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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. His first track, Hold On, a pop house track about surviving the pandemic will be out everywhere February 25th.

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Press Quotes

“MOSAICS” is a beautifully-intimate collection of songs. It doesn’t feel like we’re listening, but instead, that we’re listening in – seated a few feet away from him while he performs the songs.

-Jason Burns of Trunk Space

Most of the songs on the album employ the slow burn, tempting the listener to stay with them, hooking themselves in to the hummable region of the subconscious.

-SarahJayne Kemp of The Bay Bridged

Lanman is able to capitalize on the romantic that exists in each of our hearts with vulnerability and open-ended honesty. He approaches each song with candor, pouring his heart out with every verse.

-Jacob Rivard of True Blue Note