Jam City on Nostalgia, Clubbing, and the Freedom of Collaboration

This is a free post from Larry Fitzmaurice's Last Donut of the Night newsletter. Paid subscribers get one or two email-only Baker's Dozens every week featuring music I've been listening to and some critical observations around it, along with a Screen Memories column every one or two weeks where I write about stuff I watched lately.

Today's installment: I last had the great Jack Latham, aka Jam City, on the newsletter to talk about his excellent 2020 record Pillowland. Since then, Jack's been extremely busy working with artists like Olivia Rodrigo and Lil Yachty, and he's put out two more great and explicitly clubby Jam City records—2023's Jam City Presents EFM and the iridescent My World, which just saw release last week. When Jack hit me with the new record over the summer I had to get him on a call to catch up, and now that chat is here for you to read in all its glory. Check it out:

Last time we talked was right when you released Pillowland, and you've obviously been up to quite a bit since then. Walk me through the last six years of your life.
A couple of big things happened. I'm a dad now, I got married, we moved into a house, and I built a studio. That all happened within two years. When I was speaking to you having just finished Pillowland, I knew I wanted to do another record that was dance-influenced and go back to my roots—but I was pretty deep into doing collaborative work and production, and I'm still balancing my time between the two things. Around 2021, I really had to make a promise to myself that I was going to keep doing Jam City, because it would've been very easy for it to fall by the wayside a little bit when there were other opportunities to earn a bit of money. I split my life between various projects, but if I didn't make the time and space to commit to working on my own stuff, it could be too little, too late—and that made me really sad. Making my own work is the genesis from which all the other collaborative stuff comes from.

I definitely reprioritized Jam City in the last couple of years, and the more I did that, the more I felt refreshed and recharged when it came to working with others. This is the second album in this phase of the project, where I'm revisiting a lot of early dance music influences in my own style. It's really helped clarify what I want to do with music. The last record came out around two years ago, and making records in relatively quick succession on some sort of schedule—it feels good. It's a nice cruising speed at the moment, where I can work on all sorts of things, but every two years I find the time to work on my own stuff and figure out what I want to say.

This record has a darker, clubbier edge. The last one was clubby too, but this album is particularly nocturnal-feeling.
I'm glad you noticed that it feels darker. That's what my wife said when I played it for her, and it wasn't intentional at all. But it is darker. I don't know where the darkness comes from, necessarily, because I'm quite a happy person.

Darkness doesn't always have to signify emotion! Sometimes it's literally just about being in the dark. Going off the clubbier aspect of things—I went to a Two Shell club gig a few years ago in Brooklyn, and the club was irritatingly well-lit the entire time. Being in a club where the lights are basically on at 2 a.m...
That should be a crime.

I said to my friend, "Is this like one of their pranks? Are they fucking with us here?"
That is a prank I cannot accept. I'm all for having a bit of fun, but that's not okay.
It's funny you say that though, because a lot of people like having, mood lighting in the house—like a lamp or something—when it's dark outside. But I don't like to have the overhead lights on ever. My wife's slowly come around to that. She was talking about someone disparagingly, and she was like, "They're the kind of person that has the overhead lights on." I was like, "I know exactly what you mean." Having a huge strip light above you as you're trying to sit down and unwind is like being in jail.

Talk to me more about the clubbier edge on this record. It is palpable, and it goes even closer to what you were doing during the Night Slugs days.
My time spent going to nightclubs definitely waned over the years as I've got older, but I'm still interested in it and love it as a genre. The one thing about it that I found myself drawn to wasn't so much the music itself, but the feeling of the nighttime in the period when I was DJing a lot and going to Europe and North America quite regularly. It was what I began to get nostalgic about during lockdown—the nighttime economy. It wasn't so much the music, it could be arriving at or leaving a nightclub and the city being really quiet while waiting for a taxi, or memories of waiting for the bus where I grew up, seeing people in an office block with the lights still on past midnight, hammering away at the computer. All these things felt really romantic.

