By Ed Power | Sat Nov 30 2024 - 05:15
During the pandemic the songwriter and producer James Vincent McMorrow would rise early, go for a run and write songs for Louis Tomlinson, of One Direction.
“I actually made half of a record for him,” he says. Tomlinson’s team “had a lot of songs but maybe not a lot that he was as into as he wanted to be. I think they were maybe looking for a weirdo. So they reached out to me. I love him. He’s a fascinating human being. I absolutely loved making that album,” adds McMorrow, who is about to start a tour of Ireland.
When it comes to potential collaborators with a boy band megastar, McMorrow’s name is not the first that springs to mind. He’s an indie songwriter whose open-veined, falsetto-driven pop has been compared to that of folkies such as Bon Iver and Sufjan Stevens. But Tomlinson was a fan of the Dubliner’s beautifully wrought music. He wasn’t alone: Drake famously sampled McMorrow on his 2016 track Hype.
One of the tracks they wrote together, The Greatest, would serve as the opener to Tomlinson’s second LP, Faith in the Future. As is often the way with the music industry, the rest are in a vault somewhere. Still, for McMorrow the opportunity to work with a pop star was about more than simply putting his craft in front of a wider audience. The call from Tomlinson’s team had come at a low point for the Irishman, who had become mired in confusion and doubt after signing to a major label for the first time in his career.
Executives at Columbia Records had recognised potential in McMorrow as an artist who bridged the divide between folk and pop. The fruits of that get-together would see daylight in September 2021 as the excellent Grapefruit Season LP, on which McMorrow teamed up with Paul Epworth, who has also produced Adele and Florence Welch.
The album was a beautifully gauzy rumination on the birth of his daughter and the muggy roller coaster of first-time parenthood. It went top 10 in Ireland and breached the top 100 in the UK. Yet the experience of working within the major-label system was strange for McMorrow, who at that point had been performing and recording for more than a decade. He didn’t hate it. But he knew he didn’t ever want to do it again.
“It was a weird time. I stopped touring in 2017. My daughter was born in 2018. I signed with Columbia Records at the same time and made a record that ... There were moments within it I was proud of. But fundamentally, I think if I was being very honest, I would say that I definitely got lost in the weeds of what the music industry wanted for me rather than what I wanted for myself.”
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McMorrow grew up in Malahide, the well-to-do town in north Co Dublin; as a secondary-school student he suffered debilitating shyness. In 2021 he revealed that he had struggled with an eating disorder at school, ending up in hospital (“Anorexia that progressed into bulimia”). He was naturally retiring, not the sort to crave the spotlight. But he was drawn to music. “It was definitely a difficult journey,” he says. He wasn’t alone in that. “The musicians that tend to cut through and make it ... A lot of my friends, musicians that are successful, they’re not desperate for the stage.”
The Tomlinson collaboration was part of his strange relationship with the mainstream music industry. It went back to McMorrow’s third LP, Rising Water, from 2016. A move away from his earlier folk-pop, the project had featured engineering from Ben Ash, aka Two Inch Punch, a producer who had worked with chart artists such as Jessie Ware, Sia and Wiz Khalifa.
That was followed by the Drake sample in 2016 and by McMorrow writing the song Gone, which was at one point set to be recorded by a huge pop star whom he’d rather not identify.
“Gone is the red herring of red herrings in my entire career. I wrote that song for other people. I didn’t write it for myself. The whole reason I signed to Columbia Records and I had all these deals was because of Gone. I was very happy tipping away in my weird little world. And then I wrote that song, and a lot of bigger artists came in to try to take it,” he says.
“I won’t name names. There were recordings of it done. It got very close to being a single for someone else. I would go in these meetings with all these labels, and I would play it for them – just to play. Not with any sense of ‘This is my song.’ And they were, like, ‘You’re out of your mind if you don’t take this song. This is the song that will make you the thing that is the thing.’ And I was, like, ‘You’re wrong.’ For a year I basically was, like, ‘I disagree.’ And if you go in a room with enough people enough times and they tell you that you’re crazy ... I loved the song, but I did not love it for me. I never felt I fit. There was a little part of me that wanted to believe.”
