asked him about, but you can feel it from the record, there’s just some really great songwriting on it and his voice sounds incredible,” he says. “I remember going to the studio to hear it and when people play you records and you don’t know what they’ve been doing for the last few months it’s always slightly anxiety-inducing, but I was absolutely grinning from ear to ear.”
He does, though, stop short of calling it a comeback. “I hate that term, it always sounds like you’ve been away for a long time,” he reasons. “You just want to cement what he is to people. You’ve had this huge worldwide hit and you want people to find out more about him. Rory is a big admirer of songwriting and a student of songwriters. I first met him when we were trying to sign him to Polydor and he was talking to me about Leon Russell and Holland-Dozier-Holland. The songs really come through as the strong part of this record, it’s about knowing more about him, what he does and how he likes to ply his craft.” Senior A&R director Julian Palmer echoes Unger-Hamilton, and is brimming with excitement over the evolution of Graham’s songwriting. Sony’s dedication to Rag’N’Bone Man has long been clear (even Rob Stringer got soaked watching him in the Glastonbury rain in 2015) but Palmer bangs the drum even louder than he did during the Human campaign. “Rory is growing, he’s experiencing life and he wants to make a record that’s appropriate to someone of his age, so pandering to commercial demands and production techniques that might work at DSPs and at radio, it’s not Rory,” says Palmer. “He’s never going to do that. He follows his heart and I’m thrilled that he does. There aren’t enough artists that are prepared to take those kind of risks any more.”
By the very nature of these things, a major must concern itself with the commercial aspect of following a million-selling debut, but Palmer – who grew up loving David Bowie’s chameleonic tendencies – says that Graham’s will to be different must be celebrated. “There’s the responsibility to Sony and the commercial potential that he’s created globally and just how significant an artist he is,” Palmer explains. “And, because he is a real artist, we have to expect that he’s not going to want to stand still and that he may not deliver what everybody may expect, which is Human part II. So it’s about being brave.” Palmer’s attitude married up with Graham’s, and after he and Jackson-Cook had sketched skeletons of the album’s songs in London and Sussex, they settled on Nashville, with Palmer smoothing the path towards the record’s collaborators. Graham had the offer of going to LA, but he didn’t fancy it. Palmer notes the versatility of Mike Elizondo – who played on swathes of Dr Dre’s 2001 and has subsequently crisscrossed through genres – as a key attraction. Upon arriving in Nashville early last year, Graham had to quarantine for two weeks at Elizondo’s studio, as Covid-19 circumstances elevated rapidly. There, he spent blissful hours alone with the songs with which he planned to shock the world.
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Amber Davis, head of A&R at Warner Chappell, is delighted with the element of surprise. “I know people are going to be excited to hear Rory’s album and intrigued to see how collaborating with some of Nashville’s finest will influence his sound,” she tells Music Week. “It’s always great when our homegrown artists work with writers from different traditions to keep things fresh and interesting. I can’t wait for people to hear it.”
Everyone on team Rag’N’Bone Man did everything in their power to make the songs on Life By Misadventure as good as they possibly could be, as Julian Palmer makes clear.
“The one thing I always pushed Rory on was the songs, if the songs were great then he could travel off into different dimensions and try different things,” he says. “The public would be bored if he just kept trotting out the same stuff all the time.”
W
hat, then, will the public make of Rag’N’Bone Man’s new sound? Will this record cement one of the biggest UK breakthroughs of this generation
and send Graham towards Adele-level stardom, or will it melt away? Only Lewis Capaldi has come close to matching Graham’s feat since Human, which says something about the scarcity of such moments.
To recap: the Human album had sold 70.421 units by the first midweek count, outselling the rest of the Top 20 combined. It went on to sell 117,101 copies in its first week, becoming the fastest-selling debut by a male artist that decade.
“It was outrageous,” says Palmer, not unreasonably. “People always look at those things and think, ‘Christ, so-and-so’s only sold 20,000 and they’ve gone from being a multi-million selling artist…’. The world has changed, the market and the way people absorb music have changed, and whether the album-buying public is as ready for albums any more I just don’t know.” But, Palmer counters, Graham is in a “fortunate place” occupying the same rarefied territory as Ed Sheeran as an artist who forces the masses to sit up and listen when they release an album. “I expect and hope that we can make a huge splash in that first week, but we’ve got a lot to live up to haven’t we?” he says. “The responsibility on us is to get this great body of work out there and I’m sure that the public will love it, because it was recorded as a
Record breaker: Rag’N’Bone Man in the studio
THE BONE COLLECTION
Rory Graham on the cast of Life By Misadventure...
Allen Shamblin, Mike Reid & Pat McLaughlin: “We stayed in this little place called Leeper’s Fork out in Franklin County. That’s where Pat McLaughlin lives, and Allen Shamblin and Mike Reid. We were so lucky to get to write with them. Bonnie Raitt’s I Can’t Make You Love Me [co-written by Shamblin & Reid] is in my Top 5 songs of all time. I was asked who I wanted to write with and I thought, ‘Imagine if these guys are still around writing.’ I thought maybe they didn’t write any more. But Nashville is different. It’s not so ageist as the UK, it doesn’t matter how old you are. It was a beautiful thing. They didn’t know how much I was fanboying over them. It created this really open, honest relationship to write songs.”
Natalie Hemby: “Natalie Hemby is just incredible. It felt super-natural. I would come up with concepts and the start of ideas and she would just facilitate me, not try and push song agendas or ideas. It was so personal. We were set up through Foy Vance, he said to me, ‘She’s the real deal, you need to work with her.’”
Mike Elizondo: “Mike was super-open to what we wanted, he was like, ‘So, who do you want to play on the record?’ It was really important to make people feel like they were in the room. The only way we were going to do that was to get in the musicians and just play it live. We originally had three weeks set out, but we had to lock down for two weeks, which meant we had seven days to record it. I don’t think there’s any overdubs, everything was cut in single takes. There are parts where there’s a little scratch in my vocal or little things that poke out. It’s organic and you can hear the studio in it. Mike gave it that scope.”
Human kind: Rag’N’Bone Man with his team at Lovebox in 2017
Ben Jackson-Cook: “He’s got this really great sense of melody. I’ve never really struggled with lyrics, but sometimes I’ll end up falling on the same melodies a lot and he brought a freshness to it. The way he plays just made me want to write, so I was like, ‘You need to be with me throughout this.’ He was really important. We also did a lot of driving. I rented this big truck, a fucking F150 Ford pick-up. The first time we went out we were in a Range Rover and we stuck out like a sore thumb. It was so beautiful, you can drive for miles and it’s forest and never-ending lakes. Just that in itself is inspiring.”
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PHOTO: Mike Elizondo
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