This week DeBraun profiles singer-songwriter James Friley of Idiot Glee.
James Friley is a native of Ashland, Kentucky who moved to Lexington in 2006. He started playing piano at a young age and by the time he was 8 he had won a state competition for best composition. Friley moved to Lexington to attend the University of Kentucky on a piano scholarship. Coming to music school was part of his plan but, Friley says he soon realized that he needed to change those plans.
“I’m reading and practicing something and trying to perform it perfectly, I guess part of me didn’t really want to spent my life like, playing other people’s music and that’s another thing I felt that made me a little different from the other people in college or the other people who were just playing piano, you know they just wanted to perfect Rachmaninoff, which I love, but I was just thinking ‘why am I spending so much time learning other, I just wanna make my own.’”
After playing classical music along with spending five years with the band Bedtime, Friley decided to carve his own path. In 2009 he started performing and recording under the moniker Idiot Glee. What began as Friley’s need to create, has transformed into a full band. Friley says the evolution has allowed for more room to grow and more experimentation.
“Like really me just experimenting with harmonies a lot, it’s literally in the beginning, a lot of a capella tracks and stuff, or like I would sample Al Green and just sing over top of it, and now it’s just full on every instrument, like real full band songs, there’s also a lot of experimenting with like synthesizers and what not, but stylistically it’s still kind of in the vein of 60’s, 70’s pop or rock or however you want to describe it.”
Friley writes songs pretty consistently and has been working on next Idiot Glee record that is set to be released later this year. As his sound lends itself to the 60’s and 70’s; his process of writing stays in the digital age. Friley says the process has been the same since his first record.
“So a lot of times, I’ll just hit a beat in my home studio, that’s what gets me goin more than just picking up a guitar or what not, when there’s some rhythm and I play like organ on my synthesizer or something, just when I think back about it, that’s what happens the most often and since I don’t own a piano, I don’t often just sit around playing piano and singing, so it’s just weird being in the digital world.”
James Friley performs as Idiot Glee. Idiot Glee will be performing on April 12th at Al’s Bar. More information about Idiot Glee can be found here.
