You're Not a Bad Person, It's Just a Bad World

James discusses the meaning, process, and ideas behind the new album

You’re Not a Bad Person, It’s Just a Bad World

We started recording this album in the summer of 2021. Honestly, I had to look back through social media posts to find the date because this year has been so damn busy. I’d argue to say the busiest of my entire life. 

When we booked this studio time I didn’t have a clear plan on what we should record. We had a bunch of new songs we’d demo’d, and a ton of “old” songs just sitting in my iTunes library that we probably over looked when recording RA2 and RA3.

I made a google drive folder of 40 or so songs and then sent them out to everyone to vote on. I wanted to get a sense of who liked what, regardless of when the songs were written. We actually ended up with a pretty even mix of old and new and collectively we selected 20 or so songs to put down on record.

A DARKER SOUND 

One thing I knew I wanted to do was to make this record slightly “darker” in both tone and branding. RA3 was a lighter feeling record both sonically and in the “look n feel”. A lot of the RA3 songs were inspired by my life as I had a ton of time to write solo during the pandemic. That’s why we called it “Jamesy Boy and the Screw Loose Zoo”. I wanted to switch it up with this record. My older bro Jared likes more aggressive sounding music. Bands like Idles and Turnstile have really caught his ear the last couple ears. I didn’t want to follow up RA3 with something similar sounding, and with Jareds taste in mind, I proposed to everyone that we make this record a little harder hitting. Use some bigger guitar tones, more riffs, more extremes, and just make something that felt fresh to us. I also wanted the branding of the album cover itself to be a dark pallet.

 

A fun fact (as I mentioned we recorded 20+ songs on this session and YNABP only has 9), the remainder of songs that aren’t on YNABP will come out on a follow up album soon. I gotta give ya some goods, I mean, you came here for a reason, right? Not going to spill the beans on that project yet, except to say it’s the largest video project we’ve done to date. 

We selected the 9 songs for this mixtape because they all had similar themes: loss, confusion, starting over again, acceptance. 

WHAT’S YNABP ABOUT?

It feels like the world has been in turmoil since the pandemic. It’s definitely the strangest time period in my short-ish existence on earth. It feels very divisive, like you must choose what side of the fence you sit on. You’re either one of them, or one of us. A few examples that have come up: Your stance on vaccines? Should you get a 2nd, 3rd, 4th shot? Are you red or blue? What pronoun are you? Should trans athletes be able to compete in NCAA and the Olympics? Should young children be able to make life-changing decisions with their bodies? What words are now socially unacceptable and is “woke culture” starting to go too far? Should tech companies be the ones to decide on censorship and who should be de-platformed? What should we do with the rapidly expanding community of people with mental health and addiction issues that are living on our cities streets? Should people be able to acquire and own guns easily? These are just a few highly contested topics I’ve found my own self grappling with the past couple years.

The most challenging part for me is forming an intelligent and researched opinion because of all the noise, bullshit, and fake news out there. You can practically find “sources” for every side of these arguments. Now this record isn’t about any one of these topics specifically, it’s more about the feeling of being under water, confused, struggling to understand what’s what. I know I’m not alone in this.

THERE’S STILL HOPE

It’s with this in mind that the title “You’re not a bad person, it’s just a bad world” came to be. It’s not meant to be grim and hopeless. It’s actually the opposite. It’s more the acceptance of understanding you are not alone in feeling overwhelmed by the current state of the world. It’s to serve as a reminder that you are doing just fine, and that you can’t control the things that are out of your control. 

COMING UP

In the next couple weeks, I’m going to dive in more specifically to each song’s lyrics, track by track. I’ll also dive into our approach to merchandise and marketing this record, so stay tuned.

yours truly,

JAMESY BOY