James Vincent McMorrow Quotes

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

My love of R&B and hip-hop has influenced my life not even as a musician, but generally in terms of growing up and looking to America as an inspiration.

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

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.

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

I'm learning on the guitar all the time.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

When I started out making music I thought it was about thrills and adding layers, but I realized I want to focus on saying the most with the least.

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

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.

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.

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

I have a vision for everything that I make, but... I'm not that considerate about what I do. I do whatever is in my head and how it ends up tends to be the thing that it's supposed to be. It was never a premeditated decision.

What we understand to be profoundness, or importance, it changes. It should change. It should be this moment where you cannot believe that equalled grandness or importance.

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

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

Hip-hop has been the guiding light of my life as a musician and a music fan. It's the one common thread through all of it from the time I bought my first record probably. It's always been there.

I'm an introspective human being and someone who likes to be alone in a room. The idea of going out and talking to people...there's something appealing about it, but also there's something that feels alien to me, as a cynical Irish man.

I want to talk about things that are tangible and real to me, but I also want to do them in a way that's poetic and artistic.

The hip-hop aesthetic and the way it's produced always motivated me. Alongside that I was still wanting to make great traditional songs because I've never had any desire to rap. My love of hip-hop is driven by my love of rappers, but it was built out of my love of producers.

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.

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

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.

Life is short. I'm here to make music, I'm not here to sit on a beach. That sounds really boring to me.

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.

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

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

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

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

I'm not an L.A. guy. I don't take meetings - you know what I mean? I don't really know how to interact very well with people in L.A. because everybody's got an agenda and everybody's like, "What do you do?" "Where are you going?" Or it's like, "What do you know?" And I'm not on a grind - I was there to make music and to meet people but I wasn't hustling for anything.

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

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.

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

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

I made a note in my head to be aware of things as they were happening, because they might not happen again. Up to that point, I was not really that appreciative of what was going on, or thinking about documenting life in a plainspoken manner. I was talking about my life and writing songs, but then I would go back and listen and they were about dreams, and legends, and metaphors and that was just not my life!

I approach every show from the same fundamental perspective: this is a conversation, and my job is to make people leave the show feeling like they've seen something singular. It's not about smashing someone over the head from the jump-off.

Music is a self-propelling thing. You can not rely on anybody but yourself.

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

I do not think good art comes from comfort. While from a humanistic standpoint I would have much rather been at my home that I own, surrounded by friends and family and controlling my environment completely.

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.

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.