McMorrow's World

“Every now and then the weight of this... thing... tends to overwhelm me a little bit,” he says, softly, his Dublin accent infused with a strong American twang. “I tend to have these bursts of emotion – I don’t know about full-blown tears. But that happens quite a lot at the moment.”

The ‘thing’ of which he speaks is his soon to be released third album, We Move (the follow-up to 2014’s Choice-nominated Post Tropical). Lyrically permeated with anxiety, regret and social unease, it’s easily the 33-year-old Dubliner’s most personal work to date. He’s justifiably proud of it, but also somewhat nervous about how it will be received.

“It’s always weird in these sort of troughs before an album comes out,” he muses. “You know, when everything is pure speculation, and everyone is saying really great positive things, but you still don’t really know where you stand.”

The Malahide-born musician isn’t the only one with a lot riding on this album. Although not quite a household name yet, McMorrow’s star has been steadily in the ascent since the release of his folky 2010 debut, Early In The Morning. Following the success of Post Tropical – which didn’t have a hit single, but songs from which were used in many movies, TV shows and ad campaigns including Twilight, Game of Thrones and the Spanish national lottery – he’s now operating at a level where he can comfortably sell-out 2,000-seater venues on at least three continents. Which also means that he now has his share of heavy responsibilities. In the morning, he and his band are jetting off to Australia to kick off the We Move promo with an appearance at the Splendour In The Grass festival in Byron Bay.

“Yeah, they’re not too happy about going all that way for just one show,” he smiles. “But I’m now responsible for about 20 people. I have full-time people working for me. That’s never a responsibility that they tell you about when you’re thinking about being a musician. They’re never like, ‘Oh, you’re going to be responsible for all these people in life, and you’re gonna have to take care of them, and make sure that they get from here to there safely, and they’re well-paid and well-fed and well-everything.’”

McMorrow scratches his beard and shifts uncomfortably in his seat.

“I’m not well built for that,” he admits. “And I don’t shirk the responsibility, but every now and then it becomes quite a heavy thing, and I do have moments of just… just overwhelming tears.” He starts to laugh. “Yeah, so I would definitely say in the last few weeks an amount of tears have been shed.”

Whatever anxieties he’s feeling, they’re most probably unfounded. We Move is a fine piece of work that can only further his reputation as one of the most talented and mercurial musical artists to emerge from Irish shores in recent years. Co-produced with Nineteen85 (Drake, DSVN), Two Inch Punch (Sam Smith, Years & Years) and Frank Dukes (Kanye West, Rihanna), the album was recorded in Dublin, London and Toronto. It was largely mixed in Miami by Jimmy Douglass (Donny Hathaway, Timbaland), who finessed its warm, vintage yet forward-thinking feel. Musically, it’s as soft, smooth and soulful as they come – and, although a lot more stripped back and upbeat, still not a million miles away from the dreamy sound of Post Tropical. That record was quite a strange sophomore release, given that McMorrow’s debut was a fairly straightforward folk offering.

“It was, yeah,” he nods, smiling. “And that was definitely not an unconsidered thing. It was like, ‘Okay, I’m known as a songwriter, so let’s almost not write songs.’ I wanted to make something that was a production, I wanted to make something in the studio that was aesthetic and had texture. So I did, and I guess there were certain songs on it that obviously did quite well and meant the album had kind of a wider life than a slightly obscurer, more instrumental-based, record would do, which was nice.

“But I’m always thinking about the next thing, and I was thinking about the next thing quite firmly when I was finishing up Post Tropical,” he continues. “When we put out ‘Cavalier’ off the second record the reaction to it was quite strong, and I started to suddenly find myself in the company of a lot of people that were more in the world of music that I grew up in. Like, R&B and hip-hop, from a production standpoint. So Post Tropical had kinda laid a lot of the foundation for this record.”

In a recent post about the making of We Move on your website, you wrote that you are “not the most confident person… Every time I’ve made an album before this one, I’ve worked so hard to shroud the thing in metaphor and imagery, until I’m so blurred in the picture that even I can barely see myself in it.” So given this is a more open, honest, vulnerable and reflective collection of songs than you’ve ever released before, do you feel exposed on this record?

“Definitely,” he avers. “Like, really exposed! Yeah, I definitely feel a lot more exposed from a traditional songwriting perspective. Which was what I needed to do, I needed to make that because I’ve never made that before. My lack of confidence in that has made me work really, really hard to wrap stuff up in a lot of imagery. Like, as much as I can remove myself from the image of a song, I’ve always tried to do it in a knowing way, because it’s really difficult for a person like me to go, ‘This is how I feel and this is what I think.’”

Why is that?

“It always felt too (a) simplistic, and (b) too exposing to do,” he says. “So maybe it’s like the age-old musical thing. It’s why, you know, musicians talk about mountains and trees and rivers all the time – it’s because they’re really apt metaphors and images for emotion. It’s easy to run back to those, there’s a default position. Because people can ascribe a lot of meaning from them and it works on both levels.

