From his initial role as an indie folk upstart to his evolution into a synth-heavy slow-jammer, Irish singer James Vincent McMorrow has traversed more genre melds and mashes than many artists do in an entire career.
And, excitingly, if his third studio album We Move is anything to go by, he’s far from finished shaking up his sound. As the multi-instrumentalist takes in some brief off-time in central Sydney following an exclusive set at this year’s Splendour in the Grass, he has genre semantics on his mind.
“When I was starting out making music in the 2000s, there were so many bullshit genres,” he says, recalling in particular the categorisation of MySpace music profiles. “All people wanted to know was, ‘What is this? Where does it fit?’ It became quite disorientating for a lot of musicians, but I always felt like it wasn’t even a thing. Great bands can still transcend, and I think that’s what counts.
“You need the ability to move through whatever it is that you need to move through. It’s about people embracing you. That’s what I want. People can passively accept something, but I don’t want that shit. I want people to either say, ‘I’m into this’ or, ‘I’m not into this.’ It has to be one of the two – anything in-between is no good for me.”
McMorrow first rose to public attention at the start of 2010 with the release of his debut album, Early In The Morning. Taking its cues from the indie folk movement stalwarts such as Bon Iver and Fleet Foxes, the album quickly achieved cult status, as the McMorrow name began bubbling under the European mainstream.
By the time he followed it up at the start of 2014 with Post Tropical, the game had changed entirely. His noted falsetto and breathy delivery remained intact, but by then his switch to electric guitar was complete, and he found himself engulfed in fluttering synth patterns and glitchy drum beats. So, where to from there? To paraphrase one Napoleon Dynamite: wherever he wanted to go.
“This record is me doing the thing that I’ve always wanted to do in the most non-condensed manner possible,” says McMorrow excitedly of We Move. “I feel like the second record still contained an element of me holding back and being afraid to dig into what I wanted to make.
“You’re burdened by what’s come before you, and you’re burdened by the weight of expectation,” he continues. “The trick is to not just go, ‘Fuck that’ and react to it. You have to take it into context and understand it. There are definitely songs on the second record where I was doing exactly what I wanted, but there are also songs where I was a bit more careful. On this record, I had a clear vision. I had the songs, and I knew exactly what I wanted to do. There was no time to question it.”
We Move was written over a patchwork of several cities and several key producers. McMorrow constructed the album in studios around the world, recording in Los Angeles, Toronto and his native Dublin, assisted by producers such as Frank Dukes, Two Inch Punch and Paul “Nineteen85” Jefferies.
If you don’t know Jefferies by name, you will almost certainly know the artists he has worked with – Drake, DJ Khaled and Nicki Minaj are to name but a few. While it may seem strange to go from ‘Hotline Bling’ to making music with a relative outsider to the pop world, McMorrow is quick to point out the gap between commercial radio-ready tunes and the songs he makes is smaller than one might think.
“It doesn’t feel like a world away from what I’m doing,” he reasons. “That’s the thing, y’know? A song like [Drake’s] ‘Marvins Room’ was so revelatory for me. I’ve been searching for my entire career how to fit the sonic aspects of what I love with being a singer-songwriter. When I heard ‘Marvins Room’ – much like when I heard [Kanye West’s] 808s & Heartbreak for the first time – it showed me how to put yourself on the line emotionally and yet keep it in this minimal electronic pocket. It’s a tricky thing to do, but listening to that kind of music proved to me that it wasn’t impossible. You can use a lot of low end and aggressive sounds while still keeping the heart of what you’re singing about.”
Listeners have already heard two tracks from We Move ahead of its release – the recently dropped ‘Get Low’ and the pulsing, catchy ‘Rising Water’. McMorrow explains that the latter was selected to once again indicate that he’s not interested in making the same record twice. “It’s funny: the lead single from all three of my albums has always been the track that opens the album,” he says. “It was never planned that way – it just so happened that they were the songs that I felt best reflected what I was doing on each, and would ease people into the records themselves.
“I think, as a song, ‘Rising Water’ is simple in its premise,” McMorrow says. “It’s direct and it’s got a lot of things that help it. It’s not necessarily a song that will knock people completely off-kilter, but it definitely will keep them off-centre. With this record, people are definitely going to be getting something different. I would be really disappointed if people had me figured out.”
James Vincent McMorrow’sWe Move isout through Dew Process on Friday September 2.
