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James Vincent McMorrow is on the edge of releasing his third album We Move but this time around things are slightly different. While 2014's Post-Tropical was an extension on the sound that permeated his debut Early In The Morning, album number three is nothing short of a reinvention. Produced largely by Drake-affiliated producer Nineteen85, it taps into his R&B influences, channeling Neil Young produced by The Neptunes, in his words, not ours.
First single Rising Water, is a subtle introduction to the new sound. It's smooth, synthetic and soulful but there are still connections to his previous work, gently easing fans into this new chapter for the Irish musician. In many ways, We Move is the record that he always wanted to make but wasn't reckless enough to throw out all genre-boundaries and reinvent the rule book. It's hard to imagine an organic singer/songwriter working with R&B and pop producers really being well received though when he released his debut. Since then, Rihanna's been connected to Tame Impala, Kanye's tapped into Justin Vernon's songbook and Beyoncé's working with Jack White.
Talking to Vincent McMorrow following a one-off Splendour In The Grass set in Australia much of the conversation centred around the blurring of the lines and how we worked with that to meld his influences and create We Move.
It must be cool to gauge the reactions from people with the new music?
I started the show last night with two new songs and you're kind of taking a risk to a degree even though you're in a room full of people who really really want to be there. There's still that element of not over-selling the song because you're worried. You want people to respond and hear the song the way you intended it to be heard. For me as much as them it was like let's not oversell this and try too hard to deliver a punch. Let's let the song settle in and let people hear it. People responded really well and there's one song on the record called Evil which I'm particularly excited about playing live. I did it last night and I could see people's reactions. It was really overt. That's really great for me because the second I wrote that song I felt it would have its moment live or on the album. To see it happening now is a lovely, revelatory thing for me personally.
The new record has a different vibe but I was at Splendour and the new songs are melding into the others well. Did you go into this album knowing you wanted to shake things up in terms of the producer and the sound?
I had a vision for it but it wasn't specific to production. When I started it it was a desire to make something that...I wasn't trying to self-impose road blocks. Even though to a degree I'm known for doing things that aren't expected of me, there's a self-imposed, narrow parameter that I apply to myself where I'm like, "ok, I'm going to make this record but I'm going to make it through the filter of what's come before and try to add to that". What you end up with is something, that when you get it right...on the second album there were songs where I knew I was getting it right like Cavalier and Red Dust, that's exactly what I wanted to say and completely unfiltered. Then there's other songs where I'm proud of what it ended up with but I felt I could've done it better. With this record the simple idea I had was to not get in my own way, to not question it. I knew in order to do that, that it had to have outside voices because they aren't as invested as I am. I think too much. I didn't want to under think but I wanted to apply the appropriate amount of thought to it while it was happening. The only way to do that was get other people because they just aren't as involved. They want to be there because they want to be involved but they're not going to spend 10 hours talking to you about a snare sound. You go in and they have their way, they have their work flow. Once I'd spent a year writing the songs and coming up with arrangements like I normally do, at that point it was like now let's go and start speaking to people, producers or friends, and play them the record and see who reacts the strongest to it. And that was sort of how it went. I'd been friends with 85, we'd worked on things for a year and a half but we hadn't talked about making a record for me, we'd been working on things for other people. That was it. I just included him in it once I was ready and able to have him come in and tear the songs apart and put them back together. There was a process to it that involved a lot of prep.
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I love what you said about wanting to write songs by Neil Young but produced them like The Neptunes. I feel like artists often get pigeonholed into one or the other. Did you feel at all pigeonholed on your other albums to not venture too far into a different genre?
