Fiercely cerebral, contemplative, and conversant in his interests, the Malahide-born musician James Vincent McMorrow combined his smarts and skills to weave and sustain a prolific career. From performing at some of the world’s biggest festivals to having his songs featured on the soundtracks of major Hollywood films and television series, James has been an in-demand act for some time now.
He found immediate success when he released his debut album, the acoustic-guitar- driven-folk songbook Early in the Morning, in 2010, which received instant critical acclaim and charted in several countries. Yet, at the time, fans of that album may have been surprised if they knew who James cited as an influence.
“The reason I made music was because I wanted to be Pharrell Williams when I was a kid,” James says. “I wanted to make beats. The sounds were compelling to me, and I’m someone who just explored a lot of music. What resonated with me, what made sense to me, wasn’t just singers and songwriters. It wasn’t a binary structure, because music shouldn’t be and life shouldn’t be. It’s a diverse, nuanced thing.”
While James could have ridden the success of his debut by crafting more songs in that vein, that was simply never going to happen. “I didn’t just want to do that,” he says. “I wanted to figure out how to bring the parts of rap music that I loved into my love of Neil Young. It seemed ridiculous to me to not do it, so once the opportunity was afforded to me, I did it.”
While versatility is a celebrated and often expected facet from musicians today, in the early-to-mid 2010s, James felt that he suffered in the short term for it, as people were more genre-inclined then. “It was tough at times, I’ll be honest,” he says of those days. “We were out there, trying to have a conversation, and there was still a lot of people going, ‘Yeah, but could you just go play your guitar?’, and I was like, ‘No. You’re asking me to do something that is a part of me, but it’s not the totality of me.’ It’s an unbelievably myopic way of looking at things.”
Heavily influenced by the sonic opportunities afforded by digital music, soundscapes and non-traditional instrumentation (such as rubbish bins), James took inspiration from producers as much as songwriters. The emotion, expression and ambiguity of intent of dance producer Jon Hopkins’ instrumentations were a significant influence on James’s perception of auditory limitlessness.
Undeterred by certain fans’ musical orthodoxy, James continued crafting what was interesting to him at any given time, and, ultimately, his success never waned. “I’ve always been very proud of my place in the industry,” he reflects. “Without sounding like a smug idiot, I think I’ve done a decent amount to dispel the notion that you have to be a certain thing, especially within the singer-songwriter structure. When I hear other songwriters or other singers tell me that those records that I made made it easier for them to do the thing that they wanted to do, I wouldn’t say that’s the reason that I do it all, but it’s certainly a nice feeling to know that you’re a part of something.”
After releasing three succeeding albums in 2014, ’16, and ’17, respectively, James decided to release his fifth album, Grapefruit Season, with a major label, mainly just for the experience. The one-album contract was penned before the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, but the album was not released until 2021.
James felt that the prime follies of the major label system were their lack of vision and innovation when it came to the promotion and support of their artists. “It just didn’t click for me, at all,” he says. “They really undermined me. I felt quite lost. So, the resulting album coming out of the pandemic was that record, and there’s moments in it where I see myself, but beyond little glimpses through the trees, I don’t really feel that I’m in it.”
James’s negative feelings in the process were amplified by his preexisting burnout. “That record and the process of it, it was definitely my low point as a musician,” he says. “What I mean when I say that is, just mentally, from top-to-bottom, I wasn’t in a good place. I’d come off the back of three or four years of really intense, constant touring. I definitely wasn’t a very well-rounded person. There’s a lot of aspects of the music industry that don’t suit me well: I’m a quiet person and I deal with a lot of anxiety, so three or four years of being on a tour bus and being in front of people.”
Once the lockdowns ceased and James began playing festivals again, he quickly became dissatisfied with what he saw as the dissolution of curation and the feeling that promoters were arbitrarily stuffing incongruous acts together without regard for continuity or placement, resulting in disengaged audiences.
With these factors combined, for the first time, James considered quitting working as a musician. “[I felt], either I’ve lost my way or music’s lost its way, or both,” he says. “I had deep considerations for just stepping back and making records for other people. Like, I do that with a lot of my time, anyway, and I love it.”
But it was the success of two unorthodox songs at this time – Zach Bryan’s “Something in the Orange” in the U.S. and Lizzy McAlpine’s “ceilings” in the UK – which gave him a glimmer of hope that atypical and inventive music could still make a dent in the popular consciousness and made him reconsider his premature retirement.
After Grapefruit Season’s release in 2021, James resumed exclusively releasing his material with indies. 2022’s The Less I Knew was put out by his old label Faction Records, and his new album, ‘Wide Open, Horses,’ was recently released by the Canadian indie Nettwerk on June 4th.
Continuing from the subject of Bryan and McAlpine’s tracks, James concludes, “That gave me the impetus to go and start rebuilding my shit; like, unwind the years on the major label, where they made bad decisions for me and I made bad decisions for myself. So, this album was part of that.
“It’s part of an overall structure. It feels quite sympathetically connected to the first two albums because there was an amount of stuff on those first two records that was just beyond me as a writer, beyond me as a producer, that’s always been an unfinished chapter. So, I felt like this album had a lot of connective tissue to those records and that I could articulate those ideas that were just beyond me, back then. So, that’s the lovely feeling.”
James credits watching the members of the Dublin band The Scratch synergise to create a powerful and well-balanced sound while he was working as a producer on their album, Mind Yourself, as a huge influence on how he made his album. “That stayed with me,” he says, “and, in the back of my head, was, ‘How do I, as someone who is a dictatorship of one, get that sound?’”
Over several nights, James fully performed what would become Wide Open, Horses at Dublin’s National Concert Hall, to get a sense of the tracklist’s order, what to cull and keep, and what resonated with people. Attempting to sustain the energy and joy generated by the audiences’ reactions, he brought in the musicians from the shows to record with him in the studio.
After his despondency which gave way to this album, James is, thankfully, now in a better place. Currently, he is working on two EPs (one with a friend in the U.S. and the other with a friend in the UK) and is halfway through Wide Open, Horses’ follow-up.
“How I listen to music and how I make music tends to be an indicator of how I’m feeling,” James says. “I’m making good music and I’m listening to a lot more music, and I’m listening to a lot less podcasts and shit like that. So, I feel like my brain has slowly started kicking back in after those years. So, I feel pretty good. I feel as good as I have in a long time.”
Words: Aaron Kavanagh
Feature Image Credit: Rich Gilligan
James Vincent McMorrow’s latest album, Wide Open, Horses, is out now to purchase and stream. You can keep up with James on his website, jamesvmcmorrow.com