“But it wasn’t working for me. I was like, ‘I don’t feel I’m getting at anything particularly real to me, or pressing to my life.’ My job is to write songs, it’s not to write songs that people ascribe meaning from, it’s to write songs that I ascribe meaning from, that mean something to me. So that was definitely the arc to this record, the notion of not shying away from things just because it scares me.”

You recently tweeted that ‘Evil’ is the song you’re most looking forward to performing live.

“I just wanted to write about the idea of people being good or bad,” reflects McMorrow. “I’m fascinated by this idea of people on Twitter shouting their dissatisfaction with stuff, and ‘Oh you’re a good person, you’re a bad person because you do this and that’ and it’s like... (shakes head). This week, there was that Kanye, Kim, Taylor Swift thing and all these people going, ‘Oh, there’s more important things in life to talk about!’ And it’s like, ‘Yeah, but an hour ago you were talking about how much you love McDonalds! So it’s not like you’re hard and fast in your rules.’ I’ve always been taken on this idea of how black and white it is, and how it’s not black and white at all. It’s way more detailed and difficult than that.”

A lot of performers turn to drink or drugs to control their anxiety. How about you?

“Well, yeah, a lot of drink,” admits McMorrow, uncomfortably. “But I stopped drinking about two or three years ago now.”

So you’re a teetotaller now?

He smiles and shrugs. “I’ve had drinks from time to time. It was more about the idea of confidence. And not having it. And being onstage every night. Alcohol brings out this natural sense of confidence. Somewhere deep within you it removes all of the barriers. So I could go onstage and be the person that I wanted to be.”

Needless to say, with so much downtime on the road, booze is always a constant temptation.

“We’d roll up into a soundcheck, get off the tour bus at one o’clock, and it’d be like, ‘Let’s have some beer, let’s drink!’ I remember vividly this London show in 2013 or some shit like that, towards the end of my first album’s cycle. And I just remember getting offstage and looking in the dressing room, thinking, ‘Did I drink all that? That’s fucked up!’”
How much had you had?

“It was at least two bottles of wine, a bunch of beer, and... it was a good show!” he smiles, shaking his head. “I think. People say it was. I can’t really remember it. I was fine on stage, I did my job, but I wasn’t in it. I wasn’t feeling it, I was just drinking to get around myself. And it was like, ‘This is a waste of everybody’s time’. So I stopped, just to see what would happen.”

And what did happen?

“Actually, I went to Australia, weirdly enough, which is where I’m about to go again, and they were the most terrifying shows,” he recalls. “They were smaller – three or four hundred people – and I was really aware of my hands and I was fucking up all the time, but it was still like, ‘I feel this, I get it, I can do it.’ So it was like trying to relearn how to do it all over again, and lose that crutch, because it’s an unsustainable crutch. It was really important to me that I lost that from my daily life as a touring musician. Otherwise it would’ve not worked out good. At all.”

How do you respond to negative criticism?

“I take it, but I take it heavy,” sighs the singer. “I have taken it heavy in the past, but not in terms of reviews and stuff. Just in terms of people on social media being kinda... mean (laughs). Because I’m not mean, I’m not that person, so I can’t actually understand the desire to do that.
“I was reading something this morning about Leslie Jones, who’s in the new Ghostbusters, and she got so many horrible people saying so many horrible things to her on Twitter yesterday… about a Ghostbusters movie! It was like, ‘That’s heartbreaking that you think that that’s okay!’ I can’t even conceive how somebody could be so mad at the world or mad at their life that they would be like, ‘I need to go on Twitter and call this person a fucking asshole’. That’s terrible to me, because it affects you, and it affects everybody.

“I guarantee you that somewhere right now, Kanye West is reading his notifications on Twitter and someone’s saying something mean and he’s ignoring the million other nice things and he’s focusing on that. It’s human instinct. I’ve taken that hard in the past.”

How about now?

“I don’t take it as hard anymore, because I think making this record was a paradigm shift for me, where I was going, ‘I’m owning every position I’ve ever believed in as a musician, I’m not shying away from it anymore.’ I’m just making the things that I really want to make without that filter and without that sense of, like, human shame or whatever it is that tends to water down the thing that we want to make.”

He laughs again. “Some people are gonna like We Move, some people aren’t. That’s always the way.”

Publicist Pete Murphy sticks his head around the door and asks us to wrap it up. McMorrow has two more interviews to do and has yet to pack for Australia. But before Hot Press leaves, he has this to say.

“I don’t feel a sense of comfort. I don’t think, ‘Yeah, we got this’. I’ve grown this thing from a hundred people to a couple thousand people in most every city that I’ve ever played in. And that’s tangible and feels real to me. I love that because I didn’t go it at like, 2000 people a night, and then next time I’m doing 1,500 people. There was no law of diminishing returns, but at the same time I don’t feel this sense of, ‘Yeah, I got this.’

“I always feel the desire to push and try to be better,” he continues. “And I think that helps me, because when you start to get a little sure of yourself, that’s when mediocrity can squeeze through the door. So I don’t want to ever feel that sense of comfort. Even though it makes me stay up at night, and I think more about things than I would probably like to.”

We Move is out now. For more from James Vincent McMorrow, see [link]hotpress.com[/link]