Yeah, I think that there's that sort of...If you listen to what other people say then you'll always be stuck. You can find as many people to agree with you as will disagree with you. No one is right and no one is wrong, everyone just has an opinion. You have to ignore it and do the thing you think it right which sounds easy but is actually really difficult. We're humans and humans were pre-disposed towards listening to others and not being able to really own the courage of our convictions. Musicians are particularly lacking in confidence, it's hard to own a, "this is what I'm gonna do". Up until recently I was heavily weighed down by the thought of, "ok I love people like Neil Young, Bob Dylan and Donny Hathaway but I also love Pharrell, I love Timbaland, I love Just Blaze, how do I make a record that incapsulates all this?" I tried to do it in the past and I was getting to points were I was sounding on the edge of all those things. On this record it was like, let's just do the thing and let's not question it and that was the key. There are people who make R&B records that probably four of five years ago were making records with guitars. The lines are pretty blurry these days and that's a really good thing.
Ultimately you have to own a position and my position is that I'm a singer/songwriter, my desire isn't to wrap my songs up in tonnes of reverb and I'm not fooling anybody into thinking I'm something that I'm not. I've always been a soul singer and used the aesthetics and sounds that were available to me at the time. With rising confidence and ability levels you say more and you do more. With this record it was just the culmination of five or six years of learning. That thing of wanting to be those two things, being able to put them together, the secret to it was not trying to put it together. And for the first time just allowing people to sit in a room and go with their instincts. How it ends up is almost secondary. It was like, "let's do this thing, you're all brilliant and I have a vision for this, let's make it and see what it is afterwards".
Was there a point or a song where the sound clicked for you?
Yeah, I think there's always one song on each record that makes me think I can make an album. This album...it tends to be the fifth or sixth song on the record. On this album it was a song called Evil which when I wrote that I thought it was different from a lyrical standpoint. It was way more, putting myself out there which is not something I'm naturally predisposed to do. My instinct naturally is to wrap things up in a lot of metaphor and blur the picture a bit. It makes it easier for me to sing the song night after night because when you're singing songs with a first person thing, it's harder. You have to think about it more while you're singing. That's difficult for me to do. Singing that song and recording that song, it was like, "ok cool, there's something here, I can use that as a blueprint". Working on that song was the first real revelatory experience and then working with 85 in such a back and forth way was a real revelatory thing for me because it's something I've never done before. Anyone who has worked on my records are people who have worked for me like my engineers or people I've known a long, long time. That was a very different way of working for me.
How did that relationship start with 85? Obviously he's had a massive year with Drake's Hotline Bling and DVSN but I imagine your relationship began before a lot of that.
Yeah. He was working on all of those things when we were working on this record. There's a heavy overlap and it's funny because I think if we tried to work on something now it would be almost impossible because he's so busy and so in demand. The thing with the three guys that worked on this record with Two Inch Punch and Frank Duke, it was just a real...we all liked each other's work and they approached me in the beginning about wanting to work in a general sense. That's how it tends to work in their world because they take a meeting and in the course of the meeting the publisher or manager comes up and says who do you want to work with? My name came up in three conversations that they had so people reached out on their behalf and said, "these guys would like to meet you". There was no specific aim in mind it was just to chat. And that happens a lot in this business. Nine times out of ten it doesn't work out. I just really liked...there's something about 85. He came to my show in Toronto with a couple of his managers. I like how low-key he was. He was this lovely, thoughtful individual who was into what I was doing way more than what I thought he would be. The only thing I knew about him at that point was that he had done Hold On We're Going Home. I loved that song but I couldn't see it at the time. I was like, "how are we going to work together?" because our work is so different and that was a huge thing for me too. I realised there aren't as many barriers as you think there are.
When people see my name on paper with Frank Dukes, Nineteen85 and Two Inch Punch they think, "that's strange". I understand that but it really isn't. We're all mutual admirers of each others work. It's just songs and melody. The gaps between the genres are so tight these days and so blurry at the same time that there's not as much difference as it appears on the outside. But I was probably coming from that perspective too. I thought it was going to be too difficult. It was actually really simple. it involved a degree of me giving up an amount of preciousness and ownership of the work and letting them do what they wanted and then them coming back and me defending what I thought I needed to defend. But it all worked really well. These guys are absolutely brilliant and 85 has proven in the last year and a half how incredibly good he is at this. I felt lucky I'd got him at the right place and the right time.
