I have to be honest, ‘A New Life’ is actually the only song I really like on Jim James’ last solo effort. The album is strangely and presumptuously called ‘Regions of Light and Sound of God’, as if it was an attempt to prove some spiritual new search, or discovery? I am not sure, but I understand why he picked ‘A New Life’ for the single, as it is without any doubt the catchiest and brightest tune of the album, a folk song turning into a gospel-ish jubilation, the type you certainly want to sing along all your lungs out, a little bit Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros style, a little bit emotional power chorus, which, I imagine, can grow totally bombastic when played live…. Did you watch that Jimmy Fallon performance?
The song just got the video treatment, with a buffalo-headed girl running through a series of doors opening on nothing but a desolated road in the desert, while some go-go dancers jump behind Jim James almost the whole time.
Who knows what were the intentions behind this Minotaur symbolism? There may be an Ariadne but not even a maze or a thread, and I am probably looking too hard to make a vague god-connection. In an interview, Jim James said that his new album was partially inspired by a Faustian novel called ‘God’s Man’. In the graphic novel, an artist sells his soul to the devil in exchange for a magic paintbrush, and ‘A New Life’ would be about the part of the story where the guy ‘falls off a cliff and falls in love with the woman who helps nurse him back to health’. Now, do whatever you like with all this, I just have to leave plenty of mystery when writing about an album which supposedly connect us to God.