james vincent mcmorrow australia tour

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James Vincent McMorrow’s Australian Tour Diary

By Nastassia Baroni

Irish musician James Vincent McMorrow showcased his sonic development from folk troubadour to r’n’b-inspired multi-instrumentalist producer, while in the country recently for the Falls and Southbound festivals. Music Feeds has the exclusive behind-the-scenes photo diary, documenting the artist’s Australian escapades.

The photo diary, which you can see below, follows the Irishman as he braces the harsh Australian summer tour schedule. Filling his time in between sets with seaside lunches, rigorous Boules tournaments and nail-biting Battleship bouts. All the while dazzling crowds with his latest offering, Post Tropical .

McMorrow confirmed earlier this year that he’s got an Australian tour pencilled in to his calendar for 2014 , adding his name to the growing list of Splendour In The Grass 2014 lineup rumours. “I’m not sure if I’m allowed to say anything,” he explained to triple j , “but I think you’ll probably see me for some shows during your winter, when it’s a freezing nineteen degrees.”

Gallery: James Vincent McMorrow’s Tour Diary. Photos and captions by Emma J Doyle.

James Vincent McMorrow Tour Diary

Photos and captions by Emma J Doyle

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About James Vincent McMorrow

James Vincent McMorrow (born 17 August 1981) is an Irish singer and songwriter. McMorrow's debut album, Early in the Morning, was released in Ireland in February 2010, and in the United States and Europe in 2011, to widespread acclaim. He made his UK television debut on BBC Two's Later... with Jools Holland on 27 May 2011. He played with Lisa Hannigan on 8 December 2011 at Dublin's Button Factory for the Choice Music Prize event.

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James Vincent McMorrow tour dates 2024

James Vincent McMorrow is currently touring across 8 countries and has 13 upcoming concerts.

Their next tour date is at Real Jardín Botánico Alfonso XIII, Universidad Complutense de Madrid in Madrid, after that they'll be at Barbican Centre in London.

Currently touring across

• 🇳🇱 Netherlands

Upcoming concerts (13) See nearest concert

Noches del Botánico

Barbican Centre

La Maroquinerie

Koninklijk Theater Carré

El Rey Theatre

Aladdin Theater

The Crocodile

Charlie White Theatre, Mary Winspear Centre

Red Bird Brewing

Myer Horowitz Place

All together Now

Past concerts

Victoria Park

National Concert Hall

View all past concerts

Recent tour reviews

James Vincent McMorrow could stand alone and sing acapella and he would still leave audiences captivated. His falsetto never cracks, his set lists easily flow from one song to the next and his audience interaction in between feels like an old friend. He comes across like he has no idea how good he is, which is endearing and makes his talent all the more admirable. He is one of the greatest artists I have ever, ever heard, and I feel honored to have gotten to see him perform live.

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Fucking amazing. I have not seen that great of a live performance in so long. I was captivated 24/7. A must see! They were jet-lagged, and that did not stop any of them! The venue worked well with them, and I loved how JVM opened for themselves. I got to see so many songs performed live, and I left absolutely on Cloud 9.

I've seen JVM twice now and he is always incredible. The voice on James in incomparable-- not to mention the energy of his live performances are so natural and beautiful. Each album is better than the next and I can't wait for him to come back around!!! <3

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Irish America

The New Irish Songwriter: James Vincent McMorrow

March 13, 2012 by Leave a Comment

A spring tour in Australia on the immediate horizon, thoughts brewing of a sophomore album and the world at his feet, James Vincent McMorrow has stormed onto the scene from virtual nothingness in the last year. It was January of last year that the Dublin native’s debut album, Early In the Morning, found its way to my desk for review, and I was completely stunned.

In many ways, McMorrow is Ireland’s answer to the growing success of the ethereal indie bands in the vein of Bon Iver and Band of Horses. The tone of his voice is spectacularly warm and his arrangements are elegant but simple. I sat down with McMorrow this summer in the middle of his American tour with famed Irish band BellX1. Various BellX1 and McMorrow band members wandered in and out of the hotel lobby, all commenting on the New York summer heat and asking each other the schedule. “Are we in Boston tomorrow?” “Back to New York on Friday?” For many Irish artists, McMorrow explained, touring America is a whole new world.

“I see it as a big challenge. Places like France, Germany, the UK, where [Early In the Morning] has been doing well, you can drive top to bottom of the country in a day. In America you can’t even do a tenth of it. So I think if you ask any musician, they will always say they want to do well in America, it’s a big nut to crack.”

And in America, the perception of the Irish musician is ever changing. It has been over ten years since Damien Rice’s O coined for him the Irish singer-songwriter image. After series of copycats and attempts to capitalize on the success of acts like Rice and The Frames, it seemed the quiet and tortured poets of Ireland were all but spent. McMorrow comes in a new wave of the Irish singer-songwriter. He joins the world stage with Lisa Hannigan and Foy Vance, who have all taken their niche to different places, exploring new genres of influence.

