James Hood: Redefining Music Through Immersive Sound and Storytelling

My career in the entertainment industry has enabled me to work with a diverse range of talent.
Through my years of experience, I've recognized two essential aspects.
Industry professionals, whether famous stars or behind-the-scenes staff, have fascinating stories to tell.
Secondly, audiences are eager to listen to these stories, which offer a glimpse into their lives and the evolution of their life stories.
This podcast aims to share these narratives, providing information on how they evolved into their chosen career.
We will delve into their journey to stardom, discuss their struggles and successes, and hear from people who help them achieve their goals.
Get ready for intriguing behind-the-scenes stories and insights into the fascinating world of entertainment.
Hi, I'm Tony Mantor.
Welcome to Almost Live Nashville.
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Thanks for being here.
Joining us today is Grammy nominated composer, musician, and visionary immersive artist James Hood, who's redefining how we experience sound and storytelling.
Through groundbreaking productions like Mesmerica and Astronomica, he's taken audiences beyond just listening into feeling, seeing, and truly experiencing music on a whole new level.
He has such a great story to tell.
Thanks for joining us today.
Yeah, you're very welcome.
I just got back from uh Europe yesterday.
Before we dive into everything you've done, let's take a moment to catch up on what you're working on right now.
Well, what I'm doing right now is I'm making I'm doing the music for the next show.
What everyone is experiencing is the new show, Astronomica, which of course I finished about six months ago.
But that's the thing I really am excited about right now, is it's starting to play all over the country.
And it's just an interesting, just an interesting show, I think.
Yeah, that sounds very interesting.
So tell us a little bit more about it.
Well, you know, we all know what a planetarium is.
You know, planetarium, in a way, is is a Wi-Fi with people.
I mean, with is a VR with people, so you can experience something that's all around you.
It's part of what we call a sort of new wave of immersive entertainment or experiential entertainment.
Pact is in a planetarium, the music is surrounding you, and the visuals are all 360.
So you can't notice everything.
And what that does is it sort of throws you into some kind of a benign, passive trance where you just let everything roll onto you.
It's very relaxing.
It's a very good way to sort of lose track of time.
The music's very rich and emotional and melodic and uh dynamic.
And the visuals are just, you know, I mean, every two years the resolutions are getting more and more sharp, you know.
So really can't tell the difference between real life and what's on the screens now.
Yes, it's amazing how technology has improved so vastly.
Now, tell us a little bit more about how your shows are going in the planetariums.
Well, planetariums, I mean, there are about 300 viable planetariums for us to play in.
At the moment, we've played in about 100.
At the holiday season, I think we were up to about 90, but now we're down a little bit, but uh, you know, 50, 60 every weekend.
And that's all over the country.
We play in every state.
It's just a beautiful thing.
It's like, you know, you can bring your children as long as they're older than six.
Yeah, that's great.
That must mean that you must get a wide variety of ages.
I get like little films from all over the country of the ushers who greet people to the show, and everyone knows in a planetarium you need to get early to get a good say.
So an hour before the show, there's a line all the way around the block.
They just film the line, and it's literally like what my dad used to call the rich tapestry of human life.
Every different type of person, anyone with an imagination and a pair of eyes and an inquisitive soul is is gonna love the show.
I understand that this is a series.
How has the audience's feedback, man?
Tsunomica is the third show of this series.
We started with Mesmerica, sold over a million and a half tickets of a combination of these three shows now that you could argue were about the only part of the entertainment industry that's actually thriving at the moment because people want something that they haven't experienced before and that's really, really exciting.
So we're bringing back good quality sound.
You know, it's like you're surrounded with speakers, and we endeavor to give you the best possible audio.
I feel that that's got slightly neglected now.
Not just loudness, it's got to be rich, beautiful, delicious sounding music.
So that's really my department, and then I have a coterie of artists from all over the world who provide what we call full dome art.
Yeah, let's dig into the music a little bit.
Now, you've been with the pretenders and played with so many various people.
