James Vincent McMorrow Releases New Album “Grapefruit Season”: Streaming
Irish singer-songwriter James Vincent McMorrow released his fifth studio album “Grapefruit Season” on September 17, 2021 via Sony Music Entertainment UK Limited.
It is his first album since the 2017 album “True Care” in four years. The album comprises of 14-track, featuring guest appearance from Kenny Beats.
He started to make the album in 2018, recorded between Los Angeles, New York, London and Dublin, produced with Paul Epworth, Kenny Beats, Lil Silva and Patrick Wimberly (half of synth-pop duo Chairlift).
Each song is held together by his instantly-identifiable voice, an untethered musical imagination, and from dancehall to soul, country to R&B purposefully little else in its pursuit of fear-free pop music.
Initially, he planned to release the album in 2020, but it was shelved by the label twice until the summer of 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and again until September.
The album title is inspired by James Vincent McMorrow watching his mum eat grapefruit as a kid, and the idea that what's good for you may not actually be pleasurable.
James Vincent McMorrow shared on social media, “Before I started making Grapefruit Season I was definitely missing moments, always focused on the next thing and the next possibility. When I started making this album in 2018, a lot had changed for me. Not in any deliberate sense, i just started feeling like i was giving less of a fuck about what the world thought of me, and caring more about what i thought of myself. So I made songs about that, about feeling ok with the prospect of never feeling truly ok. Each song became a little island that I could populate with whatever ideas and characters I wanted, it wasn't about outside voices or pressure, it was about me and the person I was starting to know myself to be. And i fucking loved it. It got me somewhere I've always wanted to go, but honestly, wasn't sure I'd ever get to. I hope you can hear it in the work. To me when I listen to the album, for the first time it's work that feels wholly like my life, all the chaos, the nuance, all the hard turns left and right at any given moment. I'm incredibly proud of it and I still can't believe it's finally in the world, it's been such a journey. Thank you to everyone who helped me create it, i'm gonna make a separate post later just for them! Love to everyone who's been with me on all these journeys, everyone who's listened, who's going to listen. X”
James Vincent McMorrow explained track-by-track for the album via Apple Music.
“Paradise”
“Before the pandemic, another much quieter song opened this record. But I realized that was the wrong instinct. 'Paradise' just automatically felt like it set the tone. This song is about the recurring theme in this album: I've often been waiting for that signal in the sky and it's never come, and I think that in hindsight, I've missed a lot of moments as they were happening because of it. This song is about not missing those moments.”
“Gone”
“This was basically the starting point of the album. Once I had 'Gone,' we all knew I was doing that something that felt right, but different. I wrote it in 20 minutes and the lyrics never changed after that first day. Initially, it was supposed to go to someone else, but I just kept finding reasons to pull the cord. The lyric in the pre-chorus ('I give less fucks than I used to/Still give a lot of fucks') became a touchstone for pretty much everything on this record.”
“Planes in the Sky”
“I used to spend a lot of time trying to find a clever way to say something. I very much didn't want to do that on this album. We were in LA and someone in the studio started playing the bassline and I thought, 'If I don't fuck this song up, it's going to be really special.' This is in my top three favorite songs I've ever written. The guys would spin it around and around and I'd just listen to it—it's hypnotic to me.”
“Tru Love”
“I had two songs that I tried to fit together—one that I started about four years ago and then one from 2019. It didn't occur to me until April or May of 2020 that they should go together. It was almost like a problem to solve, so I gave it to [producer and guitarist] Jay Mooncie and Two Inch Punch, who I did [2017 album] True Care with. Despite me talking about giving up control, I'm still a control freak, but I gave them all of the music and just loved what they did. 'Tru Love' is quite a cheesy thing to call a song. I knew if I didn't get the instrumentation and tone right, it wouldn't land.”
“Waiting”
“I wrote this song in 20 or 30 minutes on the guitar. It's about being candid and honest—sitting in my car and crying was a real thing that happened, and it's something I'm not remotely ashamed of. I wanted to write about being frustrated that I have to wait [to release the record], having spent my whole life being told that all of my self-worth and all of my value is derived from this person that gets on the stage every night and sings for a couple of thousand people. It's not healthy, but it is what it is.”