“Well, in Dublin there’s always guys running around with guitars,” McMorrow joked. “When there were a few about 10 years ago who were really successful, it then meant there were a lot of less original versions of them. I’m glad that isn’t so much happening anymore… It’s great now to come to these new places and see the Villagers or Lisa Hannigan doing well. To come to a place and your friends are already there.”

McMorrow’s story of success begins, of all places, at the Dublin Airport. He began playing drums at the age of fifteen as a hobby. Then after college, took a job pushing trolleys at the airport while he explored drumming in heavy metal bands. Does he think it’s strange to transition from heavy metal to the much softer, folk sound he’s embraced?

“On paper it does,” he laughed, “but I think if you asked anyone they’d say that the music they listened to as a teenager is a lot different from what they end up making.”

McMorrow picked up guitar at 19 and began experimenting vocally with different sounds. Then in the winter of 2010, he stole away to a house in the nearby Irish Sea, alone for half a year to compose and record what would become Early In the Morning.

“Recording it was really unspectacular.  I just wanted somewhere quiet and the house was offered to me. Someone could’ve offered me an apartment in New York and I would’ve taken it if it were quiet. I just wanted somewhere with no silly distractions like computers and people. I’ve always been a fan of my own company.”

That place ended up being a small house outside Drogheda. He ran alongside the sea almost every day and spent the better part of five months isolated, writing and recording. McMorrow’s songwriting was influenced in large part by the atmosphere he was suddenly very alone in. He learned and played all of the instrumentation on the album.

McMorrow allowed the changing atmosphere to influence the movement of the album. “I got there in January so it was very dark and wet, sort of bleak … It’s certainly easier to sit down at do a drum track when it’s like that.” The collection of books he brought with him dictated the album further “I had a big collection of all of Steinbeck just before I went out there and read all his little stories like “The Pearl” so that influenced me.

“A lot of the writers I like are really descriptive about nature.” Nature is most certainly the theme of Early In the Morning, almost every song packed with stirring descriptions in the lyrics. For McMorrow, tackling lyrics is the last piece of the songwriting puzzle.

McMorrow’s unusual writing process requires recording and composing to become one and same. “I need to be able to hear [my music] back. I have to record and write at the same time. I’m not someone who can just sit down with a guitar. I find if I write that way it becomes too linear – the melody is linear. I just prefer if I can hear it back, then I can take things and build them, the little melodies or structures in my head. And the lyrics come later.”

When Early In the Morning was released, McMorrow suddenly found himself in need of a band and a tour manager. The world of professional musicianship started to unfold before him. “I’m a big fan of my own company,” he joked, but also seriously spoke about his ongoing struggle to release creative control, something he has learned to deal with much more as touring becomes the dominant lifestyle for McMorrow. He needed a band to tour.

“I found it really hard with just a guitar to duplicate what I was doing,” he said. “None of us [in the band] are really spectacular players. I didn’t want anything too slick sounding because I think a band should sound different every night.”

Now with a second album well in the works with a release date pending, McMorrow has quickly become another overnight Irish songwriting sensation.

“For such a small country, I think Ireland really punches above its weight when it comes to art and music,” he mused. The world certainly should turn its ear Ireland’s way.

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JAMES VINCENT MCMORROW

Australian tour december 2013/jan 2014.

James Vincent McMorrow announces Sydney and Melbourne sideshows this December – January!

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James Vincent McMorrow: 'All of my biggest shows, I was fairly lit, I was pretty jarred'

James Vincent McMorrow

When singer-songwriter James Vincent McMorrow thinks back to his early years of success, the memories carry the dark glow of too much merlot and the sinister haze of hangovers that make you question the existence of God and the meaning of life.

“The trappings and the idea of what it is to be a singer-songwriter are often quite tortured and involve a glass of wine when you’re writing,” says the 39-year-old Dubliner. “My first album was very much based on that. As it got bigger and bigger – and to cope with the “bigness” of it all – drink became this thing. I was using it to cover a lot.” McMorrow is speaking from the terraced Dublin home he shares with his artist wife, Emma, and their two year-old daughter, Margot. It’s a week before he is due to perform to a socially-distanced audience of 500 at Dublin’s Iveagh Gardens – a pilot concert that will hopefully mark another stage along the return to normality (he’s predicting tears, from both performer and punters).

The Iveagh Gardens also provides McMorrow with the opportunity to road test material from his upcoming fifth LP. Released on July 16, Grapefruit Season is a succulent smorgasbord of a record. Packed with pop songs, luxuriant r’n b and confessional ballads, it’s one of those rare albums that has the potential to have near universal appeal. Whether a pop, indie or rock fan, there is something here worth exploring.

