In 2019, James Bay seemed to be having the time of his life. His number-one debut album of anthemic indie pop, Chaos and the Calm, had been streamed a whopping six billion times, he’d just supported Ed Sheeran on his European stadium tour, and he was preparing to record his third album in Nashville.
“But below that I had a bit of a crash,” Bay says. “On the surface it didn’t look like that at all and it sometimes feels like my job to make sure it doesn’t look like that, but I had a hard time. Only with real insecurity, impostor syndrome, fear.”
By the time the now 31-year-old singer-songwriter from Hitchin was finally ready to release his pandemic-delayed album Leap (out next week), he was faced with a decision. He could just go about his normal business and let his music speak, or he could reveal the painful circumstances in which he began writing the album. In May, I published an open letter on social media revealing his mental health struggles for the first time.
The letter specifically mentioned imposter syndrome, the overriding feeling of not earning success that is more often discussed as something women experience. “While mental health has become a more open conversation, there is one nuance that I feel a bit affected by,” he says. “In my world and in this society, it still doesn’t feel as accepted as I would like to be a guy who talks about it in conversation.”
While the therapy of recent years has been helpful, Bay wishes men could talk more with friends. “I think sometimes you have to speak it out with your loved ones. And I recognize that it’s still not the most direct and fluid experience of working with other men, which I think is a shame.”