Many songwriters would kill for the predicament that James Blunt is in: famous for one song, and only one.
That hit, You're Beautiful, is a dewy ballad about catching a glimpse of a former girlfriend in the subway. Critics loathed it, but it reached No. 1 from Latvia to Latin America and helped Blunt's debut album, Back to Bedlam, sell 11 million copies around the world. As last year's combination wedding song, television soundtrack song and supermarket background music, You're Beautiful was more than popular - it was ubiquitous.
This kind of success can be an albatross for a new artist, and even Blunt, who last Tuesday released his second album, All the Lost Souls, and sold out two shows in Manhattan last week, doubts that he can ever score such a hit again.
PHOTO: NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
"I sold a hell of a lot the first album," he said recently over steak frites at a trendy restaurant in New York's meatpacking district, where every female head seemed to turn as he walked in. "I can't possibly compete with that on the second album. It's impossible to do."
Blunt, 33, a throwback to the 1970s soft-rock golden age, says he is uncomfortable with the marketing of one song at the expense of all others. But given the industry's sales slump, it has become even more crucial for record labels to promote singles relentlessly and to gain maximum exposure by licensing them for television shows, commercials and ringtones. All of which poses a quandary for Blunt's label in its post-You're Beautiful campaign: Is it better to play it slow and steady to groom Blunt as a career artist or to shoot for another smash?
That first smash came relatively easily. Back to Bedlam, released in Blunt's native Britain in 2004 and in the US the next year, had a whiff of Coldplay in its big, swelling refrains and earnest falsetto vocals. And Blunt had stubbly good looks and an intriguing back story. A former UK army officer in Kosovo who was once one of Queen Elizabeth's personal guards, he was picked by the songwriter and producer Linda Perry (Christina Aguilera, Pink) to be the first artist on her label, Custard.
In the UK two singles preceded You're Beautiful. But Atlantic Records, which issues Blunt's music in the US in partnership with Custard, released that song first. Though it stalled on the charts at the beginning, a flurry of commercial licensing made it inescapable on television. It was used in a Sprint ad campaign, in prime-time dramas like Smallville and ER, on daytime soaps, in promo spots for Extreme Home Makeover and even in the 2006 Winter Olympics. That exposure helped its popularity on radio, and after seven months it hit No. 1. To date the album has sold 2.6 million copies in the US.
As Perry sees it, all that licensing backfired: You're Beautiful became as hated as it was loved.
"When you have a really big song and you want to see some legs on a record," she said, "you don't start putting that song in commercials and on TV shows and keep oversaturating it. Because that's when people get sick of it."
The backlash was harsh. Blunt became a tabloid regular - his tendency to be photographed alongside scantily clad young women didn't help - and was ruthlessly jeered in the music press. (His album was named worst of the year by the UK music magazine NME.) And in a sign of true notoriety, his name entered the lexicon of Cockney rhyming slang as a particularly crude insult.
Blunt professes a cool equanimity about his treatment by the news media, but doesn't deny his playboy reputation. During the interview he received a text message from his friend and fellow bon vivant Kid Rock. ("We spent some good times in Cannes this year," Blunt said.) And he lives on the Spanish island of Ibiza, famous for its huge, wild dance clubs.
"We'd have dinner at midnight," he said of his life there, "and I'd be thinking about going to a bar at 2 in the morning. And then we'd think about hitting a club between 3:30 and 4, and the club would close at 8. I'd come back at 9 in the morning and I'd write songs."
If All the Lost Souls is any indication, the popular ridicule has had little effect on him. It sticks closely to the formula that made Back to Bedlam such a big seller: gentle guitars and piano, breathy vocals, melodramatic sweep, a slight tinge of morbidity.
"The person who has to live with this album is me," he said. "It doesn't matter how far up the charts it gets. It doesn't matter if it sells. I really like it."
But his business representatives differ on the promotional plan. Perry says that the gradual roll-out in Europe saved him from being considered a one-hit-wonder there. Blunt made an appeal to Lyor Cohen, the domestic chairman of Atlantic's parent company, the Warner Music Group, asking him to avoid pushing any single too hard and to emphasize the new album as a whole.
Cohen was sympathetic, but only to a point. "Ultimately we're not as romantic," he said. "You need to get the impressions at radio to bring attention to it."
The entire album can be streamed free, or purchased for US$9.99, on Blunt's MySpace page.
And Blunt is not above shooting for big hits. One of the stronger new songs, Carry You Home, was written with Max Martin, the Swedish pop maestro behind blockbusters by the Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears and Kelly Clarkson.
Cohen said fears of piracy kept him from sending out the songs on All the Lost Souls for licensing in advance of the album's release. But now that the album is out, the saturation can begin.
"We will license these records, in movies, TV and commercials," he said. "Trust me, you will hear these records."
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