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All three of them have done a great job at blurring the lines between alternative and pop music. Do you think from your first record to know there's less of a difference between the commercial and the alternative?
Without a doubt. You just have to look at the credit list on major successful records to know that's the truth. If you look at the credit list on the Beyoncé album, that's a good example of how it's about finding the best songwriters or the best lyricist. It's not about finding the person that has done something before. What makes those albums so special is it's reaching out to people who are inspiring. If you read the Lemonade credit list I think on Hold Up there's people like Father John Misty and Ezra Koenig which is mind-blowing. When you say that out loud it's like, how is that possible? But when you read how it happened it's totally organic. Beyoncé reached out to him and asked if he could try something and because the lines are so blurred, if you're precious about that stuff in 2016 you're doing your job wrong. Music is music. There's good music and bad music and if someone is coming to you and they're a good musician then you respect it and you say, "yeah, I'll totally be involved". There are so many examples of really great indie musicians writing great songs for people that are massive popstars like Taylor Swift working with Jack Antonoff from Bleachers. It goes on and on. On hip-hop records like Kanye using Justin Vernon so much. These are guys that are really successful but they're not top 40 guys. We've all existed and thrived beyond that and yet people come to us to talk to us about writing these kind of songs because the melody is there and the lyric is there and everyone is looking for something with depth.
If people have heard Rising Water and they haven't heard the rest of the album where does that fit? Is there more stuff moving towards the R&B stuff?
Rising Water was the song to put out first because it's a good thing to wipe the slate clean while also being sympathetic to the last record. I think it was like Cavalier. It's like this is not what you're gonna have and it's not what you got before but bare with it and listen to the record and it'll be a window into it. That's what Rising Water is. It's a good opening window into the record. The difference between the second record and the third record is that this record dives into that world way beyond what Rising Water is. It digs into my influences and the idea of making that singer/songwriter record with the production that I've grown up with. It goes above and beyond what Rising Water is. My favourite songs on the record people haven't heard yet which is really exciting.
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We Move is out 2nd September.
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[device]
James Vincent McMorrow is on the edge of releasing his third album We Move but this time around things are slightly different. While 2014's Post-Tropical was an extension on the sound that permeated his debut Early In The Morning, album number three is nothing short of a reinvention. Produced largely by Drake-affiliated producer Nineteen85, it taps into his R&B influences, channeling Neil Young produced by The Neptunes, in his words, not ours.
First single Rising Water, is a subtle introduction to the new sound. It's smooth, synthetic and soulful but there are still connections to his previous work, gently easing fans into this new chapter for the Irish musician. In many ways, We Move is the record that he always wanted to make but wasn't reckless enough to throw out all genre-boundaries and reinvent the rule book. It's hard to imagine an organic singer/songwriter working with R&B and pop producers really being well received though when he released his debut. Since then, Rihanna's been connected to Tame Impala, Kanye's tapped into Justin Vernon's songbook and Beyoncé's working with Jack White.
Talking to Vincent McMorrow following a one-off Splendour In The Grass set in Australia much of the conversation centred around the blurring of the lines and how we worked with that to meld his influences and create We Move.
It must be cool to gauge the reactions from people with the new music?
I started the show last night with two new songs and you're kind of taking a risk to a degree even though you're in a room full of people who really really want to be there. There's still that element of not over-selling the song because you're worried. You want people to respond and hear the song the way you intended it to be heard. For me as much as them it was like let's not oversell this and try too hard to deliver a punch. Let's let the song settle in and let people hear it. People responded really well and there's one song on the record called Evil which I'm particularly excited about playing live. I did it last night and I could see people's reactions. It was really overt. That's really great for me because the second I wrote that song I felt it would have its moment live or on the album. To see it happening now is a lovely, revelatory thing for me personally.
The new record has a different vibe but I was at Splendour and the new songs are melding into the others well. Did you go into this album knowing you wanted to shake things up in terms of the producer and the sound?