How did that music journey shape and prepare you for the kind of work that you are doing now?
Especially with these immersive projects.
Well, I think an enormous amount.
I mean, I think drummers make good arrangers because they have to understand about temperature and dynamics, you know?
Yes, right.
Basically, the pretenders was the last band I ever played in as a drummer.
It was a pretty good way to hang out my boots there.
But what really happened was that Bob Clearmountain came to London as a favour, great friend of Chrissy Hine.
He agreed to mix a single we were doing for some kind of movie, and it was a copy of the Burt Backrap song, um, Windows of the World.
We went down to see him and ever and you know, had a cup of coffee, and then the rest of the band all got up to leave.
And I ended up staying there for 24 hours, and that was the day that I decided I I wanted to switch, uh, go into a different type of music.
I wanted to produce and make the whole music, not just be the drummer at the back, you know.
You've worked with some incredible artists, the pretenders, King Creole and the Coconuts, Jeff Beck.
Just to name a few.
Each one brings a completely different style and ways of creating music.
How did each one of these experiences help you evolve, not only as a producer, but in what you're doing today?
Well, it's funny you say that because I I'm very interested in genre bending.
Like I like making music that people can't absolutely define what it is.
It feels a little bit like free jazz, but then it's a little bit sort of electronica, and then I feel that we've all heard everything now.
And what's interesting in music is to pair instruments and styles that you wouldn't perhaps naturally hear together, which and possibly create a reaction in the listener.
I think we're all very, we're very sophisticated.
We all know different types of music.
I don't know anybody who only likes one type of music.
So what I try and do in the show is never let you quite settle into thinking, okay, so this is definitely now, you know, whatever.
And I will slightly liken it to people acting in front of scenery that's constantly being changed.
Because essentially, if you have a melody and a tempo and in a key, you can have that melody played by an infinite amount of different instruments.
So if you take a great melody, and I always aspire to write them, then it can be played by a Japanese instrument, it can be played by a guitar, it can be played by strings.
And there's something interesting in that because you can always have the same piece of music that's gradually exploring different areas where it could almost never quite goes into.
Do you know what I mean?
Yeah, absolutely.
What I think that does is it creates reaction.
Yeah.
That's what I think I like to do is I want to use the way that all the things we've learned about how, you know, we know that certain chord changes, certain keys are emotional.
We all know that the minor key is more emotional.
And now going into orchestral music is I want to utilize the hundreds of years of how to get big feelings out of people, you know.
So you want to stand on the table and roar your support and your appreciation that how music can really make you feel, really make you feel big feelings.
Let's roll it back a little bit in time.
If you would tell us what brought you into the music scene, then after playing and performing out there, it wasn't just a hobby, it was your path in life.
I was the third of three brothers, and my two older brothers were like my dad, quiet and quite businesslike.
And then I came out and I was very creative and very, you know what I mean?
It's like though my mother, God bless her, she had a brother who left the army to become a professional trumpeter.
Okay.
Despite the fact that he ended up being extremely successful, his father never spoke to him again.
And so what happened is I think it's in my mother who was quite a good singer.
My father played music in the house all the time.
And of course, I was growing up in the early 60s, so uh the Beatles and all of that, it was in the water.
And I never ever thought of doing anything else.
I was in London the other day and I pointed out to my son that that's the only other place, only other job I ever had was I was a waiter in the summer of 1980 at Olympia, which used to put on Rod Stewart's concerts, but also sort of car shows and yacht shows.
But apart from that, I always wanted to be a drummer, and from about the age of nine, practice, practice, practice was pretty good.
First band at the age of 12, then ran away with a circus, really.
Like I flunked out sort of high school because I was in a band with people a couple of years older than me, and they were gonna go on tour, and I couldn't miss that.
And that was the moment where I told my father, and my mother intervened and said, call back in an hour.
And then he called back, and my father was compliant and said, Well, you gotta do what you gotta do.
And luckily, I've never really ever I'd have been so lucky, you know.
