WHAT A difference a year can make in the life of an ambitious but under-the-radar musician. We say this in the knowledge that eleven months ago, Malahide singer-songwriter James Vincent McMorrow was virtually unknown. In February 2010, he released to little fanfare his debut album, Early in the Morning, a collection of sturdy songs that you felt would go somewhere if more people knew about the person behind them.
In April of last year, we watched McMorrow perform, rather shakily, in a Kilkenny pub, almost unable to contain a crowd that wanted to be appreciative but which was left untouched by the singer’s inexperience.
However, a couple of months ago, in Dingle, we experienced a different McMorrow: although still arm wrestling with the art of interaction, his performance was in control, accurately delivered and astutely timed. And the songs just got better and better – gorgeous tunes offered up with a rare blend of delicacy and strength, sung in a voice that referenced classic soul vocalists such as Donny Hathaway and Marvin Gaye.
Something had happened between April and December – either McMorrow had upped his game, or perhaps the game had come to him and simpered in submission.
Whatever happened, he’s right here, right now, and so it came as little surprise that his album landed on the shortlist (announced a few weeks ago) for the Choice Music Prize Irish Album of 2010.
“Music came quite late to me,” says 28-year-old McMorrow, looking for all the world like an Irish navvy straight off a building site. He’s a natural talker, eloquent as well as insightful. “I was always drawn to it, but it wasn’t until I was 18 that I took up playing any instrument, and then I started singing and writing songs at around 19.”
A short time after college, in 2007, he signed a publishing deal with EMI, made a demo, upped sticks to London, and embarked on – to date – one of the most important learning curves of his life: how to engage with the music industry.
It was a frustrating year, he recalls, because he knew he hadn’t figured things out fully.
“For me, it was a sequential thing – I had learned how to play the instruments, and then I started to learn how to write the songs, but I hadn’t really finished that part of it before I signed to EMI, so I felt I was on a conveyor belt. That major label/publishing thing is a very intense experience, and if you’re not equipped for it . . . ”
The trail off of the full story is significant, and following an abortive attempt at making an album, McMorrow returned home from London at the end of 2008. His entry into the yawning maw of the music industry occurred, he quickly realised, too fast and too soon.
“In my mind I didn’t really know any better. I thought it was just the way it went. I had no one telling me otherwise. I was pretty much on my own, with no managers or anyone else. I was on a track – which was clearly the process – where I was talking to loads of people in the presence of a lawyer. Then you get a manager, and the next step is you sign a recording deal, and after that you make a record. Yet it just wasn’t clicking for me.
“I didn’t have enough songs, and I wasn’t playing enough gigs. At the time I wasn’t thinking I should be playing more, I was just so frustrated by the process that I reckon I hadn’t figured out what actual route to take.
“The other thing was that when you’re dealing with major labels, every one involved with you has an opinion, and the opinion is that you need to go in a certain direction if you have a type of voice or music. The songs that I was writing at home and quite liking were probably the complete antithesis of what the label people were telling me I should be writing. It was up to me to draw a line in the sand. Which I did, and so I went with my instincts.”
Back in Dublin, following what he terms judiciously as “a directionless year”, he was offered a support slot with Tracy Chapman. Something, somewhere must have gelled, because his one-show gig in Dublin generated an offer of support act for Chapman’s full UK and European tour.
“It was seeing her perform that made me realise I wasn’t giving the live shows my full attention and time,” admits McMorrow. “I mean, she had soundchecks that lasted over two hours, she knew every single song inside out, and just watching that every night was very instructive.” Such instructiveness has surely turned around the likeable McMorrow’s chances of far wider exposure. He has taken on these industry experiences and welded them to his creative thoroughness. The change, though, in his stagecraft is also something else that has made him a singer to warm to.
“I was never a live performer, and because of that I never gave the live aspect of the work any real energy or consideration that I now know it deserves. I naively assumed that I had the songs, that I would play them and that it would work. That is fundamentally wrong. I was approaching it completely wrong – to think that an audience who had little or no idea who I was would get the music. You need to realise that playing live is an art form in itself. You have to put time and specific energy into it for it to work.”
When he started playing live in February of last year, at the time of the album’s release, he admits to really not enjoying it, or understanding it.
But by summer, and the Electric Picnic? “I felt it finally fell into place. Since then I would consider myself to be a live performer. The more you play the more adept you become at how to read an audience, how to read the dynamics of a room, and how to put it across in a way that makes sense.”
Single-minded and consciously independent ("Pretty much everything I've done has been so that I don't have to rely on others"), McMorrow's sense of purpose is such that he has had to step up to the mark in tandem with the increasing profile of Early In the Morning.
“No one knew of me nine months ago,” he remarks in the context of being shortlisted for the Choice Music Prize, “so to come from nowhere to getting things like that? It makes me realise that I’ve had to be more focused in direct relation to the rising success of the album. If I don’t move with it, then I’m doing it and the people that have bought it and liked it a disservice.”
James Vincent McMorrow performs in Dublin’s Vicar Street, March 3rd, as part of the Choice Music Prize Irish Album of the Year 2010 event
