‘Secrets’ revealed as Upper St. Clair musician gets personal with latest release
When the surviving members of the Beatles reunited in the mid-1990s for a TV documentary series, it was accompanied by six compact discs’ worth of previously unreleased music.
Amid pre-fame artifacts and alternate versions of the band’s most popular songs are excursions into the screaming-fans phenomenon known as Beatlemania.
Nevin James performs live.
“It was the live music that really shocked me, the way people responded and the excitement and everything,” Nevin James recalled, having dug as a youngster into the collection of his parents, Dr. Robert and Marilyn Shogry of Upper St. Clair.
Hearing the reception accorded the Fab Four helped point the direction for James, who to this point has released two full albums plus a pair of extended plays featuring his original compositions.
The latest is “Secrets of the Heart,” which the singer and multi-instrumentalist released earlier this year following an extended period of preparation.
“That album was made on both coasts, over the course of about 18 months,” James said about the recording, which took place at studios in Los Angeles and Dormont. “Then we spent at least half a year mixing and mastering it.”
He described the album’s tracks as “mile markers for a person’s life, in a lot of ways,” specifically his.
“These songs were moments from my life that I felt so strongly about and was so affected by that I felt I had almost no choice but to turn them into a song. And that’s pretty much what ‘Secrets of the Heart’ is,” he explained. “It’s a very personal album.”
The illustration on the cover of Nevin James’ “Secrets of the Heart” is by Italian artist Valentina Zou.
Spiritual, too: The title comes from Psalms 44:20-21.
“If we have forgotten the name of our God, or stretched out our hands to a strange god, shall not God search this out? For he knoweth the secrets of the heart.”
James also draws from the verse for the lyrics to “Guide Me Through the Dark,” the album’s closing track: “The secrets of the heart are not unknown to you and me.”
“And that song,” he said, “is basically a prayer.”
He bases much of his songwriting on the concept of conveying honesty – “For me, it’s about trying to tell the truth” – in following one of his favorite attributes of another major musical influence on him.
“I started to get into Bob Dylan when I was about 18, right before I left for college,” James said about attending Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif., following his 2007 graduation from Upper St. Clair High School.
Prior to that, he’d drawn on the piano lessons he started taking at age 7 to learn material, also in his parents’ collection, by the likes of Billy Joel, Cat Stevens, Elton John and Dan Fogelberg.
“Someone told me at one point that if you want to be the leader of a band, you kind of have to know how to play a little guitar,” he said, citing his inspiration to learn to do so: “For me, it was watching the ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ video of Bob Dylan, the one at Newport.”
That performance is from a 1965 Rhode Island folk festival, and in fact, James is part of a project that involves an even earlier point in Dylan’s career. He is set to play the young troubadour in the independent movie “116 MacDougal,” which chronicles the story of The Gaslight, the Greenwich Village coffee shop that helped spark the popularity of folk music in the early ’60s.
Filming is scheduled for 2019, and in the meantime James continues to concentrate on his music, writing songs for what he projects as another album and playing concerts, again on both coasts.
“I’m blessed to have a strong group of musicians that I work with here and a strong group of musicians that I work with in L.A,” he said. “If a good performance opportunity arises, I’ll call them and say, ‘Guys, let’s rehearse on Thursday. We’ll play the show Saturday.’ The guys are so good that they can usually pick it up pretty quickly.”
In Pittsburgh, he works with guitarist John Wilcox, a 2014 Upper St. Clair graduate, along with Arnold Stagger on bass and Kevin Hindes on drums. And contributing to “Secrets of the Heart” is another USC grad, Benny Benack III of the Class of 2009.
“Benny is the best trumpet player I’ve ever met,” James attested. “You can quote me on that, for sure.”
Let’s also quote him with regard to the late lead guitarist of the Grateful Dead:
“I was pretty influenced when I was young by the Jerry Garcia Band, probably more than the Dead, to be honest with you. My cousin gave me a stack of about 20 Jerry Garcia CDs when I was 18, and I played them a couple of summers and just loved them.”
For more information, visit www.nevinjames.com.