I could not do what I do without the computer because even though I'm a drummer and I understand rhythm, I can't play any other instrument, but I can hear it in my mind, you know.
So the computer has been an amazing tool for me to be able to make the music that I can imagine.
Yeah, that's amazing that you bring up the computers.
Like you, I remember the days of two-inch tape and analog.
We didn't have the computers to do all this, and now we've got all these tools that can.
Some of the things that will kind of make me smile at different times when I see it being used, the people using all these plugins now are merely duplicating the sounds that we used when we were doing it all in pure analog.
They're trying to get that same thing.
In fact, that's a very selling point.
I mean, what's amazing about it, I might be working on 15 different bits of music and I can attend to each one with fresh ears.
Whereas in the old days, I had an analogue mixing desk in my house in London before I moved to America.
And until you finished the mix, you couldn't strip the desk.
Right.
Because there was no recall.
I didn't have any recalls.
So you said to make a little marks with a white chinograph if you had some other session coming in and you never came back the same.
That's right.
The ease of use, but of course it means too easy to make mediocre music now, and music that just sounds rote, you know, the whole AI thing.
Oh, yeah.
I'm so heartfelt in what I put into the music, and it's supposed to the very kind of summit of what music can do for you in the day, whether you're getting ready to go to work or driving on a road trip.
You know, music is just so important to us.
And now I have this amazing um opportunity where my whole career, I was lucky if it got played in a noisy kitchen with everyone sort of talking drunkenly over it, played on a wonky system with no bass.
Now people listen to it in absolute silence.
So the music's coming, so you can play, you can do a lot more with dynamics, and it gives you a lot more uh freedom to sort of um build things and and to do subtle things that uh very beautiful.
You know, you can tune your ears in about three minutes to pick up on such subtleties, and it doesn't take long, you know.
So it's just a wonderful opportunity, especially the surround.
And music just never felt better.
Yeah, that's great because you can take and use your music to create layers like a guitar here, a violin there, all blending so seamlessly that you're not focused on just one sound, you're taking in the whole experience.
Yet at the same time, it gives the listener space to kind of lean into whatever they connect with the most.
Yeah, I'm really interested in trying to evoke innerworldly quality where the music feels like it's rich and deep in a way that you can ascribe your own meaning to it.
That's essentially sort of what I do, is that I you know, I mean, back in the day, I was just trying to amuse myself.
And then an amazing thing happened, which is that people started listening on earbuds, which I'm a huge fan of earbuds.
It's like people are rude about them, but I mean, I don't care any kind of headphones.
You're in the music, then you can start doing much more subtle things.
It's like a sort of soft place to rest.
I'm not gonna do anything scary, but I'm gonna take you on a journey which would be deep, but it won't be dark.
I'm never scary, but I am interested in the depths of our awareness and our attention and how quiet we can be, or how focused we can be, or how fascinated we can be with a feeling that the music's giving you.
You've had the success of working with some well-known household name artist.
How have you been able to stay grounded, to keep your passion for music, have your personal time, and of course, all the other things that go along with that?
Wow.
Well, life just carries on.
You know, I'm a parent back in the day.
I mean, they're grown up now, but I was lucky if I could get two hours of wafting about in my own ideas now with the encouragement I've had from success.
It's incredible that I know that people are gonna hear it now.
When the iPod was created, that was the that was the day the music industry changed from being something that was beneficial to musicians to something which was essentially the opposite, you know, where suddenly record labels not only didn't want to give you any money to make a record, they also they essentially wanted you to pay for it and then they wanted to own it, suddenly became a very, very different thing.
So, in a way, I feel lucky that I found an area where I can find an audience that kind of bypasses the music industry in a way.
Because although I'm on Spotify and you know, like this experience that when people come to see the show, they're really hearing it like I made it, and that's incredibly nice.
That's not usual, you know.
And now I think I'm really good at creating big feelings.
