Over the past fifteen years, the music career of James Lanman has been quite the winding road. Starting his career behind the decks as a resident house music DJ and producer in Italy, he would eventually shed the turntables in favor of an acoustic guitar, honing live performances and songwriting in Los Angeles, California. A few short years later, he would be touring SXSW and selling out shows on both coasts as the frontman and founding member of Seattle based Indie Pop Rock act, The Good Hurt. During this time, Lanman starred and performed in a Scandinavian insurance commercial creating a small legion of new fans in Sweden, Norway and Denmark.

A crisis of artistic identity saw the band members parting ways and Lanman moving to New York City to reinvent himself as a jazz and neo soul singer. In 2016, he would sell his belongings save for instruments in order to buy a van so he could live on the road full time performing house concerts in the living rooms of his biggest fans across the US and Canada. What started out as an experiment to get closer to his fans turned into a 127 show odyssey in 2017. It was during these years, playing stripped down and raw performances for both friends and total strangers where he learned to work a crowd. In 2017, while on the road, Lanman was asked to do a Tedx Talk on his experience as a traveling musician and perform a song about it in the Fargodome Arena in Fargo, North Dakota.

After the pandemic forced a cancellation of a final tour across North America where he planned to make a documentary about his life on the road, Lanman's world was turned upside down. But it also provided him with the opportunity to get reacquainted with producing. In the pause of the pandemic, a new project and sound would take shape. From experimentation, an unexpected mutation in his sound sprung forth and what emerged was JAMES. An unapologetically dancey synth pop falling somewhere between Disclosure and The Weekend. Recently, his song Hold On ended up on a large Spotify Editorial playlist alongside Ed Sheeran, Justin Bieber and GAYLE garnering thousands of monthly listeners. Lanman's latest single, Enough, is now streaming on all platforms.