the end is always in picture. You get the actual beginning of the universe and the actual end — and you can speculate all of the stuff in between.”
Email music@nashvillescene.com
