James the Seventh - Artist of the Week (06.14)
Former ballet dancer, James the Seventh is an independent pop and alternative artist from the Philadelphia area who found solace in the art of making music after getting a leg injury while dancing. Her injuries left her unable to walk for 5 months and it was in this time that she unexpectedly had sparked a love for making music. Her dad bought her a guitar and she began singing, writing, and producing; James says that it was making music that saved her life. Since the release of her debut single “You Don't Know Me” in January of 2021, the song has gained 132,350 streams on Spotify and she has accumulated 174.6K followers on TikTok. Since this release, she also had 67,634 monthly listeners on Spotify.
James compares her music and style as similar to Billie Eilish, Lorde, and Lana Del Rey, while she takes inspiration from her own life experiences as well as experiences she has seen from other people in her writing. In her latest single “Wouldn’t It Be Nice to Not Care Too?”, she talks about how she struggles with feeling like people have a stronger impact on her than she does on them. In the song, she talks about how she feels like she is always meeting the expectations of others, but how at the same time they do not try at all to meet her expectations, and how the people around her don’t match the energy she brings. She ponders on the idea of what it would be like to be like the people she interacts with, and have the ability to not care just as they do. The beauty of this song is that with the lyrics “Do you have the guts to say you don’t care, I don’t have the guts to say you're never there,” she tackles a very important problem in a lot of these relationships; that being the fact that people will drag you along just because they can and that they do this because they have no regard for how much effort you are putting into the relationship.
You can find James the Seventh on all streaming platforms as well as on TikTok (@jamestheseventh) and on her Instagram (@james_theseventh).