James Walker - Next To Me (feat. Josephine Zwaan)

Earlier in the year, I spent some time hanging out at my friend Josephine's basement studio in Amsterdam. She was living in one of the apartments above the recording space, and invited me to come chill with her for a little while and create.

I had a few new ideas that I was working on at the time but none of them were really sticking, so we went back to re-visit my song Next To Me.

I took the stems from the original session that we recorded for English Bones, and started messing around with tempo and arrangement in the early morning while Josephine was out of the house living her daily life.

At some point prior to this recording session, we had been touring together playing some small shows in Germany and the Netherlands. Midway through this run, I lost my voice because of a virus and had to stop singing entirely for a few weeks. Josephine actually sung this tune in her set, to introduce the audience still to my songs. It was very kind of her, as immediately it sounded as though I wrote the tune for her. She has such a magnificent voice.

So, in our studio sessions, we decided that we would track a vocal part of hers over mine on this 'remix'... but what happened instead was an entirely new part and arrangement. It's like Mary J Blige got involved or something. What a great time.

Huge thanks to Josephine for all of the work, and continued love. You're a great friend and big inspiration to me.

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Here's Next To Me, as featured on Spotify's 'Easy' and on Digster Netherlands' 'Lazy Sunday Music'. Thanks so much for all your support so far.

https://open.spotify.com/artist/08cmu...

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