James Vincent McMorrow

Today, Irish singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer James Vincent McMorrow shares his new single Things we tell ourselves,” off his forthcoming studio album, Wide Open, Horses, slated for June 14 release. The track comes on the heels of his announcement of an extensive tour across the UK, EU, and North America.

In 2023, McMorrow brought Wide Open, Horses to life—on stage. He booked two nights at The National Concert Hall in Dublin, recorded a handful of lo-fi demos, practiced the material for a week, and then hit the stage. Phones weren’t allowed, but James recorded it to “see what worked and what didn’t work.”

“I literally performed the album before it was recorded,” he explains. “The whole point was to expose the flaws and also highlight the special little moments. It was an odd experiment, but it worked great. The notion is so simple, ‘Write songs and perform them live’. Without cameras, they were the best shows I’ve ever played—which is interesting because no one knew the music! Everyone was just experiencing it though. I had friends in the lobby talking to strangers. Who talks to strangers anymore? It was lovely. It was a heartening experience for everyone involved.”

Galvanized by this energy, he hit the studio and assembled Wide Open, Horses. The new single “Things we tell ourselves” – the last to come ahead of his new record – doubles as “a mantra” propelled by a hypnotic drum pattern. The cyclical, math-inflected instrumentation steadily builds as McMorrow repeats the lyrics “I’ve been thinking about how much I miss you around / If you come back, I’ll never let you down”. The deceptively intricate single is one of the most hook-led tracks to come from the record and once again shows McMorrow’s ability to take everything that has brought him to this point and consolidate it into something that is at once reflective and anthemic.

“To me, the album is about finding relief from the cycle of life’s pressure,” McMorrow continues. “I don’t think the theory ‘modernity equals better’ holds much water these days. The more technology we add, the more unhappy everyone seems to be. I don’t want to move backwards, but I felt a sense of nostalgia and happiness in the album. It would be grandiose of me to think I could offer you some profound release through words and lyrics, but maybe I can…The job is to make a record I love and hopefully offer a respite. Maybe we can all get back to a life where we aren’t so obsessed with trying to seek out meaning from absolutely everything.”

In the end, James Vincent McMorrow simply sounds alive on Wide Open, Horses.

“I’m grateful to be here,” he leaves off. “The whole process was rebuilding myself and my connection to music, who I am, and what I wanted to be when I was starting out at 20-years-old. I struggle like everyone else does, but I’m going to appreciate the fuck out of every moment I get now. When I play shows, I want them to be shows you talk about for years. Going through hardship, I’m back to a point where I can see myself very clearly in the music and I know what I can do.”

Young Jesus

John Rossiter (a.k.a Young Jesus) was clearing trash out of a citrus orchard in Tarzana when he received a mysterious email from Shahzad Ismaily.

i was curious to reach out to Young Jesus about Milford Graves.

can you please put me in touch with them?

are they still LA based?

kind regards,

shahzad

Milford Graves was an interdisciplinary drum genius who explored connections between improvisational music, the human b… 

So, John left the orchard to meet Shahzad (Feist, Lou Reed, Arooj Aftab) for lunch. They instantly bonded, talking about improvisation, rhythm, the heart. On a lark, Shahzad invited John to New York. When John demurred, Shahzad cooked up a scheme to have John working in his garden in between sessions. Half ruse, half invitation. Shahzad The Trickster, leading them deeper into their strange journey.

They improvised whenever they were in the same town. John would work in Shahzad’s garden in New York. Back at home in Los Angeles, John met with Alex Babbitt and Alex Lappin to plant fruit trees and build paths from broken concrete. After work, they’d sit at a piano and sing their hearts out.

Songs started to form, songs about shame and grief, love and redemption. They came fast, a song a day for two weeks. It was different from past albums, which felt like years of hammering out lyrics and ideas. This one came in the wake of a long illness, where tunes came in a rush, as if they were physical, as if the body couldn’t heal without them. An almost involuntary outpouring, overrunning his usual self-consciousness.

Rossiter had to sit and transcribe without judgment: let the ideas grow on their own. Shahzad was in LA one day when John sat down at the piano and played them for him. They decided to record them at Shahzad’s Figure 8 Studios in Brooklyn – these songs would blossom into Young Jesus’ forthcoming album, The Fool.

The crew grew naturally from there. Lappin and Babbitt joined them in New York. Phil Weinrobe (Adrianne Lenker, Lonnie Holley) engineered and helped produce the songs. Aaron Roche came and sang. As the week went on, everyone grew closer, talking through the deep darkness in some of these songs. Building trust and friendship. Healing a bit. Rossiter remembers recording the tune “Rich”. How it started so uncomfortably. Too much shame, sadness. No connection between the musicians. But, slowly, people showed up. Lappin’s great aunt and uncle. Uncle Jack asked John if he’d ever talked to a therapist and everyone burst out laughing. Shahzad’s daughter. Everyone shared some food and laughed. By the end they were singing the final line of the song – “back when I was a kid” – together.

Rossiter and Lappin went back to LA to finish the songs. They guided each other in the same way they built those broken concrete paths in the garden – sometimes using a sledgehammer, sometimes using their bare hands. Shahzad and Daniel Littleton (of IDA) happened to be in LA, and they came together to do a couple takes of “Rabbit” with Pete Min at Lucy’s Meat Market. It was deeply connected music and they left the session laughing. Phil Weinrobe and Phil Hartunian (Westerman, Florist) mixed the record, former Young Jesus drummer Kern Haug mastered it.

Inner landscaping requires presence and bravery. It can get pretty dark and strange the deeper you walk into that jungle. And it’s from the absolute pits of that inner landscape that the truest music rises from.