James A.M. Downes Does Not Give Up
Believe in Haunted Continents
By Adrienne Matei
In a profession whose prevailing lore only semi-ironically dictates that if you were any good, you’d have died at 27, it’s tough to be striving at age 35. Sure, James Murphy, Leonard Cohen, and Debbie Harry hit it big in their thirties. But most of the time, the music industry — which floods with new hopefuls each year — favors fresh faces, young up-and-comers with just enough novelty to their sound.
James A.M. Downes isn’t a fresh face, although he does look youthful, the kind of 35-year-old who would lose a decade if he lost his sparse, gingery beard. He’s been making music for a quarter century, since he first picked up a guitar at age 10 in his parents’ house in Old Saybrook, Connecticut. Song-writing and performing have always felt so right that Downes never bothered with fail-safes. Rather than go to college, he started touring after high school, and he’s always picked up a little restaurant work on the side. Things are going well for him: he’s an artist by trade, making ends meet with a supportive family and his contemporaries’ respect. He recently snagged a winter residency at the Bowery Electric and will be performing his new solo material there in December and January. But Downes has one problem: he isn’t famous. And he really wants to be.
Downes came close to his big break once. His first band, a teen punk act named Call It Arson, was popular on the New England hardcore scene in the early 2000s. Several record labels interested in signing the band suggested they create a catchy, radio-ready hit, but Downes and his former bandmate, Ryan White, refused on principle. They didn’t want to sell out.
Eventually, Call It Arson broke up (though Downes and White still collaborate) and Downes moved from Connecticut to New York City, nurturing his more folksy tendencies with a new band, The End of America, two singer-guitarists and a banjo player making sweet, harmonica-laced neo-Appalachian harmonies — the kind of music you could tap your boot to on a wooden floor. They’ve been booking folk festivals and private party gigs for a decade now, and were once asked to perform at an event organized by Beck, which was cool, but Downes wants more. “There are moments when I’m like, ‘how am I going to raise a family like this? How am I going to support my wife and myself?’” he says. “I mean she’s a brilliant, capable person and can support herself, but I want to be able to add to the team, you know?”
Downes doesn’t regret having been an idealistic teen punk rocker, but his attitude toward entrepreneurship has changed. “I think what happened to me is I got to this age and I’m like, it’s not ‘selling out’ to want to be able to buy a pair of shoes, you know? It’s not ‘selling out’ to wanna buy my wife dinner on her graduation day — that’s not selling out. So it’s like a paradigm shift in my mentality.” His priorities recalibrated, Downes is welcoming change. For the first time in his musical career, he’s going solo, taking an acute responsibility for his own fate independent of a band. “I just did some real soul-searching and was like, fuck it, I’m gonna go for it,” he says.
In Shakey, Jimmy McDonough’s biography of Neil Young, Young offers this ruthless appraisal of unsuccessful musicians: “A lot of artists are weak when it comes to their own direction and their own future. Many of them just put themselves in other people’s hands — and then feel frustrated that things aren’t turning out right. They really have no one to blame but themselves.” Downes loves that book, and has Young’s singular drive in mind as he works on Haunted Continents, his indie rock solo project.
“Haunted Continents is like my outlet for being able to sort of run with ideas as soon as they come up without having to run it by anybody,” says Downes. “My idea before was that somebody’s gotta take care of me, like a record label. These last couple months have been like a total realization of like, holy shit, no one’s going to take care of me if I don’t take care of myself.” The future Downes wants to “design” involves releasing his best work every year, touring the world, having “thousands of people come to every show,” and making work he finds meaningful that others connect with. For now he is continuing with The End of America and bartending part-time at Soho’s City Winery. Most important, since September Downes has been releasing a new single as Haunted Continents every month in an ongoing, yearlong blitz. He’s hoping consistency and discipline will lead him to a greater level of success.
