James Vincent McMorrow Quotes

“I like what I like, I don't like what I don't like, and I'm very bad at toning myself down.”

— James Vincent McMorrow

I don't know if I'm attention deficit, but I certainly am easily distracted by other things.

— James Vincent McMorrow

My mum was a big fan of E.L.O. and Elvis Costello. She used to play that, consistently, all the time when we were kids. And my dad, he would claim to be a singer ... You know, he loves singing, and he used to sing a lot when he was a kid and at parties and stuff like that. So I come from a very party-musical family.

— James Vincent McMorrow

I don't function well in certain aspects of society, and you can read into that what you will.

— James Vincent McMorrow

“You get one chance to make an impression, and coasting through is a disservice.”

— James Vincent McMorrow

“I have some vivid memories of walking around as a child with a cassette tape.”

— James Vincent McMorrow

I'm very ambitious, musically - I want to create great things, not mediocre work.

— James Vincent McMorrow

“I'm mostly a keep-to-myself kind of guy, but you slowly find yourself getting folded into the musical tapestry.”

— James Vincent McMorrow

I've traveled quite a lot and become a coffee nut.

— James Vincent McMorrow

“I don't know about folk music. I play guitar, so there's a feeling I make folk music.”

— James Vincent McMorrow

I'm learning on the guitar all the time.

— James Vincent McMorrow

“The idea of trying to predict what people will or won't respond to is risky.”

— James Vincent McMorrow

“You play a couple of shows, and these label guys come - and they leave halfway through a show. Then the phone calls just stop. And your heart is broken.”

— James Vincent McMorrow

I was never a 'sit down with a notepad and write lyrics' kind of person.

— James Vincent McMorrow

“I didn't really learn how to play guitar until I was in college.”

— James Vincent McMorrow

I like working by myself.

— James Vincent McMorrow

“I never was the front man in any bands I played in when I was in college, and I always learned music by myself at home.”

— James Vincent McMorrow

“All the really good guitar players - Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, or even Bert Jansch or John Martin - I love all those people. But I didn't start out thinking that I would be a guitar player. In the beginning, I played the guitar so I could sing. I mainly concentrated on my voice.”

— James Vincent McMorrow

“Food in Dublin has gotten immeasurably better than it was. When I was a kid, there weren't a lot of options. Now you're overwhelmed with options.”

— James Vincent McMorrow

“I didn't start playing music really until I was 18/19, so it was a relatively new thing. I didn't play much music in school.”

— James Vincent McMorrow

“I grew up in a place called Malahide, which is by the water and is beautifully quiet, leafy, and part serene.”

— James Vincent McMorrow

I have no interest in making music that's built for an antique shop.

— James Vincent McMorrow

“I moved to London with this really warped sense of expectation.”

— James Vincent McMorrow

“It's like half the campaign of selling a record is trying to convince people that you're an artist. Well, I am an artist. This is what I do.”

— James Vincent McMorrow

My favorite records are not easy - they're not records that reveal everything to you the first time out.

— James Vincent McMorrow

“The only thing that's ever made sense to me has been sitting in the house by myself making music.”

— James Vincent McMorrow

“With music, it feels natural that, in my head, I can pull things apart and then put them back together very quickly.”

— James Vincent McMorrow

“You just wake up and make music.”

— James Vincent McMorrow

“I think it's safe to say that if you talk to anybody in Ireland, they'll have a passing knowledge of the guitar. It was something that I couldn't get away from when I was younger: guitars played in shops and parties, just everywhere.”

— James Vincent McMorrow

“I heard of this Texas studio. The owner, Tony Rancich, wanted to fly us out for the day to see the studio. I booked it the next day. He's that rare guy that is in it purely for the love of it.”

— James Vincent McMorrow

“I just essentially stayed at home for three years and just learned to play as many instruments as I could and listened to as many singers as I could. Like, when I got to about 19/20, I started listening to singers. I normally just listened to bands. Now I listen to a lot of old singers, not a lot of new stuff.”

— James Vincent McMorrow

“I remember always looking forward to listening to country music in the car with my mother, and it wasn't even something I enjoyed in the sense of music, but just being around music itself was enough.”

— James Vincent McMorrow

“I've got an Avalon guitar - that's the company that used to be Lowden. They come out of Ireland, and they're like these folk kind of guitars. You can pick 'em, you can strum 'em - they're quite good.”

— James Vincent McMorrow

“It bothers me when musicians listen to music from the '60s and try and recreate it. Those people weren't trying to recreate music from the '20s. Why do it?”

— James Vincent McMorrow

“More often than not, changes had to be made in order for a song to make sense, and by the end of it, it would just be something different. Lyrically, I am usually fairly confused until something is finished, and then it makes perfect sense to me.”

— James Vincent McMorrow

My first record was made in Termonfeckin, which is a small town on the north-east coast of Ireland. I had been in London, but it didn't click. So, at home, I didn't think about making something, just whether something could be made. There was no grand plan.

— James Vincent McMorrow

“When I first saw Drake, I thought I was never going to like him based on the person that I saw on T.V. He's just so full on, and he's got the ladies' man thing, which isn't necessarily something that would resonate with me.”

— James Vincent McMorrow

“You can batter your guitar, and it won't distort too much, which is important for me because I play with my hands a lot - I don't really play with picks.”

— James Vincent McMorrow

“Sometimes my hands they don't feel like my own; I need someone to love, I need someone to hold.”

— James Vincent McMorrow

I think sitting in the car with your parents and listening to music is an essential to growing up.

— James Vincent McMorrow

Music is really everything I know. To be honest every experience I've ever had has been brought up from music and everything I do is because of music. I don't know anything else, I think about music before I go to sleep and it just really is everything that I am.

— James Vincent McMorrow

“I feel the reasons my songs might seem dark is because of how I viewed the situations I was in and it was just something I always felt like documenting.”

— James Vincent McMorrow

“I write songs on a course of time that's comfortable for me. I would probably never write a song from start to finish in the course of a day, hell probably not even a week. My mind is always going to change and my emotional state will also change on a daily basis.”

— James Vincent McMorrow

“Its always important to fall back on your instincts and core beliefs and that was pretty hard for me to do but trusting in my self the way I trusted that if I were to sit at a piano for two hours and I was going learn something, that trust I'd put in myself really helped me get through it. For five to six months I just wrote songs and believed they would turn out to be things I could be proud of and be happy.”

— James Vincent McMorrow

I feel if I wanted to be taken seriously I have to study music the same way someone who wants to be a doctor would study medicine. You have to know your craft and by doing so I had to make sure to ignore what people were thinking as well.

— James Vincent McMorrow

“I never looked at being a musician any different than waking up one day and wanting to be an accountant or a lawyer.”

— James Vincent McMorrow

“I really wanted to get that dynamic on the record onto people and let them know it wasn't just a simple strumming along the guitar type of thing without ramming it down their throats so I kind of went the opposite way and sang some of the songs more quietly which allowed for the louder parts to sound as though there were more. It was the only way singing those songs made sense to me.”

— James Vincent McMorrow

I really wanted to approach performing live differently than most people who just play guitar and sing.

— James Vincent McMorrow

“At the end of the day music is a grind. You're constantly working at it and even with playing shows as well. If your schedule isn't planned right it could really throw things off, but honestly at the end of the day its incredible being able to go to so many places.”

— James Vincent McMorrow