When I go back to these dance sounds, they all live within that world, and it becomes more divorced from the club. It's very romantic to me, and it's what I've been wanting to submerge myself back into—going backwards, reconnecting to this sweet spot from when I was 18 or 19, super obsessed with music but really discovering dance music for the first time. I'm an internet kid, and I didn't live through any golden age of anything—but I remember getting into Chicago house, Italo disco, and UK garage all at the same time within a year. I increasingly mine that period in my life in a really nostalgic sense, of trying to capture that feeling that I first got when I heard some of those records.

Increasingly, I'm writing more songs, and the songwriting aspect feels central to this project now. But I always want to have dance music as a structure in the background. It could be really minimal—just a kick drum—but it has to have that insistence to it. I can sit down with a guitar, piano, or keyboard and try to come up with chords, melodies, and words—but it always needs to hang off the back of some pulse. I can go deeper into songwriting without worrying too much about how it's going to work in a set, because it's all dance music—but it has space to tell its own story, and the songs have space to do their own thing.

What's your kind of overall relationship to going out like now that you're a new parent?
I don't really do it, but that's fine. I remember having friends who made this kind of music, when I was more heavily involved in that scene, and their understanding was that you had to have that relationship with going out to stay on top of, what was happening. Not to sound arrogant at all, but I feel like I've got that already in my veins. I have an implicit understanding of, not what works at a certain time, but groove and rhythm. Those are the things that I'm trying to write with.

Also, increasingly I can't take in what's going on outside my own little world, and I don't think my music benefits from doing so either. I've definitely become way more conservative and shut down all these other avenues of exploration, because I did that in my early 20s and discovered a lot of music that I love, and I'm still trying to understand how those records work. So I'm not really trying to put myself in [the present]. If I am, it's great and it's really fun for me, but I feel like I'm done with that now and I can just keep tinkering away at the things that have continued to haunt me for the past 10 years, instead of going out and thinking, "Maybe I should try and do something in this style." It's better for the music to really focus in on the things that you really love and what you're going to say.

Kai from Mount Kimbie said to me a while back that he's never really felt comfortable at the club, which can be relatable. How old are you again?
I'm 37. When I started going out, I was in my teens, going to a local nightclub. I had some nights there. When I moved to London, I had a real education. I went to all the dubstep and grime clubs. Deviation was doing more of a soulful, Theo Parrish kind of thing. I saw Theo Parrish a bunch of times at Plastic People. I started going to Horse Meat Disco a couple of times—that was a massive experience. There was an industrial party as well called Body Hammer at the top of an office block in Bethnal Green. You'd have to take a lift up. It was the most exciting thing ever—to have just moved to London, giving a password to the guy and going up a lift to hear these guys play eight hours of Skinny Puppy remixes and Front 242. I'm still working through all that stuff, you know?

My wife had a big history of like going out too, and we met through clubbing. At a certain point, we'd always be the first people to leave, because we just wanted to go home and hang out with each other."Let's go home, get into bed, and put a movie on." That's kind of still our life now. My clubbing years are almost like a blip compared to that. It was a lifestyle change that had a huge impact on the kind of music that I wanted to make as well—as life does, you know?

Talk to me about being a parent. You're two years in, right?
Yeah, it's the best thing that's ever happened to me. I love it. If I'm honest with you, I didn't know if I'd be a good parent—and I think I am. You're learning every day, and I don't feel like I've got any wisdom to impart because I'm still figuring it out. Obviously, it reprioritizes your life. The only two things I cared about in life were my career and my relationship—and now there's this third thing. But the nice thing about it is that it gets rid of a lot of the bullshit. I'm not wasting my time doing things that didn't really serve me or going down avenues that I don't want to with my creative work. There's a certain confidence that was maybe missing in my life, where now that I have this other human to take care of and I'm managing it—obviously, with a lot of help—it makes me feel like if I can do this, I can do anything. In a really bizarre, abstract way, it's making me make the music that I want to make without being beholden to anyone else's opinions.

