Jamie Scott – 'make sure you are always writing honest good music'
By James Garbett
“A great song is a song that instantly makes someone relate to it in some way and has a lyric and melody that is authentic and tells a story”
Producer/songwriter Jamie Scott is the mastermind behind a number of some of the most beloved pop tracks of the past ten years, with the songs he's produced having amassed ten billion streams collectively. However, at the end of 2019, having spent over a decade in the studio writing for other people, Jamie decided it was time to focus on his own career as an artist. He cleared his schedule and started the process of recording his own music.
Locked away in his home studio, he recorded most of the instrumentation himself and, without really intending to, finished an entire album’s worth of music in just a matter of weeks. We got a chance to talk with him more about his career as an artist and what it's like to be a producer to some of the biggest names in the music industry
You love writing songs that connect, but how do you establish that connection?
I guess you need to have a certain amount of empathy but also to have experienced things in your life that other people might be going through. Keeping lyrics very simple and to the point really helps.
What is something about being a song-writer for the big names that would surprise people?
Sometimes these songs can sit around for 3 to 5 years on someone’s hard drive and then out of the blue you can get a call saying that someone wants to cut it. Good examples of this for me are Cold Water, which was written three years before it ever came out (with Major Lazer and Justin Bieber) and These Days which was written almost 4 years before Rudimental put it out.
How does the brief change for each artist you write for, is there always a mandate for you before you start? How do the songs start and how do they develop?
How songs start and how they develop completely depends on what kind of songwriter you are. I think most of the songs that I’ve loved writing (and the ones that have been most successful) have been ones that start with a piece of music that I love, followed by a melody that I love and then lastly, the written lyrics that I thought sounded amazing with that particular melody.
Are there any songs you’ve helped write that have had a particularly interesting development?
Yeah when we wrote These Days it started off as a song that I wrote with Julian Bunnetta, John Ryan and Dan Caplen in my house in Surrey. Then suddenly we heard that Rudimental loved it and wanted to feature Dan Caplen. Then Macklemore loved the song and wanted to rap on it and finally, Jess Glynne heard it, wanted to sing on it and the song very quickly became Rudimental featuring Jess Glynne, Macklemore and Dan Caplen. That was a crazy evolving story that took about three years.
How does writing songs for others influence how you write a song for yourself?
Actually it doesn’t really influence it at all because I think the more separate I can keep those two things the better. Therefore I can have rules which are important to have when writing songs for other people but I try not to apply those rules so much when I am writing my own stuff.
What do you wish you knew about the music industry before you started and what do you think is important for others to know?
I guess the amount of ups and downs that I was going to have that always ended up being okay in the end. So whenever you’re in a down period or you think things are not going great you’ve just got to keep your head up, keep going and just make sure you are always writing honest, good music.
Could you tell me more about Friendly Fire, where did the song come from? What made you choose the tone of the song, why is the tempo upbeat despite the slightly melancholic lyrics?
I love it when you get the paradox of a song where the up-tempo groove is working with a really sad lyric because then it’s still kind of uplifting but leaves you feeling rather melancholic which is cool I think. Friendly Fire was written with a good friend of mine, Theo from the Band, Hurts, and it was written as a piano ballad. The main reason why I recorded it up-tempo was that I just wanted to record a completely different version than the one I’d written with Theo and wanted it to fit more with the album that I was making.
What can fans expect from "How Still The River", is there a tone or common theme that ties the album together?
The album is about loss and relationships, and the struggles with those relationships, and that is definitely the theme running throughout the album. It is also a dedication to an old friend of mine, Toby Smith, who died a couple of years ago. Toby was one of my mentors when I was just starting out. "How Still the River" is really talking about the space that was left when he died.
I want to take you back to “Just”, how has your musical style changed since then and why?
So Toby was the reason that ‘Just’ sounded like it did. He left Jamiroquai after album 5 and when I met him this was the song he was writing and producing, having just left the band. When I heard it I loved it, so we wrote some lyrics together and a melody over the backing track and the song was born. I guess throughout my career I have made music that I’ve loved but that has also been influenced by the people I’m working with at the time. I do think though that as I got older and started to write and produce my own records my style became much more authentic to who I am as an artist.
Where’s been your favourite place to perform live and what’s the best thing about performing live?
That would probably have to be the Troubadour in Los Angeles because of the history that’s wrapped up in that building. Selling it out twice was probably the last thing I did on my last record five or six years ago so that memory will always be a very special one for me.