Bigger picture, performing keep James Blunt grounded

James Blunt, the British singer-songwriter whose breakthrough hit was the fragile love song "You're Beautiful," starts an American tour tonight at the Moore, where he'll feature songs from his latest album, "All The Lost Souls." We reached him in London to talk about the tour.

Q: Any particular reason for starting in Seattle?

A: It was logistics, really, although I like the West Coast, and Seattle in particular. It feels a bit like Europe in its character.

Q: The new album has a theme of mortality. What is a successful, 33-year-old rock star, whom all the ladies are in love with, doing thinking about death?

A: Well, I have plenty of very shallow moments (laughs). Life is about diversity and I enjoy lots of it, but I think it's worth remembering the roundness of everything. I have lots of friends in Iraq and Afghanistan, and it's worth remembering that there's a reality to the world, and these things are important to talk about and deal with and understand, just to keep yourself in check with the planet we live on, really.

I want people to hear with total clarity about life and death and how we're all here for just a short flash and how we're all very isolated within our own minds. At the same time, we're just searching for a little bit of connection and meaning and depth in life itself.

Q: Your military service (with the NATO peacekeeping force in Kosovo) seems to inform much of your songwriting.

A: It was a great grounder. It was a great education in many, many ways. Not only going and seeing humans at their most violent and least compassionate, their most animal-like, it also helped me understand a bit more about the politics of the world, how politicians are often concerned with power rather than humanity.

To work with people from all walks of life from my own country, from the very poor and uneducated, and people who, if it weren't for the army, might have been in prison, and yet rely on each other as a complete team, that was amazing. Things that I felt beforehand were probably reinforced by my experiences in the army.

Q: You've been the subject of criticism and scrutiny for your music and jet-set lifestyle, especially in the British tabloids.

A: Truth is no longer important. It's actually whatever will be the most sensational. And those things make our world so much more empty. We talk about people's private lives rather than, in my case, music. That's pretty depressing when we cut our art and our culture in order to instead talk about whether or not Britney Spears is wearing knickers.

It's all just made up for that media world to make money out of the culture of celebrity. But I'm not a celebrity, I'm a musician.

Q: What does it feel like for you to be on stage?

A: It's a place of great honesty for me. It goes back to why I really got into this in the first place, which is communication to other human beings, social interaction through the medium of music, which is the best language humans have. It is an amazingly honest place.

Patrick MacDonald: 206-464-2312, pmacdonald@seattletimes.com