"You sound like Bob Dylan," people often tell John Allen James, "except you can sing!" That doesn't make any sense to him, either. "But everyone means it kindly," he says, "so I don't argue."

John never intended to sound like anyone else. Unlike most musicians, who cut their teeth on songs of others, he wrote and recorded two albums of his own music before he learned his first cover song.

John does mean to write songs with heart and brains. A reviewer of John's 2018 release Fire Sky  wrote,  "John Allen James delivers a very versatile and beautiful album on which he proves that it should now be over with those Dylan comparisons. He is going to grow very big on his own!" Another critic described John's 2016 album Harder Roads  as "timeless, enduring, yet also current and relevant." American Songwriter Magazine chose the title track of John's debut album Light of Day  for its Daily Discovery feature.

John played all the instruments except for drums and did all the production on his first two albums before enlisting the help of studio musicians for Fire Sky. John returned to a one-man-band approach for his subsequent releases – Jericho  (2022}, Love Songs of Outlaws (2023), Squared  (2023) and Next of Kind  (2024).

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