I don't want to be specific because I've had the same piece of music played at a wedding and a funeral, and so I've learned that you cannot specify what music people will find sad and what music people find joyful.
Well, but my music will always be innerworldly.
It's it's never gonna be brash, it's never gonna be tacky, but it's always gonna be reaching to the subtler parts of our awareness, you know, because I think we're deeper than we give ourselves credit for.
When you step back and look at your journey, everything you've created, everything you've contributed to, what do you hope that people may take away from everything that you've done working in this music business?
Well, I was thinking about this the other day, I mean, because I it's so unlikely.
You know, if you think about people who lived a hundred years ago and how few people we actually, not just in our family, I mean, that's ridiculous.
None of us can remember barely our great grandparents, you know, and what they did.
But genius doesn't visit that many people.
And I I'm not saying it's visited me, but I mean, like what I would love is to leave a body of work that stood the test of time and spoke to someone in a hundred years in the same way that Nick Drake or someone like that, in his lifetime, uh ironically, because you know, he was completely unknown when he died.
So I don't know.
I think it's time for me to give back.
And how I still grounded is that, well, as I say, I've been a parent, you know, I lost my studio a year ago to the LA fire.
So that was, you know, I haven't really still got a studio, like I'm working out of other people's studios, but I've also had the most creative, most extraordinary sort of year.
You know, I'm very, very lucky to have had the support I've had.
I come from Altadino in LA.
I've lived there for 15 years, and uh that place pretty much got wiped out.
So it's it's not hard to say, it's not hard to stay grounded.
But I tell you, man, I've just got a bit between my teeth.
Every day I just want to produce and manifest because I think that I make some music that I didn't know how much it was needed.
Because I think that I use all kinds of art forms of all kinds of styles of music.
But what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to speak to that ineffable in all of us, you know, the transcendent uh in all of us, so that we lose track of time, whether it's watching puppies playing or watching resting our eyes on the water.
You know, it's like when we're quiet, we're just being, you know, that lovely expression, we're human beings, not human doings.
You know, it's like I'm really interested in what we do when we don't do anything because I call it constructive escapism.
I don't think it's really valued by society because it doesn't make money.
But I think that AI is gonna wheel in a hell of a lot of us.
We're gonna have a lot of time to stare out the window and wonder about the meaning of life, you know.
And and I think that's really good.
I think that's what we should be, we should be thinking about a little bit more being and a little less doing.
Having worked with so many different artists, do you feel like each one left a mark on you?
And those influences have come together to help you with the music that you see yourself creating today?
I think it was Joe Walsh of the Eagles who said, when you're living your life, it just looks like a whole series of happenstance, crazy occurrences, sometimes coincidences and stuff like that.
But when you get to, you know, later in life, you can see that everything led to something, and even the thing that was a disaster actually turned out to be the best thing that could have happened.
And like everyone I've worked with, I mean, dear friends of mine, I mean, like Chrissy Hind, I mean, I'm still working with her.
Jeff Beck, that was extraordinary because I had a track that ended up on the first Mood Swings album, track called Skin Thieves, and he wanted to play a solo on it.
And what that did to me, he came and played about three or four solos and then just left in his Corvette.
And I had to comp together the sort of ultimate solo, and now it's one of the things I most love doing.
I love solos, whether it's a trumpet solo or a guitar solo, whether it's comfortably enough or some kind of amazing, kind of just soaring, kind of free improvisation.
I I love that because I it took me about a month to do it justice.
So I learn a lot about phrasing and content and repetition and all these things that I haven't really been taught.
For younger musicians coming up through the ranks, you know how it is when you're young, moving a hundred miles an hour.
What advice would you give them to help them navigate through their journey?
Well, I don't think it matters how good you are.
I don't think that how good you can play an instrument in no way denotes how good you can make music.
I think now with modern technology, I think the most important thing is to be authentic.
Someone told me once, if you lose your instinct, you've got nothing.
You know, it's like if you're the only person who in the world that wants to do something that sounds like sort of underwater country and western, then you should do it because it's all been done.