As he had predicted, Gone wasn’t a hit. He received a lot of other strange advice, including that he cash in on the mercifully short-lived craze for NFTs by putting out an LP as a watermarked internet file. All of that was swirling in his brain when Tomlinson got in touch. To be able to step outside his own career was exactly what McMorrow needed.
“With Louis it was like boot camp. I had a very limited time with him. I had to wake up every morning, go for a run, write a song in my head, go to the studio. We made songs all day long. It lit a fire in my head again. I loved the process. I like sitting and talking to someone like Louis, who’s had this unbelievably fascinating lifestyle – so much tragedy in his life,” he says. Tomlinson’s mother and sister died within three years of each other, and his 1D bandmate Liam Payne died in October. “So many things have happened to him. I chatted to him and then write constantly. That was a lovely process.”
Because life is strange and full of contrasts McMorrow ended up working with Tomlinson around the same time that he was producing the Dublin postpunk “folk-metal” band The Scratch, on their LP Mind Yourself. “Totally different animals,” he says. “The Scratch album was an intense period in the studio of that real old-school nature of making music. A lot of fights. A lot of pushing back against ideas. A lot of different opinions. And you have to respect everybody’s opinions and find the route through.”
During his brief time on a major label, McMorrow was reminded of the music industry’s weakness for short-term thinking. In 2019, the business was obsessed with streaming numbers and hot-wiring the Spotify algorithm so that your music posted the highest possible number of plays.
“Everyone was driven by stats. ‘This song has 200 million streams.’ ‘That song has 400 million streams.’ I went into my meetings with Columbia Records ... the day I had my first big marketing meeting was the day my catalogue passed a billion streams, which, for someone like me, who started where I started, was a day where I should be popping champagne corks. Instead they immediately started talking about how they have artists that have one song that has two billion streams. So by their rule of thumb I was half as successful as one song by one artist on their label.”
Five years later he believes things have changed. He points to Lankum, a group who will never set Spotify alight yet who have carved a career by doing their own thing and not chasing the short-term goal of a place on the playlist. They are an example to other musicians, McMorrow says.
“I was in Brooklyn, doing two nights, a week and a half ago. In the venue across the road from where we were, pretty much, Lankum were doing two nights and had [the Dublin folk artist] John Francis Flynn opening for them. Those are two artists that, if you were to look at their stats, you wouldn’t be, like, ‘These are world-beating musicians.’ You start aggregating to this stat-based norm and you miss bands like Lankum, bands like The Mary Wallopers, people like John Francis Flynn.”
McMorrow is looking forward to his forthcoming Irish tour, which he sees as another leg of his journey to be his best possible self.
“The last two, three years have been a process of building it back to a version of me that actually made me happy rather than making me cry at night-time – a version that was making music because I liked it. Within this industry there’s so much outside noise. It’s quite overwhelming. I was overwhelmed. It’s been nice to reset the clock.”
The Dubliner isn’t the first name that comes to mind as a songwriter for a boy-band megastar. But working with Louis Tomlinson was just what
In November 2022, McMorrow posted this now deleted Instagram post:
Text: late 2021 I got a phone call asking me if I wanted to come to London to meet @louist91 and possibly write some songs. A few years ago he released a statement talking about changing his path musically, instead of the immediate search for hits, he’d start with music he genuinely loved and see where it got him. Seems like a simple and obvious thing to say, but considering the amount of people just chasing hits with little regard for vision or artistry, a statement like that struck me when I read it. So I was excited to meet him and see what he was about. First day we met we all wrote Common People, second day we wrote Lucky Again. In December of last year we went back in again, finished those ones, wrote and produced 3 others that are also on this album. It was the studio line-up of dreams, @mrfredball @jmoon1066, @riley_mac. Shouts to Louis for letting us do our thing, letting a dork like me come write some weird lyrics and weird melodies, trust us to shape the vision that he had. These last few years were dark at times, but it was moments like that where I remembered why I’m obsessed w music and why it’s all I’ve ever understood. incredibly proud of the work, Holding on to Heartache is genuinely one of my most favourite songs I’ve ever been a part of.
Also I was reading something about the album and it mentioned something about the gospel choir on the bridge of that song… nah man thats’s just 200 stacked of me singing super super high in the studio out back of Fred’s house😂]