The press release mentions going back to Red Hill with your son, encountering past memories, and feeling like there's something different or missing. I'm curious to hear you kind of talk more about that feeling. As you get older, the idea of things not being the way you remember them, and kind of having to question whether this is just the result of aging or if things really have changed—it can be very complicated.
I'm increasingly drawing on records from the past, and trying to recontextualize them in what I do. I'm not quite sure where I'm at with this whole theory, but they all seem to come from the late '70s to the mid '80s—with a little island of the early '90s when I was a young child, stuff on the radio. I'm so drawn to that stuff, because it mirrors when my own parents met, married, and started a family. I've got two older sisters, born in '83 and '86. All these little effects that I've collected and cherished over the years, they're like little coordinates on a map about who I am. Increasingly, I feel like that's what I'm trying to get at—a hard-to-grasp feeling.

It would be all too easy to make a political point and be like, "I love these records from this time period, when the British welfare state was crumbling and the rise of Margaret Thatcher—and look at the world we're in now." And you could say that the apparent mess we're in, so many of the seeds were planted around that time. But it's more complicated than that. There's a certain longing there that I'm trying to capture. It's hard to describe. What is this project, who is the person that made it, and where do they come from? I'm picking up the pieces and figuring out who that is.

What are some of your earliest memories of growing up in Red Hill?
I remember Luther Vandross' "Never Too Much" being on the radio. It wasn't until I got a bit older that I realized, "Wait, that record came out almost seven years before I was born." But because there was less music then, records had longer shelf lives. I remember what we'd call street soul now, where Jocelyn Brown's "Somebody Else's Guy" was playing all the time. I remember being in the shopping center where I grew up and hearing those records playing, not really having a context for them—maybe not even hearing them and thinking they were that significant when I was, like, five years old. Theee's something so irresistible about returning to those memories for me. I find them very seductive, and it's very hard to not just want to go there.

The older I get, my memories of my childhood—they're unreliable at this point. I've got a good memory, but I'm romanticizing stuff and fictionalizing things. It's not necessarily how things were, but it's how I remember them. I like going headlong into that and imagining the music I make now existing in that world from over 30 years ago, in some time-slip kind of way.

You mentioned working with other people earlier in this conversation. Some of the most high-profile work in that regard was with Olivia Rodrigo and Lil Yachty. Talk to me about engaging in that level of collaboration.
Over the years, I'd always felt that the Jam City project was going to run into its own boundaries and begin to feel too small. I've ignored that, because the records I've made for myself are all over the place genre-wise. Hopefully, there's some cohesion there, but they're often pretty far-reaching. Working as a producer and collaborating with other people—none of that matters, and it's amazing. It was almost a relief when I started to do sessions with other people. All the mind games you can play about your own solo work—"Does this fit?" "Are people going to like this?"—the thing that matters as a collaborator is that you've got the broadest possible sense of music history, and I've always had that.

When I first started doing sessions, it didn't really matter who I was with. We'd be able to find some common ground musically every single time, whether that was club music, R&B, or Fairport Convention—what I can't do in my own project. Maybe an acoustic Jam City album would be a bit too far, although who knows? I never know. I've got full license to go off on any tangent I want with whatever the artist is looking for. I bring back those experiences—that practice of songwriting in different styles of music—to this project, and I feel energized to give a little bit of myself and my personality. It's tremendously freeing to have this other life where I can serve other people's visions.

For the last couple of months, I've been working on a record with a good friend of mine, and we've been working within the wave of '90s and early 2000s British boy bands. A lot of their songs were covers of American R&B songs, and a lot of them were also middle-of-the-road 2000s pop—a breakbeat, some nice vocal harmonies. I remember all those records. I didn't think I particularly loved them when they came out, but my friend did, and they're referencing them a lot—and it's made me reassess them and learn a couple of them on guitar. It's stuff that I'd never bring to Jam City as a project, but I'm having a great time going deep into this side of music, gaining an appreciation for it, and turning it into my own thing that serves them in a way that doesn't conflict with the kinds of records that I want to put out as Jam City. It's a great outlet for everything that doesn't fit otherwise.