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hannahssimblr · 6 months ago

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“Come on!” Jen giggles, “Just one! One little eeny-weeny teeny puff!”

“No! Get it away!”

With one hand locked behind my neck, she tries to slot a joint into my mouth. I gently but firmly peel her hands off me. “This is the textbook definition of peer pressure.”

“Oh, you should tell your parents what’s happening to you. They’ll think I’m evil.”

“They already half think that.”

“Come on!”

“I’ll vomit.”

“You might not this time. It might be different.”

“There’s something deeply insane about that statement.”

“Here!” Shane interjects, holding his hand out for the joint. “Give it to me, sure it’s only wasted on him.” He pops it between his lips, and when he smokes it, the end crackles, a dot of smouldering light in the dark.

Standing around watching my friends get stoned has been a regular fixture of the summer. We spend most of these long, lazy evenings hanging out in some unkempt corner of the caravan park, where the sun’s warmth lingers on the fractured tarmac and damp beach towels are drying over the wire fence around the tennis court.

Last night, some man in his thirties complained that our chatting was disturbing his kids’ bedtime and that he could smell the weed smoke inside his caravan. Except he didn’t call it weed. He called in ganja, and when he went back inside, we snickered about it until he hissed out of the window that he was going to phone the police.

So tonight I am standing around watching my friends get stoned in town instead. It took me forty-five minutes to cycle in to meet them, and my reward for that is the ends of the Chinese takeaway that they didn’t finish and a wonky joint being forced into my mouth.

“Fuck, that’s shite,” Shane hacks out a bone-dry cough, and he pushes the joint towards Joe, who has the temerity to look offended. “Hey! My brother sold me that.”

“Did your brother fish it out of that bin at the back of the chipper?”

Joe smokes it to prove a point. “It’s lovely,” he insists, eyes watering, “I think that’s… that’s actually the nicest weed I ever had.”

“It tastes of stale crackers.”

“My brother wouldn’t sell me bad stuff! Don’t say that about-” his eyes bulge and he breaks off into wheezing coughs, doubling over with a hand clutching at his throat, “Okay, right enough,” he manages as we passively watch him struggle, “it’s a bit dry.”

Kasper is waving in the distance, doing a little half-run across the pedestrian crossing. He’s coming back from the off licence with a school bag packed so full of cans that he hasn’t been able to zip it up all the way.

“I saw Liam,” He says, eyes dancing as though he has spotted a cryptid in the woods, “And girlfriend eating at restaurant.”

“Just now?” Jen says.

“Yes, five minutes.”

They must be on a date. I wonder did he ask her to his debs. I wonder if she said yes. I wonder why I am invested.

“Oh! Cute! Maybe they’ll come and hang out.” She produces her flip phone and begins texting.

“No,” Shane protests with a waving hand, “Don’t. Don’t invite them.”

“Too late. I’ve asked her.”

“No. It’s weird! I don’t want her to see me stoned.”

“She knows you smoke weed.”

“She doesn’t.”

“Well, she’s about to find out.”

My stomach does strange things at the thought of seeing Evie again. It’s ridiculous and makes little sense because she’s just some random girl who hangs out with Kelly Healy. It would be easier to dismiss this sensation as weird hunger pangs if I hadn’t eaten less than half an hour ago, so instead, I conclude I am experiencing a sudden onset anxiety disorder and concentrate on ignoring it.

When she arrives about fifteen minutes later, I ignore the feeling even harder. She is smiling, but Liam is not. He drags his feet behind her, pointedly miserable, while Evie drifts over and hugs Jen, oblivious to him.

I’m there too, somehow, holding out my arms to hug her. I make sure it’s brief, because I am still somewhat attempting to be nice to Liam, and suspect he considers my touching or looking at Evie in any way to be bullying. I give him that awkward, closed-lip smile afterwards, and he does the same in return.

The smell of Evie’s jasmine shampoo lingers in my nose even after she is gone.

“What happened to your face?” Shane asks her. She goes pink and wipes a knuckle under her eye. “Nothing happened. Kelly did my makeup.”

A laugh bubbles from his lips. “Well, you look mad.”

All I noticed was the dark makeup on her eyes and some lipstick. It’s not exactly shocking stuff.

Jen rolls her eyes as she takes the joint from Joe. “Don’t mind him. You look lovely as usual.” She takes a long, luxurious drag. “You want?”