So that we're all just like shifting it and reconfiguring things.
What I think I try and do with the younger musicians is I'm really interested in their ideas because it's what we used to call the cruel hand of the producer.
And it used to be that a young band used to get signed, but it was basically on the basis that, on the condition that they had to do what the old middle-aged producer wanted, don't touch the equipment.
I'm working with one girl, and what's really extraordinary about her is that she does everything.
She sings, she writes it, she programs it, she does all the editing, she does all the drums, she mixes it, she edits it.
And because she does it all herself, it makes it really unique.
It doesn't sound like anybody else who's ever heard.
And I think that there's a lesson in there.
I've found that some of the most talented musicians are the worst at being able to, they wouldn't know a melody or catchy tune if it came and hit them in the face.
You know, it's like they're too locked into their mind.
And I can't play any instruments, but I can simulate almost anything except electric guitar.
And there I have an amazing electric guitar player who lives in New Orleans called James Harra, who's just wonderful.
You've been at this for a long time, from your early days with the pretenders to working with so many different artists.
For the lack of a better word, I'm going to use the word amazed.
With everything you've experienced from those early days to where you are now, do you ever pause and use that word?
Wow, this has been a truly amazing journey.
Yeah, well, it's an amazing journey, but I was pretty quiet for a while.
I feel I've just got better and better.
I mean, there's that story about the 94-year-old cellist who says, you know, I think I'm just getting the hang of it.
Elon, I feel I'm better than I was five years ago.
I mean, I wasn't even working in surround five years ago.
So the age where my parents used to start thinking about winding down, I'm just getting started.
There's nothing more exciting than an audience.
You know, it's like any musician, if they say, Well, we promise you that we'll listen, there'll be at least 20 people there.
You, you know, you won't see any musician who turn up that opportunity.
So now that I've got people's attention, there's so much that I want to do to really affect the culture and to comfort and inspire.
You've got a lot happening right now.
So looking ahead, what's next for you?
What can the audiences expect to see from you in the future?
Well, now, as well as planetariums, we're in IMAXs.
We call it our 5D show, which is it's our own proprietary 3D technology, but it throws out way further than the usual 3D, and it's incredibly, really fun.
I mean, it's just a roller coaster for the eyes.
Mesmerica is, we've already done that.
Now we're doing Astronomica, which will come out in the summer.
And then at the same time, we're doing two new shows that'll come out next year.
One is the follow-up, the fourth of my shows, and then the next one is like a sort of secret one that's going to be in a way, I think, will be our best show.
Now, once the audiences have had an opportunity to go to your show, they've sat there, watched it, and now they're leaving.
What do you think would be the one word they would use to describe the experience they felt from seeing your show?
Well, I want them to feel that what I'm doing is trying to give them an experience.
So if they come out and say, I feel it's so serene and like I'm inspired, and I can really see now where I'm blocked in life, or I can see now that that now I need to, you know, it could be anything because I don't know these people.
But what I'm doing, sometimes I characterize it, I I'm planting the seeds, but they they bring it to life.
There's nothing in my shows that gets in the way of your own experience of yourself, and that's where it's slightly different to going to just see a normal movie, is you are actually the star of the show because it's your awareness, it's your perception, it's the what it's how you make sense of it that that makes the meaning.
Yeah, that's great.
Now, how do people find you?
I mean, I would encourage anyone who wants to just check it out, obviously to Spotify, James Hood, but but YouTube, uh there's all sorts of stuff on YouTube that can show you some of the visuals in the show, and also um uh yes, the the latest, you know, uh quad uh the uh Astronomica.
Yeah, that's great to know, and I am sure they will be checking it out.
Well, this is Been a pleasure.
I've really enjoyed our conversation, and I really appreciate you taking the time to join us today.
Oh, you're so welcome.
Thank you so much.
Oh, it's been my pleasure.
Thanks again.
Thanks for joining us today.
We hope you enjoyed the show.
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