James Blunt: the latest musical phenomenon out of Britain is not a boy band or a pop/hip-hop hybrid but a soldier turned crooner whose motto could well be "make music not war"

James Blunt was born and raised to be a soldier. At the age of 23, Captain Blunt was leading 30,000 British peacekeepers into Kosovo's war zone. He'd surely fulfilled his destiny--or had he? Five years later, on the eve of the U.S. release of his debut album, Back to Bedlam (Custard/Atlantic), James Blunt is in the vanguard of a new wave of troubadours whose broody good looks match their moody music and whose edgy intimacies are an increasingly popular antidote to processed pop-rock-hip-hop. The transition qualifies as a quantum leap. Carrie Fisher, his L.A. landlady, is scarcely alone when she was quoted as saying, "How did James get from there to here?" One way: by staying on the move, always dodging the bullet.

TIM BLANKS: Your story is quite linear in the telling, but it seems like there's something missing there. How did an English ex-army guy end up signing with Linda Perry, working with Beck's producer, touring with Elton John, and staying at Carrie Fisher's place?

JAMES BLUNT: You're right in the sense that the bio put out by the record company paints this rosy picture of everything falling into place, and of course it wasn't like that at all. I heard Elliott Smith's album Either/Or (1997) and immediately loved the honesty. It was his lack of ego that really drew me to him. I ended up with Linda Perry because certain earlier deals hadn't worked out, but when she put her deal on the table it was just, "How do you want your songs to sound? And what are you imagining?" To be given that kind of freedom was a godsend. But I've done music all my life. I took up the violin when I was 5 and the piano when I was 7. And then I began playing the electric guitar when I was 14--it looked like a hell of a lot more fun than the piano lessons I was forced to attend. My mind was set on having musical ideas. Sadly, I had to get an education and enlist in the army first. [laughs]

TB: Was there family pressure to do that?

JB: Yeah, definitely. I guess like most parents mine just wanted me to be safe and secure in a career with steady income. My dad knew and understood the army already, so when I went to university, he said, "Why don't you try to get a bit of help with your tuition?" But when you sign on the dotted line, you're giving the army four years of your life.

TB: But when people sign up like that to have their education underwritten, they don't necessarily expect to get shot at--which presumably you were.

JB: I guess if you're stupid enough to join the army without thinking about getting shot at, then you really are a fool. So when going on operations came up, I wasn't wholly shocked.

TB: But at those moments when you were in physical danger, did you think, Hmm, this could intrude on my grand design?

JB: I definitely had a game plan. I thought, Well, I'll do this army thing, but I'll get out when I'm 25, 26, and I'll progress with my dream of music. And I do remember thinking at moments, "Oh, for God's sake, don't die now! It'll really fuck things up."

TB: At times how close were you to death?

JB: Pretty much as close as you can get. Kosovo was a dangerous place, a war was on, and there were bombs going off. I was on the Macedonia-Kosovo border during the bombing campaign, and t was working as a reconnaissance officer, and there were some angry people out there.

TB: A song like "No Bravery" suggests that you saw some pretty horrible things.

JB: We saw some things that were truly revolting, and it was extremely distressing that civilization can break down in just the snap of a finger. It was really like Lord of the Flies. Fortunately we had the benefit of being able to come back to Britain, where our families and friends are still alive and we can carry on as normal. I guess in that way we could spectate and then look away from it, whereas there were people whose children or mothers or grandparents were slaughtered in obscene circumstances who couldn't and who obviously suffered a great deal more than I did.

TB: There's a real darkness in your lyrics, and I can only think it would stem from exposure to experiences like the ones you had in Kosovo.

JB: I don't really agree with that. "No Bravery" is obviously a song directly from those experiences. Ten minutes is all it took to write that song, but it doesn't have an emotional slant. It's pretty much a reportage of what I saw. There's one other song called "Cry," which follows some of the relationships you build in those extreme circumstances, but I don't see the rest of the album as negative. Actually, I think it's uplifting in many ways. I see its solitude having hope.

TB: My favorite song on the record is "Out of My Mind." There are a lot of lines on the album that make reference to being in an altered state. Is that something you fear in yourself?

JB: Along the way I've had interaction with that kind of lifestyle, and the girl I went out with for a while suffered greatly from drug addiction, so I saw the damage that can do to relationships.