James Vincent McMorrow talks about The Amazing Adventures of writing Cavalier, gleaning nuggets of wisdom from Mitch Hedberg and why flamingos and polar bears belong together, despite what you might think.
“Every moment is not magical in life and that’s what I fucking love about life and that’s what I love about making music.”
Early In The Morning was made in an isolated house on the Irish coast whereas Post Tropical was made across the world on the Mexican border. Was it a conscious decision to make this album somewhere vastly different from the first in hopes that the contrast would be reflected in the record?
I would never repeat a process, if I use a studio once it would be rare that I would use it again because I am believer in switching it up and changing things. With this one [Post Tropical] I have a studio in Dublin, it’s a beautiful studio, it’s really comfortable, it’s got all my equipment. I could have stayed there and made the record there but I don’t like the idea of resting on your laurels, of settling. If you’re gonna go for something, go for it and one of the beautiful things about success is you have the means to do things that you couldn’t do before.
So I was able to go “ok I want to take this out of Ireland, I want to take it somewhere else” and at that point it was “lets just look at every studio that exists and see which one is the best” and it was down to the studio it wasn’t down to the environment, the environment was almost secondary. It just happened to be an incredible studio. I hadn’t even Googled the place. I literally had just looked at their equipment list and said “can we get there from Ireland?” and they said “yes” and we were like “lets go”. Then we showed up and it was just like “wow we’re in the middle of the desert” and then it was like “how far are we from the Mexican border? OK we need to bring our passport everywhere.” Those kind of things that we didn’t realise, it added to it exponentially, an experience beyond just record making but it wasn’t a thought out thing.
I read that while recording Early In The Morning you felt you were limited and sometimes found it difficult to articulate exactly the kind of music you wanted to make. Did access to a whole new range of sounds allow you to articulate it better this time around?
Absolutely. I wouldn’t have been able to make this record the first time around which is why I didn’t make this record the first time around. I didn’t have access to any of these things and I didn’t have enough understanding of how I worked to know that I could make those things work, if you understand what I mean.
I think that with the first record that was me maxing out what was possible for me at that point because having ideas in your head and articulating them with guitar or with drums, not that that songs like We Don’t Eat were simple arrangements, it’s not an easy thing to settle on, it took a while to come to that arrangement for that song but y’know if I was to do that again it would be 40 times more complex and there would be more layering and depth to it and that’s what comes with experience and understanding what you do and then obviously couple that with the fact that you have access to all this gear and so nothing is off limits, every idea that you have is up for grabs and that’s unbelievable, the studio is like the greatest musical tool that I can ever possibly have.
While you were writing your last album you had been reading a lot of American novelists’ work such as Steinbeck. This time around do you feel like there were any influences that may have indirectly made their way onto the album?
There is a book I was reading and it’s straight up where I took the word Cavalier from, it’s called The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon and it’s one of the greatest books I’ve ever read but it’s not like I was reading that and thought ‘Oh I wanna make a record’, I just loved the beauty of that book and the vividness of it! It was like reading A Hundred Years of Solitude, it’s one of those beautiful pieces of work where I think ‘that’s a beautiful piece of art, I’d like to make a beautiful piece of art now’.
Referring to Cavalier you said you had been thinking about the song for 6 months before you wrote a note. Why wait so long before putting pen to paper?
Mitch Hedberg has a joke where it’s like “If I think of a joke in the middle of the night, I have to convince myself that it’s not a good joke ‘cause I don’t wanna have to get up and write it down” and so he decides no that’s not funny and tries to convince himself that his work’s not good enough – which has always made me laugh! So it’s kind of a similar thing – I love the idea.
But the main reason I like to keep things in my head is because when it’s in your head, all things are possible. As soon as something is real, it’s grounded in reality, it’s there. There’s something to me, as a musician with the ideas that I have for music, that’s really sad about that if it’s too soon. If you commit to something too soon it’s never gonna be what you want it to be. I’d rather it exists in my head for a while and run the risk of it disappearing from my mind altogether in the hopes that I’ll add sections to it in my head and I’ll hear different movements, passages and parts.