“Poison to You”
“I don't think five or six years ago, when I started this song, I was in a position to really occupy this song's lyric—when people hear it, they'll know what I mean. It's not a very positive song. There was a period of my life—around 2012, 2013, when I was at the height of the first wave of success for me—where touring was quite toxic. And I hated being out there, while also being obsessed with the idea of being on stage every night. A lot of stuff in my life collapsed. I want people to get a sense of me in a clear, succinct way and not staring through reeds to try and catch a glimpse. I did about 10 versions of this to try and get it right, and it ended up being basically the demo.”
“We Don't Kiss Under Umbrellas Like We Used To”
“There's a tuning of a guitar called the Nashville tuning, which people would be familiar with if they think of a song like 'Holocene' by Bon Iver. It's basically just a stack of regularly tuned guitars, but you take the high strings off a 12-string guitar and you put them on a regular guitar. They literally sound like falling rain to me. If there's ever any opportunity to add a symmetry or a connection between the lyric and the song itself, I'll pursue it.”
“A House and a River”
“I write a song and then I do 40 or 50 versions of it. I need to turn over every stone on the beach. In 2020, when the album was delayed, I opened it back up. I had this idea to do something that felt more like Marvin Gaye or even Kanye West, with the drum loops. Then I had a metal drum in the studio one day and I just started playing the piano.”
“Hollywood & Vine”
“When I'm in Los Angeles and Hollywood, there's a window of time where I feel like, 'I need to live here forever,' because everything is outdoors and healthier. But then I cross over a threshold. I was standing at a street corner, Hollywood and Vine, and I was kind of looking around and I just was like, 'I need to get out of here.' And I went straight to the studio and wrote this song. I wanted it to be candid and honest and have some self-deprecating humor in it.”
“Cliché”
“This is a very rough-around-the-edges recording, relative to everything else on the album, because I did it in an hour in the studio. Play the drums, play the piano, play everything on top—that was it. I was trying to explore the notion of a cliché in the lyrics. If I'm honest, I think that there are clichés for reasons. Sometimes there's no better way to say a thing than to say it in the most nth-degree version.”
“Headlights”
“The process with this song was very convoluted. It started with a songwriter called Justin Parker, who's written with people like Lana Del Rey and Rihanna. He's an amazing, intense songwriter and a really great person to be around. He had the chorus and I wrote the lyric in the hotel overnight. Then we kind of parked it, but it had to go on a journey and just needed to keep moving, even though some people would just argue the first version was probably pretty good. It's a bit of a Frankenstein—I was just trying everything with it. I wanted it to be like if you go in at 15 seconds and then you go in at 45 seconds you're basically getting a different song.”
“I Should Go” (with Kenny Beats)
“I started this one by myself and then finished it with Kenny Beats. I got a text message out of the blue from him—we'd never met or spoken before. I was working on 'Paradise' and having a really shitty day, and the message said, 'Hi, this is Kenny Beats. “Paradise” is one of the best songs I've ever heard in my entire life.' Someone in my team had played it to him. I played him my demo of this in LA, and he just flipped it so fast. He knew exactly what I wanted. It was very out of step with the rest of the record, but I just had that desire to have something that felt kind of guitar-y and a bit edgy to me.”
“Grapefruit”
“This was the song that I had intended to open the record. If you listen to it, the way it hands off from the acoustic elements to the electronic elements in the second verse and chorus, that felt like me in my lofty way of holding people's hands through the process. But in lockdown, I realized this was where the song needed to live.”
“Part of Me”
“This song, which was made at the start of the pandemic, felt like a manipulation of me sonically and mood-wise, and I thought that was interesting. The full title was 'There's a Part of Me That Needs to Be Constantly Fucking Up,' which felt very emo. But also I'm an emo person, so why not embrace it? That said, rather than just picking up an acoustic guitar and singing that lyric, which felt a little reductive, I thought, 'Why not pitch my voice down?' Then as the song folds in on itself towards the end, it's just choirs of me singing myself off to sleep. It felt like a nice way to end the album.”