I had a vision for it but it wasn't specific to production. When I started it it was a desire to make something that...I wasn't trying to self-impose road blocks. Even though to a degree I'm known for doing things that aren't expected of me, there's a self-imposed, narrow parameter that I apply to myself where I'm like, "ok, I'm going to make this record but I'm going to make it through the filter of what's come before and try to add to that". What you end up with is something, that when you get it right...on the second album there were songs where I knew I was getting it right like Cavalier and Red Dust, that's exactly what I wanted to say and completely unfiltered. Then there's other songs where I'm proud of what it ended up with but I felt I could've done it better. With this record the simple idea I had was to not get in my own way, to not question it. I knew in order to do that, that it had to have outside voices because they aren't as invested as I am. I think too much. I didn't want to under think but I wanted to apply the appropriate amount of thought to it while it was happening. The only way to do that was get other people because they just aren't as involved. They want to be there because they want to be involved but they're not going to spend 10 hours talking to you about a snare sound. You go in and they have their way, they have their work flow. Once I'd spent a year writing the songs and coming up with arrangements like I normally do, at that point it was like now let's go and start speaking to people, producers or friends, and play them the record and see who reacts the strongest to it. And that was sort of how it went. I'd been friends with 85, we'd worked on things for a year and a half but we hadn't talked about making a record for me, we'd been working on things for other people. That was it. I just included him in it once I was ready and able to have him come in and tear the songs apart and put them back together. There was a process to it that involved a lot of prep.
I love what you said about wanting to write songs by Neil Young but produced them like The Neptunes. I feel like artists often get pigeonholed into one or the other. Did you feel at all pigeonholed on your other albums to not venture too far into a different genre?
Yeah, I think that there's that sort of...If you listen to what other people say then you'll always be stuck. You can find as many people to agree with you as will disagree with you. No one is right and no one is wrong, everyone just has an opinion. You have to ignore it and do the thing you think it right which sounds easy but is actually really difficult. We're humans and humans were pre-disposed towards listening to others and not being able to really own the courage of our convictions. Musicians are particularly lacking in confidence, it's hard to own a, "this is what I'm gonna do". Up until recently I was heavily weighed down by the thought of, "ok I love people like Neil Young, Bob Dylan and Donny Hathaway but I also love Pharrell, I love Timbaland, I love Just Blaze, how do I make a record that incapsulates all this?" I tried to do it in the past and I was getting to points were I was sounding on the edge of all those things. On this record it was like, let's just do the thing and let's not question it and that was the key. There are people who make R&B records that probably four of five years ago were making records with guitars. The lines are pretty blurry these days and that's a really good thing.
Ultimately you have to own a position and my position is that I'm a singer/songwriter, my desire isn't to wrap my songs up in tonnes of reverb and I'm not fooling anybody into thinking I'm something that I'm not. I've always been a soul singer and used the aesthetics and sounds that were available to me at the time. With rising confidence and ability levels you say more and you do more. With this record it was just the culmination of five or six years of learning. That thing of wanting to be those two things, being able to put them together, the secret to it was not trying to put it together. And for the first time just allowing people to sit in a room and go with their instincts. How it ends up is almost secondary. It was like, "let's do this thing, you're all brilliant and I have a vision for this, let's make it and see what it is afterwards".
Was there a point or a song where the sound clicked for you?
Yeah, I think there's always one song on each record that makes me think I can make an album. This album...it tends to be the fifth or sixth song on the record. On this album it was a song called Evil which when I wrote that I thought it was different from a lyrical standpoint. It was way more, putting myself out there which is not something I'm naturally predisposed to do. My instinct naturally is to wrap things up in a lot of metaphor and blur the picture a bit. It makes it easier for me to sing the song night after night because when you're singing songs with a first person thing, it's harder. You have to think about it more while you're singing. That's difficult for me to do. Singing that song and recording that song, it was like, "ok cool, there's something here, I can use that as a blueprint". Working on that song was the first real revelatory experience and then working with 85 in such a back and forth way was a real revelatory thing for me because it's something I've never done before. Anyone who has worked on my records are people who have worked for me like my engineers or people I've known a long, long time. That was a very different way of working for me.
