Author Archives: Dan Starr

Attention is track four on the 2016 James album Girl At The End Of The World.

The song was the final song in the main set on the May 2016 tour that accompanied the album release.

Talking to Even The Stars in early 2016 Tim said of Attention “That was an hour and twenty minute jam. There’s two bits of singing there, one ten minutes in and the other an hour in and I had no way of joining them together and so what I did was fade the keyboard and then fade the other bit in. I thought we’d find something, but people loved it so it stayed that way. It was originally a lot slower and Larry accidentally speeded it up when we were playing it back and people liked it so we ended up doing it that way once we found the right tempo. It was a difficult one though, half the band wanted it slow, half wanted it fast, we’re usually a lot clearer in our demarcations, but this one was right down the line.”

“The second half of it, I thought that lyric (“this is you, this is me, underneath the manzanita tree. By the fire we are forged, we are baked, we are shaped”) couldn’t stay. People in Europe won’t know what a manzanita tree is and they’ll go “he’s singing about fire again” as I do that a lot. What happened though is as we moved back to Topanga, a father of twins at my son’s school died and the kids went to the principal and wanted to do a native American fire ceremony over four days. The twins would sleep by the fire and we’d sit there in silence for three hours or sing. It was the most profound response to death I’d seen. At the end the fire dies out, the kids and the wife and the parents were there and it’s devastating, an astonishing community response to support the kids in their grief. People would hang the names of people they’d lost and were missing on the tree – I put Gabrielle Roth and my mum on that. Those kids will be profoundly changed by that experience. I know I use fire a lot and was prepared to be slagged off for it, but that’s what that lyric is about.”

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