James Vincent McMorrow Quotes
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I grew up in a place called Malahide, which is by the water and is beautifully quiet, leafy, and part serene.
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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.
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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.
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With music, it feels natural that, in my head, I can pull things apart and then put them back together very quickly.
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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.
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I moved to London with this really warped sense of expectation.
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Sometimes my hands they don’t feel like my own; I need someone to love, I need someone to hold.
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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!
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You get one chance to make an impression and coasting through is a disservice.
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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.
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I don't know if I'm attention deficit, but I certainly am easily distracted by other things.
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I'm learning on the guitar all the time.
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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.
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I was never a 'sit down with a notepad and write lyrics' kind of person.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I like what I like, I don't like what I don't like, and I'm very bad at toning myself down.
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I really wanted to approach performing live differently than most people who just play guitar and sing.
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Music is a self-propelling thing. You can not rely on anybody but yourself.
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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.
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Life is short. I'm here to make music, I'm not here to sit on a beach. That sounds really boring to me.
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I have some vivid memories of walking around as a child with a cassette tape.
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I never looked at being a musician any different than waking up one day and wanting to be an accountant or a lawyer.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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My favorite records are not easy - they're not records that reveal everything to you the first time out.
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