As Haunted Continents, Downes composes wry, searching songs buoyed by nimble guitar and lyrics that evoke various permutations of early-generation Millennial malaise. His tendency toward earnestness over irony gives his music a warm-yet-exasperated quality that’s easy to relate to. Though unified by shuffling beats and folksy melodies, each of his new singles feels like a sonic vignette — every track envelopes listeners in a contained scene with its own message and mood. In “Haunt The World Together,” Downes’s tremulous verses conjure a cinematic, spooky romance, while “Modern Love” depicts relatable dating app fatigue in shades of sadness and resignation. “The Perfect Night (To Dig),” a “tune about pushing back against the emboldened currents of bigotry,” finds him grappling with the bleak predicaments of contemporary America, announcing to rhetorical assailants, “I swear by god if you touch my girl, my mom, or my dog / I’ll bury you in the moonlight.” He had the Charlottesville attack on his mind as he wrote, and especially, several recent hate crimes perpetrated against Asian-Americans in New Jersey; his wife is Korean-American. “It hit home to me that my wife and our future kids may not be safe in the way white people are on the streets they have every right to be walking on,” he says. In “What Were You Born For?” the first single of his project, Downes breezily summarizes his sense of purpose: “Protect the ones I love, safely enjoy my drugs / Sing ‘till there’s no air in my lungs.” He writes lyrics that simplify intense experiences that may seem overwhelming, translating them into songs that are light but self-assured.
However, 2018 may not be the best time to reinvent yourself as an indie rock musician. The genre has suffered a decade-long pop cultural recession. “Certainly less people are watching — yeah, less people are watching, there’s less money in it, there’s a smaller audience, it’s outdated, it’s not as lucrative, it’s just not as hot,” Downes admits. Even when Downes talks about his own key influence, Death Cab for Cutie, he hastens to specify he likes only their early stuff. Downtempo indie acts that centered on slim, white, cardigan-clad men with stringy hair and lots of feelings flourished in the early aughts (Death Cab, Wilco, Bright Eyes), but by and large, fans have left these bands behind in the hazy basements of adolescence and moved on. Today the indie genre is being reinvigorated by the voices of young women like Soccer Mommy and Phoebe Bridgers, who have shifted indie’s stereotypical navel-gazing into a more forthright, even acerbic tone.
Still, older styles have a way of coming back around in new forms. Columbia University sociology professor Jennifer Lena, whose book, Banding Together: How Communities Create Genres in Popular Music, explores how musical trends develop, notes that when a musician’s sound harkens back to an earlier era, the key to their success often lies in their ability sensitively to articulate both prior and contemporary influences. “That seems to be where a lot of people’s fortunes rise or fall — on how well they draw associations in their music and also in their kind of artistic persona to other artists and other music,” says Lena. Downes’s Death Cab-esque penchant for introspection can manifest in work that feels relevant now, but to make music worth downloading in 2018, he can’t refer only to the classics. He needs to engage with new indie aesthetics, too.
Downes’s new producer, Andy Seltzer, is helping him do that, smoothing the coarser aspects of his work into a marketable, velvety sheen. The two met growing up in Old Saybrook. Seltzer, who is 10 years younger, remembers Downes as a sort of local idol, the cool older guy who was nice enough to include the younger kids in his music video shoots. “[Call It Arson] were kind of just like royalty for Connecticut, like one of the biggest bands, and we were all huge fans,” says Seltzer. The two fell out of touch for years but reconnected in 2015 when they were both living in Park Slope, Brooklyn. By then, Seltzer had begun his own career in music and now acts as Downes’s bridge to the current scene. Being from opposite ends of the Millennial demographic — close enough to share a generational passion for touchstone bands, but far enough apart to bring different perspectives to their work — has contributed to their success as a generative creative pairing.
Seltzer intuitively understands Downes’s solo music, and knows how to polish his songs so they fit into the slick world of Spotify (where Downes has 5,000 monthly listeners) and sound at home on playlists alongside work by new-indie artists. “First and foremost, James’s lyrics and melodies and just him just sitting in a room is all a listener will ever need,” says Seltzer of Haunted Continents songs. And yet, “Indie rock has come a really long way since, you know, listening to like Death Cab and the Shins and stuff in high school. I’m just making sure the mixes and stuff are not too low-fi but still maintain all [Downes’s] integrity, but still could exist, I guess, in a landscape like Spotify.” Downes is encouraged by the keen response he’s been getting to the songs Seltzer has produced. “I’ve been receiving really great feedback, specifically like ‘wow dude it sounds like you but better,’” he says. “I’m like, ok!”.