“Ah, no. She can’t have any,” Shane pushes Jen’s arm away. “I wouldn’t let Evie do any of this stuff. She’s only a baby.”

Jen doesn’t rest, she just swings her arm to Liam instead. “How about you?” And I wonder if the quality is really so bad that she’s offering it to him. I feel it’s just as good in the rubbish bin. Smirking, I catch eyes with Evie, who is trying her hardest to look serious, and wonder if she is thinking about the story I told her about him at the gallery yesterday. The memory of her guilty laughter makes me feel like I might lose my cool completely.

Liam brushes some curls across his forehead and straightens up haughtily. “No thanks. I’m probably not going to stay for long, anyway. I have to get up at six for work.” He takes his phone out of his jeans. “Actually, I think I’m going to text my dad to come and get me now, so if you want a lift, Evie, you can come.”

“No,” she says, a little too quickly. “I think I’m going to stay.”

His brow furrows. “Will you just get a taxi then or what?”

“We’ll get her home safely,” I say, and a rigidity comes over Liam. He won’t look at me, and a muscle pops in his cheek.

“Will you? But sure, you’re all stoned.”

“I’m not. She’ll be fine with us.”

“Okay,” he says, though it’s clear it’s not at all, but what does he expect? You can’t exactly force a girl who is so clearly repelled by your presence to hang out with you. In fact, Evie spends the next half hour chit-chatting with Jen and ignoring him while he sulks in the background, waiting for his dad to collect him. When he leaves they exchange awkward goodbyes, and she continues as she was, as though she’s already forgotten he was with her. I should probably feel bad for him, but I am oddly triumphant.

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#lucky boy 2010 #LMAO Liam's shoes #idk how universal this is but loads of teenage boys here only have one 'nice' pair of shoes and it's the pair they wear with their uniform #so actually not nice at all #usually slip-on and scuffed #but around this time you still needed a certain dress code to enter some establishments #so the brown shoe/bootcut jeans combo lives on #irish fashion history for you #i can tell you more about the bootcut jeans that were leather from the knee down too #tw: drugs #tw: alcohol

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dreamings-free · 1 day ago

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James Vincent McMorrow: ‘I’ve been building back a version of me that made me happy rather than crying every night’

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 he needed after his record-label disappoinment

The Irish Times | Sat Nov 30 2024 by Ed Power

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.”

Finding his way out of the weeds involved putting out The Less I Knew, a mixtape of tracks, in 2022, and, in June 2024, Wide Open, Horses, the official follow-up to Grapefruit Season. It’s a fantastic reboot from an artist who has found his way into the light once again. The album showcases McMorrow’s propulsive voice – imagine a goth Bee Gees – and his ability to turn a diaristic observation about a tough day into musical quicksilver, as he does on White Out, a blistering ballad that draws on his experience of suffering a panic attack while out at the shops (“white out on the city street … pain comes from strangest places”).

He workshopped the project with two concerts at the National Concert Hall in Dublin in March 2023, performing the as-yet-unfinished record all the way through. The risk of something going amiss was significant – which was why he did it in the first place.

“Those shows, that process was me very much back on my bullshit,” he says, meaning that, having tried to fit into a corporate structure, he was embracing his old idiosyncratic methods once again.

“I’m the worst sort of career musician in a lot of ways. I do the weird thing. I like doing things that make me interested selfishly. ‘I’m engaged with this process.’ ‘The stress of this is making me feel the way that I want to feel.’ And I’d lost that. Doing those two shows was me doing something where I was, like, ‘There’s stakes to this’ ... ‘If I f**k this up, people are going to see it.’ That brings out the best in me.”

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.”

James Vincent McMorrow’s new single is Glu. He plays Vicar Street, in Dublin, on Monday, December 2nd, and Tuesday, December 3rd; Black Box, Galway, on Thursday, December 5th; and Set Theatre, Kilkenny, on Saturday, December 7th

This article was amended on December 2nd, 2024, to correct the name of Louis Tomlinson’s second album

#I love this so so much #james vincent mcmorrow #he’s such lovely things to say #about louis #faith in the future #lt collaborators #songwriting #the greatest #holding on to heartache #lucky again #irish times #30.11.24 #article #music industry #columbia records #long post #ed mention #eating disorder tw #m

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