In 2010, Aiden James sat down with a guitar and a laptop and played Patty Griffin’s “Rain” one time through. No studio. No second pass. The only microphone in the room was the one built into the laptop. He put the video on YouTube, and then the file went onto a hard drive and stayed there.
It came back out on October 20.
“Rain (2010 Version)” is now on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, Tidal, Deezer and Amazon Music, released through Songster Sounds with James credited as producer. It runs about three and a half minutes. Griffin wrote the song for her 2002 album “1000 Kisses,” so there are two pasts in play here: hers, and the version of James who sat down to sing it.
He explained the decision in a note to his mailing list. “I want to share something I never planned to put out,” he wrote. By his account the recording sat untouched for years, and this fall was when letting it go finally felt right.
“It’s not polished, and that’s the point. It sounds like a small room, an autumn night and the person I was back then.”
James also says Griffin herself shared the video after he posted it. “That still means the world to me,” he wrote. We were not able to independently locate her post, so that piece of the story rests on his telling.
Philadelphia, around 2010
James is a Philadelphia native. He writes, engineers, mixes and produces his own records, and by his own biography he never took a formal music lesson. He has been out for his entire public career, back when an interviewer still led with that.
Philadelphia Magazine caught up with him in March 2011, a few months after the “Rain” recording, ahead of a show at the Tin Angel. He had already cut a live album in that room, and he said he liked playing there because his friends and his fans were the ones in the seats. He talked about coffee in Rittenhouse Square and running along the Schuylkill. He had turned up on Logo’s Pop Lab, he had shared a bill with Andy Bell of Erasure, and he was working on a new record.
That is a snapshot of a city that is not shaped the same way anymore. The Tin Angel sat upstairs at 20 South Second Street, the last live music room standing on an Old City block that used to have several. It closed in February 2017 after 24 years, and a Peruvian restaurant took the space. Its owner and its booker opened the Locks at Sona in Manayunk the year after.
The room where James recorded a live album is gone. The thing he made on a laptop microphone around the same time is easier to hear now than it was then.
Listen
“Rain (2010 Version)” is on Spotify, Apple Music and the rest of the streaming services, with every link collected on his release page. James asked anyone the song lands on to hit reply on his newsletter and tell him. More at aidenjamesmusic.com.
