Inspiration comes from the most abstract places, and that statement did not falter in the inspiration behind Jim James’ upcoming solo album, Regions of Light and Sound of God, out February 5 on ATO Records. James drew inspiration from a vintage book entitled God’s Man, a wordless 1929 woodcut novel by Lynd Ward, for the song, “A New Life,” which just premiered on Rolling Stone, making parallels between his life and the life of the novel’s protagonist. “There’s a scene [in God’s Man] where the main character’s like chased out of town and he falls off a cliff and is lost and kind of injured and this woman finds him and nurses him back to health and they fall in love,” James says. “And they have a child together and they have this new life that’s kind of coming. That had happened to me. Like, I had fallen offstage and gotten injured and gotten super dark and fell in love and all that was happening at the same time I was loving this book. It was like I had this beautiful illustration of what was happening in my life.”
