In the 𝐈𝐍𝐓𝐄𝐑𝐕𝐈𝐄𝐖 on 𝑩𝑩𝑪 𝟔 𝑴𝒖𝒔𝒊𝒄, 𝐁𝐫𝐢𝐚𝐧 said that he fully expects to get asked all the time who James is but that he won’t answer this question. Instead, he wants “each person who cares enough to listen to the record to find their own story … ‘Who’s your favorite James? … Who is James to you and is James even a man?’ These are questions I’m not going to answer – these are questions I want people to ask themselves,“ says 𝐁𝐫𝐢𝐚𝐧.

He shared similar with Maniacs Online:

“Beautiful James” was one of the songs whose title came from my never ending list of song titles that I’d kind of written. And when you pluck a song like “Beautiful James”, it can’t be about a swimming pool or the song’s always going to be about a person, but I didn’t want to, again, I didn’t want to tell people what it was about, I wanted people to find their own James and find comfort in their own story within that. It doesn’t really matter to me what gender or sexuality they the people who inhabit the songs are, I think it’s important for each person to find themselves in this kind of modern love song, which is about more than just love, it’s about security and, you know, soul connection.

Musically, it’s very interesting because when we were in in our studio and mixing “Beautiful James”, it occurred to me that it had been like eight years since we’d put out a single. And then for some reason, I was reminded of this American band who were in a huge rock band in the States and then went away for a while in the 80s and then in 1984 came back with this with this massive global hit called “Jump”, and this band was Van Halen. You know, they came back from the wilderness after being one of the biggest American rock bands and became like this this global chart topping band with this song called “Jump”, which really broke the mold for Van Halen because they had this the axe god, Eddie Van Halen playing keyboards. And so all the Van Halen fans were completely disgusted and then everybody who wasn’t a Van Halen fan, heard “Jump”, and all of a sudden became a Van Halen fan. And it occurred to me that they were kind of, you know, career similarities between us and Van Halen at this point, you know, and that perhaps “Beautiful James” was our “Jump”. And then I went back and I listened to “Jump” the next day for the first time in about 30 years, and it’s exactly the same keyboard sound. The keyboard sound is identical.