I don’t know how to describe how it works in my head. It is sort of quite a real and substantial thing in the same way that people who are gifted with maths can see sums and can see what they add up to. I can’t do that, I couldn’t do that for you, I couldn’t do your accounts but I can hear the possibilities of a song and I can hear the 50 or 60 different layers beneath it in a heartbeat. I can just hear it in my mind and I like to live with it in that kind of a sense because than all the possibilities are there and then I slowly tick them off and then it becomes real and then I’m ok with that.
It must be massively satisfying when the song, after existing solely in your mind, is finally complete and you can listen to it.
It is. It’s probably the most satisfying thing I will ever experience like certainly from a professional standpoint I love singing songs live, I love touring but getting to the end of a song – because it’s quite a heart-wrenching process for me at times. It can be hard to navigate the weathers and sustain especially when you’re by yourself in a lot of aspects and you’re having to drive the creativity. Sometimes the last thing I wanna do is try and come up with y’know the right drum pattern, I just want to not do that. So getting to the end of this and not just getting to the end of it for the sake of getting to the end of it, that’s the tricky part. But once it’s there and once you realise ‘OK I’ve given this everything that’s required and it exists and it’s what I want it to be’, there’s no better feeling. Yeah it’s really something!
Between the image-laden lyrics you write and visualising songs in your head, I gather you are quite a visually inclined person. You also draw and paint – does your visual art inspire your music at all?
No not in a sense that I’m aware of. All things are part of everything in my life in that everything I work on, everything I do is from the same well and everything I have talked to you about comes from the same place. Everything I work on, my creative life or how I talk to my family or friends, how I look at a tree or a sunset, like it’s all connected. But not in a grand, profound way, like I hate when I listen to musicians go y’know “Oh I painted a picture of a sunset and then I wanted to write a song”, like fuck that, that doesn’t feel real to me, it doesn’t feel like life.
Life is not this grand, profound “every moment is magical”, it’s not! Every moment is not magical in life and that’s what I fucking love about life and that’s what I love about making music. It’s not this profound thing for me it’s not this “I just had this spark of imagination and then I just wrote this song!”. It’s a song that sits in my mind for a year and then I spend a year grinding away at it like chipping away at pieces of and rebuilding it and struggling with it. It’s just like life for me, it’s how I want it to be I want it to be a struggle.
I don’t believe great art comes from easy situations or from those sort of soundbitey just kind of nonsensical things that people say sometimes or y’know when they’re like “when I was a kid I used to just sit and listen to my pa’s old gramaphone records”, I just don’t believe that. It just doesn’t ring true to me from my experience. Maybe it’s true to some people, I’m not being cynical about it, but just for me the brilliance of music and the brilliance of life are not disconnected.
So if I scribble something on a piece of paper on a notepad while I’m on a plane that’s something that’s come out of my mind and then I go and I write a song, so the two are connected because they both came from the same place, if you get me? But there’s no sort of grand design to it, to anything that I do. Beyond the fact that it’s the only thing I know how to do.
There’s an obvious juxtaposition between the flamingo and the polar bear that appear beside each other on the cover of Post Tropical. Am I correct in saying that there a significance in the illustration which is in keeping with a certain ostensible theme that seems to run throughout the album?
Yeah. There’s thought to everything. It’s all part of how I want to present this record and it’s how I would like records to be presented to me as a music fan. The idea of it not just being coincidence, that it’s not just ‘well we have an album, we need an album cover, OK lets take a photo of you and then we’ll photoshop you to make your eyes look bluer and then we’ll put that on it’. Album making is worthy of respect, time, energy and money and I wanted to give it all of those things and I wanted the album cover to reflect the music.
The album cover itself, it’s a beautiful scene, something you’ve seen a million times on old postcards. Then there’s things in there that don’t belong but they look so natural that you don’t notice them at first. That’s kind of how I see the record. There are obviously elements that are quite traditional in the songwriting structure but then some of the songwriting structure is just flat out like no one’s really wrote songs like this before so it takes a minute to absorb that. You listen to and you take it in and you realise things aren’t quite what they seem but you’re not quite sure why and I love that idea. It’s the same with the name Post Tropical. Two beautiful words together that I was really into for a long time. They sound so serene and peaceful but a post tropical storm is something quite aggressive. So, there’s thought to everything is really what I’m trying to say and there will be to everything that you see from now on.
Post Tropical is out now on Vagrant Records.
Words: Roisin McVeigh
