The chords that start “Comfortable,” the first song from Manny James’s latest album, Church Street South, are pure bedroom. A melody line purrs in the background, held up by crooning voices. Then the beat drops, and James’s voice comes in strong. “If you feel that comfortable, you ain’t got to go nowhere,” he sings. “Let’s do what we came here to do.”
“This album is definitely a lot rawer,” James — whose full name is Emmanuel James Sorrells — said on a recent episode of WNHH’s “Northern Remedy.” “It’s back to the essence of when I first started doing music.” And where that happened was in, you guessed it, Church Street South.
“I’m from there, born and raised,” James said. “I was down there for 19 years … that’s where I first discovered music, where I first experienced it, where I had my first singing group.” “Comfortable” taps into that vibe, and into James’s memories of the place. “When I first started listening to music, R&B, it was New Edition, it was some of the ‘70s stuff … speaking about sex and intimacy, but doing it in a way that’s still colorful, that still leaves something to the imagination, that wasn’t just in your face. When Marvin Gaye did ‘Let’s Get It On’ and ‘Sexual Healing’ … you knew what he was talking about, but he did it in a way that was still tasteful.”
When James set about to make a follow-up album to 2014’s Just Being Honest, wanted to create a record that “felt like today, but still had those elements.”
Why? “That’s who I am as an artist. I listen to anything from Sam Cooke to SZA, or Bryson Tiller,” James said. “What you’re getting is all those influences on my record.”
James started singing as a child. In church he sang in the congregation at Ebenezer Chapel, which was on Columbus Avenue at the time. He first performed in public, with a microphone, when he was eight years old. He was in fourth grade, and sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” at an assembly at Prince Elementary School.
“I remember the whole crowd in school just getting silent. And then when I finished, everyone just stood up and started clapping and cheering. Because only my music teacher, and people in my music class, knew that I could sing.” His music teacher at the time put him up to it. “Shout out to Ms. Kumar,” James said. “The lightbulb went off, that this might be something I really need to pursue.”
He kept singing in church, eventually in front of the congregation, into his early teens. “I love gospel music,” James said. “The foundation for a lot of genres is gospel music. A lot of gospel artists go back and forth, from Al Green and Michael Jackson to Sam Cooke.” But he found the pull of R&B and soul music too strong to resist.
In Church Street South he found himself among other musicians, “a ton of people who truly had talent,” who gave him the chance to hone his craft and are “still pursuing their dreams.” He also drew strength from the community around him, “one big dysfunctional family,” he said. “You get along one day and next day you don’t, but later on you become lifelong friends. You realize these people have your back, and they want the best for you and they want to see you succeed. Some of my biggest supporters are people that have known me since I was a kid. That is the greatest feeling ever, hands down. Because they were literally there from the beginning. It’s not like they jumped on later. They’re like, ‘I know you and I know your struggle, and I know everything you’ve been through, so to see you take that and turn it into something positive is incredible.’”
James started performing with his band — Soulclectic — in his early 20s, and saw success, drawing crowds of a couple hundred people thanks to the reputation he had already built for himself. He played clubs all over town, and started playing gigs out of town, too. In 2015 he played the International Festival of Arts & Ideas.
Over that time James connected with producer Fred Sargolini at Patriarch Recordings, who first hired James to do vocals on a few recordings. They moved on to writing and producing Just Being Honest. That album included the lushly produced “If the Sky Was Blue” and the reggae-tinged “She Is Loved.”
For his follow-up effort, James decided to do something different. “Sonically, I went in with the mindset to make the records bigger, to make them be able to appeal to a bigger audience.” He booked a few days and went back into the studio with Sargolini and manager George Clomon. They started each day with no song written beyond sketches of melodies and lyrics; by the end of the day, a song was written, recorded, and produced.
“It kind of happened on its own,” James said. “It was all raw and organic…. I think that you can stunt your growth, for lack of a better word, when you have set out exactly what you want to do.” So they would instead let ideas coalesce in the studio, where Sargolini had gathered together the instruments and recording gear they would need, with James’s voice to steer the proceedings. “A couple of the records I actually recorded in one take, straight through,” James said.
The general idea, James said, was “to make something out of nothing — which is what Church Street South was. We didn’t have fancy cars and we didn’t have all the opportunities, but you had to take what you had and turn it into something great.”
So the bedroom talk of “Comfortable” gives way to the even sexier “Begging (The Vamp),” the upbeat “I Told You So,” and the club jams “Close 2 Me” and “Blindfolded,” which it’s easy to imagine booming out of enormous speakers. (“And me on top of the speakers,” James said.)
But one song had been written before James visited Sargolini’s studio, one for which “I think I had an idea of exactly what I was going to create before I created it,” James said. “That was ‘Dear America,’ and that’s just because of everything I wanted to articulate.”
In contrast to the big productions on the rest of Church Street South, “Dear America” is scaled back, the textures Sargolini excels at pulled mostly into the background. Out front it’s just James’s voice, a plaintive piano, a drum beat that could be on a Bill Withers record, with the sound updated to today.
“There’s a lot of things that are going on the world today that are weighing heavy on me.” His wife encouraged him to write the song; he did it in 35 or 40 minutes filled with emotion. “I just kind of poured my heart out,” he said. “I wanted to address those people in America who don’t understand what people of color are trying to say, what we’ve been asking for, what we’re trying to do…. It’s about inequality, about racism, about segregation, about white supremacy. And it’s about us wanting to be treated equal. And that’s it. That’s all any person wants.” He sent a recording of the melody with a basic beat and chord structures to Sargolini, who told him not to change anything. Then Sargolini got to work creating the music around the melody.
“It took him a while,” James said, “because he wanted to match the lyrics and the message in the song with the music, but also do it in a way that the music wasn’t distracting, and it actually was a marriage between the lyrics and the music.”
“I thought it was very important as an artist with a platform for me to use my platform to move the culture forward and actually start those types of conversations and to get people to understand, ‘listen, it’s way bigger than what you think it is, and if we all can just have some empathy for each other, and look at what’s going on the world, and just work to make things better, it can get better.”
James works in the field of special education as a behavioral technician and does some mentoring as well, and sees connections between that work and his work as a musician. In music, “you’re telling your stories and you’re putting your emotions into these records, but you’re doing it for the people…. Because it’s not about you. It’s never about you,” James said. When people come to see him perform, he added, “you try to give them back what they give to you. That’s how I try to approach every performance: ‘When I leave here, I’m going to make sure I gave it everything I had.’”
Church Street South is available on iTunes and on Amazon. To listen to the full interview with Manny James as well as “Comfortable,” “Dear America,” “Blindfolded,” and “Close 2 Me,” click on the file below.