Duo Branden and James bring the unique partnership to the Sammons Center
RICH LOPEZ | Staff writer
rich@dallasvoice.com
It’s a cabaret of sorts for the Sammons Center for the Arts — or it will be on Oct. 20 when the venue hosts the fundraiser Artfully, Sammons. The event will help support the arts groups and local artists Sammons features, but it will also help maintain the historic building itself that sits atop Harry Hines Boulevard and Oak Lawn Avenue.
And considering the night’s talent, it will be a fabulous gay affair.
“We are so excited to have Branden and James delight our audience with their incredible vocals and cello performance this year,” Sammons Center Executive Director Joanna St. Angelo said in a press release. “While they are well known for their live performances in places like Puerto Vallarta and Provincetown, we are thrilled that they will be coming to the Sammons Center for a one-night-only show.”
The couple — both musically and in life — have a distinct sound that merges classical sensibilities with pop songs, ballads, show tunes and The Great American Songbook selections. With Branden James’ tenor voice against James Clark’s cello, they recreate familiar songs in their own style.
James may be familiar to fans of America’s Got Talent on which he competed in season 8. Soon after, he met Clark — a meeting that led not only a to musical partnership, but to a love partnership as well.
Before their Dallas appearance, Branden James candidly discussed the meet-cute between the two, remaining transparent as a gay couple in front of straight audiences and where they might get a nightcap after their Dallas performance.
Dallas Voice: First, an early welcome to Dallas. You two are no strangers to touring, but have you played here before? And what are your expectations of coming to Texas? Thank you. We love Dallas and have played many private events in the city in the past at The Dallas Country Club, The Dallas Woman’s Club and several house concerts. This will be our first public appearance in the city.
We know Texas has its fair share of anti-LGBTQ issues, but we’ve only ever been welcomed with open arms by friendly, smiling and hospitable people. We also have an affinity for The Round-Up Saloon. I’m certain we’ll have a nightcap there after our show.
We’ll see you there! Branden and James the duo has certainly put a unique sound stamp on very familiar songs. What are your conversations like when you decide on the songs you cover?
We both grew up in church, and music was a central part of that experience. Because of that — and because of our classical training — our musical tastes are very much on par with each other. With regard to choosing cover songs, I often bring the big ideas to the table, and James executes the arrangements and makes them suitable for us.
As a gay couple and with today’s adapting language for queer communities, do you ever decide to adjust pronouns and gender in your songs? Good question. We have such varied audiences. Some venues we play in cater to the LGBTQ+ community, and some do not. It just depends.
We don’t have any filter when we’re amongst “family.” When we play for more general audiences in performing arts centers and on luxury cruises, etc ., we often change the pronouns to be non-gender specific mentioning they/them, or someone as opposed to he/she.
Those who are aware will notice our matching wedding bands and ask us after the show if we’re married. Many, many others ask us if we’re brothers even though James speaks a lot about growing up in Australia during our shows. We find it amusing, to say the least.
We love a love story. Do you mind talking about the actual moment you met? We actually met on SCRUFF. We initially told our parents we met at Starbucks and then came clean about a year later after we announced we were planning to get married.
The day after our initial conversation on SCRUFF, I went to James’ place in Long Beach, and we met in person the night before I left to go on tour for six weeks. In an unusually refreshing manner, we got to know each other over FaceTime and Facebook Messenger. We didn’t even have a single mutual friend on Facebook at the time. Now, we have thousands.
Modern love works. So does music and romance go hand-in-hand? When I landed at the airport after a whirlwind trip from South Africa to Iceland and back to L.A., James was standing there with a single long-stemmed red rose. I knew he was a keeper from that moment. We’ve just celebrated nine years together and have hardly spent a day apart since then. We wrote a show about our love story called, You Had Me At Cello, which we’ve performed in L.A., Palm Springs, Puerto Vallarta, San Francisco, San Diego and Provincetown.
If we weren’t a romantic couple, I think we’d be the dearest of friends. Friendship is truly the basis of our relationship, and, somehow, we don’t ever seem to grow tired of one another. We’re an anomaly, and we’re rather lucky for it.
You’re together romantically. Could you talk about the decision to connect professionally? A few months down the road, I hired James to play at a charity concert I was headlining in Palm Springs. We played one song — Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” — in the show together that featured the cello, piano and vocals. It was actually Greg Louganis and Chris Salvatore who led the charge of enthusiasm amongst the rest of the audience that night.
From there, we went to Santa Fe, N.M., and started taking requests in a piano bar for about seven months. We were super transparent with who we are in the primarily heterosexual audience, and they just seemed to love us regardless. We developed our sound there, our stories and our most cherished covers. The rest is history.
You’ve discussed both working together and being a couple, but what were concerns or discussions in the early days of pursuing both together? The concerns and discussions about us both working together and being a couple came from our management and mentors at the time. They were worried about what might happen if we were ever to break up. James and I have never talked about it. When you know, you know. I think this is who we are, and who we always will be.
They say love hits you in the face when you least expect it. James and I were fairly fresh out of long-term relationships before we met. Neither of us were looking to get into another relationship; it just all fell into place.
Can you tell us what you have planned for your Dallas performance? The audience who attends our performance at The Sammons Center can expect an evening of thrilling, emotional music ranging from The Eagles to Lady Gaga and all the way to Broadway, with some classical twists. We tell light-hearted stories about our musical upbringing and our relationship. Most people tend to both laugh and cry after spending an evening at our shows. Hopefully, we can have the same effect in Dallas.
Outside of future concerts, what’s next in the pipeline? We’ve sort of done everything we’ve dreamed of, professionally. We’ve recorded the album of our dreams (2020’s Chasing Dreams) and have played our music in more than 70 countries together. I published a memoir (Lyrics of My Life) and finally got to share my journey with HIV and my Christian roots with the world.
We have upcoming tours with the amazing songstress, Effie Passero from Postmodern Jukebox and jazz legend Ann Hampton Callaway. We love collaborating with female singers in particular, and look forward to more of that in the future.
We’ve been contemplating opening a production company where we can represent and develop show concepts for other artists, but we haven’t quite taken the leap yet. James wants to write an album of original, instrumental music, and I’m just laying the groundwork for my second book.
It’s hard to say where all of this will lead, but the unknown of it all is part of the excitement of the journey. From time to time we get weary of spending so much time on airplanes and in hotels, and we talk about having a “normal life with a dog and regular jobs.” But then, our wanderlust takes over, and our collective creative drive just keeps telling us to keep on traveling and record new music.
Learn more about the couple at BrandenJames.com. For more information and tickets to Artfully, Sammons, visit SammonsArtCenter.org.