Downes’s friends and family are also excited about his collaboration with Seltzer. Downes had never worked with a producer before. In the past, he’d been more stubborn about creative control (former bandmate White calls him a “classic Taurus.”) “I’m excited that he’s working with Andy, ’cause Andy’s got his finger on the pulse of all mainstream type poppy stuff and I think their work really fits together,” says White, who has lent backing vocals to several Haunted Continents tracks. “I’m glad that he’s pushing James to do some new and different things.” Downes’s wife, Nicole Cirilli, agrees. “I think he realized Andy was experiencing a lot of success, and he supported James from his really early days,” she says.“[Andy] knows James’s style and he totally knows how James wants to come off, and James trusts Andy a lot.” Having been familiar with his work the longest, these are the folks in Downes’s life who can tell his sound has become crisper, more confident.
On an early autumn evening, Downes arrives at Rivergigs, an apartment concert series hosted by Upper West Siders Andy Wanning and Brenna Cohen. He wasn’t planning on performing — he’s only just debuted as Haunted Continents, having played his first solo show in Philadelphia the previous week — but the couple had a cancellation last minute and to their great relief Downes is filling in. A pay-by-donation audience of 15 or so neighbors and whoever else heard about the intimate event gather in the living room, and by the time Downes is up, the sky is dark over Riverside Park, New Jersey’s lights glowing beyond the room’s long, west-facing windows. All night he’s been cheering on fellow performers, refilling empty plates of crackers, and sipping water from his beer bottle (there’s a drive home to Queens, where he lives with Cirilli, waiting for him at the end of the evening). But now Downes is comfortable at the center of the compact crowd, squeezed onto chairs, sofas, and cushions on the floor by his feet. He likes fantasy books, and his preamble to “What Were You Born For?” reflects their influence on his own writing. “There are folks that feel like there are spirit animals, daemons that follow you around, and they protect you and they help you do what you gotta do, they help you live that best life,” he says. Strumming the song’s first eerie chords on his black Gretsch Duo Jet guitar (a model of the one George Harrison played in the early sixties), he pulls the room into his thrall.
Having just begun his solo career, Downes is gaining the momentum necessary for a successful take-off. He’s been getting into social media for the first time, posting thank-yous on Instagram Stories when Spotify users add his work to their playlists, and teasing audio clips and cover art from new tracks. He has posted charming DIY lyric videos on Youtube. His web store is stocked with merch like white sweatshirts with “WWYBF?” (“What Were You Born For?”) imprinted on them, and tees Downes tie-dyed himself in a bubble gum color he calls “’80s skater d-bag pink.” Even though Rivergigs is a small show, Downes brings the tees, hauling a big cardboard box of them through the apartment’s narrow hall and selling one to a departing guest in the elevator. “It took him a whole day to make those shirts,” says Cirilli.
There’s inherent vulnerability to pursuing fame as an artist: Admitting you care, you’re trying, acknowledging mistakes and working against the clock to fix them. Downes knows that to get the career he wants, he needs humility and ambition in equal measure. “When I started the Haunted Continents reboot thing I was like, ok, I’m 35, not where I want to be, really grateful for everything that’s happened to me but I want to see it grow, obviously,” he says. “I want to see it grow a lot. So maybe I’m doing something right, or maybe there’s something I can do better, so the whole idea behind this Haunted Continents reboot was do everything differently than I’ve done it before.”
Whatever happens as time goes on, Downes knows he will stay committed to music. “I’m a lifer for sure, there’s nothing else I wanna do,” he says — even if that might eventually mean co-writing music for other artists to perform or working in the business side of the industry. “One of the things I’m learning about myself is the stubbornness of ‘I need to be a touring musician and releasing my own music and that’s how I’m gonna be able to support my family’ — that stubbornness is loosening a little bit,” he says.
Downes has never appraised his aspirations quite so frankly before, nor worked so conscientiously toward them. Then again, the stakes have never been higher. “Dude, it keeps me up at night with excitement and anxiety at the same time. It’s easily the beginning of a new era in my life. It’s weird. It’s awesome. I’m stoked,” he says. “Terrified.”