How did that relationship start with 85? Obviously he's had a massive year with Drake's Hotline Bling and DVSN but I imagine your relationship began before a lot of that.
Yeah. He was working on all of those things when we were working on this record. There's a heavy overlap and it's funny because I think if we tried to work on something now it would be almost impossible because he's so busy and so in demand. The thing with the three guys that worked on this record with Two Inch Punch and Frank Duke, it was just a real...we all liked each other's work and they approached me in the beginning about wanting to work in a general sense. That's how it tends to work in their world because they take a meeting and in the course of the meeting the publisher or manager comes up and says who do you want to work with? My name came up in three conversations that they had so people reached out on their behalf and said, "these guys would like to meet you". There was no specific aim in mind it was just to chat. And that happens a lot in this business. Nine times out of ten it doesn't work out. I just really liked...there's something about 85. He came to my show in Toronto with a couple of his managers. I like how low-key he was. He was this lovely, thoughtful individual who was into what I was doing way more than what I thought he would be. The only thing I knew about him at that point was that he had done Hold On We're Going Home. I loved that song but I couldn't see it at the time. I was like, "how are we going to work together?" because our work is so different and that was a huge thing for me too. I realised there aren't as many barriers as you think there are.
When people see my name on paper with Frank Dukes, Nineteen85 and Two Inch Punch they think, "that's strange". I understand that but it really isn't. We're all mutual admirers of each others work. It's just songs and melody. The gaps between the genres are so tight these days and so blurry at the same time that there's not as much difference as it appears on the outside. But I was probably coming from that perspective too. I thought it was going to be too difficult. It was actually really simple. it involved a degree of me giving up an amount of preciousness and ownership of the work and letting them do what they wanted and then them coming back and me defending what I thought I needed to defend. But it all worked really well. These guys are absolutely brilliant and 85 has proven in the last year and a half how incredibly good he is at this. I felt lucky I'd got him at the right place and the right time.
All three of them have done a great job at blurring the lines between alternative and pop music. Do you think from your first record to know there's less of a difference between the commercial and the alternative?
Without a doubt. You just have to look at the credit list on major successful records to know that's the truth. If you look at the credit list on the Beyoncé album, that's a good example of how it's about finding the best songwriters or the best lyricist. It's not about finding the person that has done something before. What makes those albums so special is it's reaching out to people who are inspiring. If you read the Lemonade credit list I think on Hold Up there's people like Father John Misty and Ezra Koenig which is mind-blowing. When you say that out loud it's like, how is that possible? But when you read how it happened it's totally organic. Beyoncé reached out to him and asked if he could try something and because the lines are so blurred, if you're precious about that stuff in 2016 you're doing your job wrong. Music is music. There's good music and bad music and if someone is coming to you and they're a good musician then you respect it and you say, "yeah, I'll totally be involved". There are so many examples of really great indie musicians writing great songs for people that are massive popstars like Taylor Swift working with Jack Antonoff from Bleachers. It goes on and on. On hip-hop records like Kanye using Justin Vernon so much. These are guys that are really successful but they're not top 40 guys. We've all existed and thrived beyond that and yet people come to us to talk to us about writing these kind of songs because the melody is there and the lyric is there and everyone is looking for something with depth.
If people have heard Rising Water and they haven't heard the rest of the album where does that fit? Is there more stuff moving towards the R&B stuff?
Rising Water was the song to put out first because it's a good thing to wipe the slate clean while also being sympathetic to the last record. I think it was like Cavalier. It's like this is not what you're gonna have and it's not what you got before but bare with it and listen to the record and it'll be a window into it. That's what Rising Water is. It's a good opening window into the record. The difference between the second record and the third record is that this record dives into that world way beyond what Rising Water is. It digs into my influences and the idea of making that singer/songwriter record with the production that I've grown up with. It goes above and beyond what Rising Water is. My favourite songs on the record people haven't heard yet which is really exciting.
We Move is out 2nd September.
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