Tomorrow will see the release of Dublin based singer/songwriter James Vincent McMorrow‘s much anticipated record Post Tropical – the follow up to the highly acclaimed Early In The Morning. He’s currently in Australia to kick off his tour for the record, playing Falls Festival, Southbound and sideshows in Sydney and Melbourne next week. Just before the end of the year, we spoke to James about the album, his return to Australia and more…
So where am I speaking to you today?
I’m at home at the moment, back in Dublin. We don’t really start touring until we arrive in Australia for New Years. So at the moment it’s just real world stuff… a regular week. I’m going over to North America for some publicity this weekend though, and I’ll do a couple of solo shows while I’m there. They’re the first shows I’ve played in quite a while – I haven’t done much this year as I’ve been working on the new record (Post Tropical) – so they’re really about dipping my toes in the water again, especially with testing out the new material.
Before I get the whole band together and the full thing, i always like to try and play the songs by myself, because these weren’t songs born on the stage, so I make a point of making sure they work live!
Having seen you a few times in 2012, it really seemed like your music from the first record evolved in the live environment. Would that be a fair assessment?
Yeah, I think they did, and I think that they should. I can say this now because I feel like I’m a pretty solid live performer at this stage, but when I started out I was absolutely terrible. I hated it. It wasn’t something I ever thought out when I was making the music to begin with. It’s a completely different artform, performing on the stage, and I’m still coming to grips with it.
I play songs that I’ve now played three or four hundred times on the stage, and I play them better each time, because I understand the role of the musician on stage more and more. What’s important and what’s not. It’s an ever changing thing. I feel like I’ve got a pretty good handle on it at this stage, but now with the new songs it’s like going back to square one. So it’s a strange feeling, because with the first album I got to make those mistakes live in front of twenty people. Now I have to make them in front of thousands of people. So it’s a different thing, but hopefully I’m ready enough to cover over those cracks for the short term.
Let’s talk about the record that brings forth this new music, Post Tropical (out 3rd January in Australia). You recorded it in El Paso – what took you there?
I have a studio in Dublin and I was recording there at first, and we were putting it together there. The studio is quite small and when I work by myself it’s fine but I brought in an engineer and we were basically bumping over one and other. It just became quite chaotic. We probably could have finished the record there, we had all the equipment and all the ideas were there, but something about it just didn’t feel right.
With the first record I made it with no money and no budget and no kind of idea about what was possible. But this time I had an idea and a budget… I decided it would be ridiculous if I didn’t go somewhere. It felt like the record deserved it. I was excited about the record and I was pushing it to be something special. But it just needed something bigger. So the studio (in El Paso) ended up coming to us through a few band recommendations.
Some US based bands I knew who had all gone through it and talked about what an amazing experience it was and that the owner was a really awesome dude. It was serendipitous, because everywhere else we had looked was overpriced and under resourced, but this guy he had this studio in the arse end of nowhere… it was hard to get to from Ireland but it felt just as hard to get to from El Paso!
But the guy was so enthusiastic, he offered to fly us over just to look at the place. He was so confident in his studio that he could deliver, that we could show up with no equipment. I played every instrument on this record, but I just brought one guitar with me. So we showed up, he said everything would be there for us, and it was! We got in at 3am and by 8am we were recording. It was just the perfect experience.
Do you feel this record has come to capture this moment, this period of your life?
Yeah, I do. I mean I feel quite bullish about the record. I’m quite a shy individual and I used to get quite bashful whenever people would talk about my records or my music. You really just deflect it… when someone says they like it you just go “oh, thank you”. But with this record, when people say they like it and they respond to it, I agree! I don’t mean that in an obnoxious way, but I really did put everything I could have mustered into this record. Completely selfishly, I wanted to make a record that I would listen to, that I would want to put on in my headphones or in my car. And I know that’s weird, but I don’t care. I really love this record. I really think it’s beautiful, and I wanted it to be as beautiful as possible. And I spent a year pouring every inch of me into it, to try and make it something worthy (of that effort).
I think that’s the responsibility of the musician, I don’t think that I took that fact seriously before. I love writing music and creating songs, but you tend to look around at music from the past and try to create something vaguely similar, thinking maybe it will succeed if you do that. But I did nothing like that with this record. I just made it something I wanted it to be and I didn’t care how people responded to it or where it would go or what would happen to it afterwards. Radio, anything like that… all those things that terrify musicians about what will happen when you release your music, I just didn’t think about it. I just wanted to make the most beautiful thing possible, and trust that when people heard it, they would understand it. Even if it took fifty listens, but at some point they would get what it was. So that’s what the record is to me.
You mentioned you worked on the record for a year – at what point do you know it’s finished?
I’m usually pretty good with that, I don’t hold on and hold on and hold on like some musicians. It’s impossible to achieve perfection. You just push it as hard as you can and get it to that point where you listen to it and it really flows. And that’s really it. If the song and the mix flows and it all makes sense… then it doesn’t bother me if a snare needs to be turned up a bit or something.
That said, my engineer Ross is a demon for that sort of stuff, he would stay up all night listening to a snare. So I guess I was lucky in that sense that I could go to sleep and he’d stay for four or five hours to make sure all that kind of those things were there. He did all the things that I probably didn’t have the capacity to do because I was so tired at that stage! The big advantage of being able to bring in people to help while I sleep.
You mentioned the first real touring you’re doing for this record is in Australia. I’m sure that’s coincidence more than anything, but what does it mean to be coming back to Australia and really launching the new record here?
I think it’s brilliant. My experiences have been limited there, but the shows that I was able to play in 2012, they were incredible. Mainly because I was so surprised there were so many people at the shows! I had no expectations, Australia is so far away, I had no idea what the response would be like. And I’m constantly amazed when I go to new countries, it still doesn’t feel real going somewhere for the first time and having people at a show to see me. I think “are they here for another show? Am I opening for someone?”.
So it’ll be awesome coming back to Australia, and with “Cavalier” the first single off the record, I made a decision to go with that one because when you hear it, you’re either in or you’re out. There are other songs on the record that are probably easier sells, and from a label perspective they would have probably been steering towards those ones… but I didn’t try to make an album with easy radio singles. I wanted to make beautiful, complex music.
So I figured if you could understand “Cavalier”, and you get it, you’ll get the record. It’s a four and a half minute slow jam! And so it’s crazy to me that after that decision, radio stations like triple j are playing it… that anyone is playing it at all in that capacity! triple j are amazing… they were the first radio station to really get behind that song and for that reason alone I’d come back to Australia! And now other countries are starting to get behind it too…
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James is playing Falls Festival in Byron Bay today ahead of Southbound Festival in Busselton, WA on the 4th then sideshows in Melbourne (Corner Hotel, 7th) and Metro Theatre in Sydney on the 9th. Tickets are on sale now. His new record Post Tropical is released on January 3rd in Australia, through Dew Process.