It is, in addition, the latest milestone in his life after booze. McMorrow gave up alcohol, more or less, in 2012. His first sober tour was of Australia. Every night he would go on stage in front of a crowd of 500 or so, feeling absolutely petrified. Drinking was a crutch. Could he stand straight without it?

“All the greatest moments of my musical life had been associated with alcohol,” he says. “ All of my biggest shows, I was fairly lit. Most of my time writing and making music, I was pretty jarred.” But he has grown to appreciate McMorrow 2.0 – the bright-eyed, sober version of himself. It’s not that he never, ever drinks. He prefers, though, to keep a clear head and feels that his songwriting has benefitted.

He is certainly operating at the peak of his powers on Grapefruit Season. Listening to it is like losing yourself in an irresistible Spotify playlist. One moment McMorrow, who is unconstrained by the genre boundaries that too often shackle Irish artists, is delivering minimalist r’n b. The next he’s filtering Motown through a sci-fi lens, singing in a falsetto that splits the difference between Justin Bieber and Radiohead’s Thom Yorke.

“I’m speaking to the people in the middle,” he says of his approach to songwriting. “The people what aren’t going on Instagram and acting like they’ve got it all together. I’m a mess of a human being.” 

Vincent McMorrow has been on the brink of the big time for the last several years. He’s been nominated for the Choice Music Prize for Best Irish album. Hipster bible The Fader has praised him as a “minimalist r’n b auteur” ; Mojo heralded his 2015 LP, We Move, “warm, slick and modernist”.

Game of Thrones has given its blessing, too. His cover Chris Isaak’s Wicked Game featured on the trailer to the series’s sixth season. That same year he was introduced to pop fans when his vocals were sampled on Drake’s Views (they are mutually acquainted with the same producers).

Yet for those highlights, McMorrow still has the aspect of an unknown quantity. Early on, he zealously guarded his privacy. However, he has since come to worry that this might lead to the impression that he was “detached” from his own songs. An opaque figure, who almost existed outside the emotional landscape of his music.

The truth is that he was shy and unsure of himself (why he drank). A crossroads was 2016’s We Move and the track I Lie Awake Every Night. Produced by Weeknd and Post Malone collaborator Frank Dukes, it pulled back the shutters on a dark time from his adolescence.

“Have you come here to save me?,” he sings. “Have you come here to waste my time again?” Though the subject matter was ambivalent McMorrow was clearly emoting from a place of great pain. In a press release he explained I Lie Awake Every Night was about an eating disorder he’d suffered through while in secondary school. It was a milestone for his career, and also for him as a person.

“I was thinking a lot about how sick I was as a kid and how debilitating it was – and how I was in hospital for a long time,” he says. “And then it kind of went away. I went back to school in fifth year, around 2000 or 2001. I found music and found a group of people. And I thought, ‘oh I have this under control’.

“But the word “control” stuck with me. The eating disorder was born out of a desire to control myself when the world isn’t something I feel I can control. And then music became this thing I was really and actively and quiet aggressively controlling.” 

Writing I Lie Awake Every Night opened his eyes to the fact that he had an issue with surrendering ownership. The song became a conduit for the unprocessed pain from his adolescence. It was also a mirror in which he caught reflections of himself as a person still working through deep-seated issues.

“If I hadn’t made that song and hadn’t thought about that process…It was a real revelatory moment. A key moment for me as a human being to feel comfortable and to feel accepted.” McMorrow was born in Malahide in north County Dublin. His father, from Dundalk, was a businessman who ran a meat production company. His mother was an accountant from Waterford. She was an evangelical Christian and so, for a time, was McMorrow who attended a Baptist Church in Swords with her.

Grapefruit Season marks another milestone for McMorrow. It’s his first album to be released with a major label (Sony). Until now he has financed and put out his own music – and with good reason.

In his early 20s, McMorrow was invited to audition to Universal Records, the world’s biggest record label and the most powerful of the majors (through its subsidiaries it works with everyone from U2 to Taylor Swift). The rejection crushed him. Never the most confident, he was plunged into a canyon of doubt. But with time he has come to the perspective that it was for the best.

“It would have been a disaster [had he been signed by Universal],” he says. “I’m not suggesting I was clairvoyant or smart enough to realise it. But a little bit of me was like, ‘you are going to absolutely die if you enter this process’.” 

As a young man he was, he feels, ill-suited to the music industry. “Debilitating social anxiety meant live shows were a non-starter,” he says. “And also, I had a very fragile ego. I needed to build up a certain amount of life experience and a certain knowledge of song structure and an understanding of being able to go on stage and play a song without collapsing halfway through it.” He has now reached that happy place. And he feels he understands who and what he is as an artist. 

“I believe I’m a singer-songwriter,” he says. “But I’m not a nostalgist. For me, being a singer-songwriter doesn’t always come with an acoustic guitar. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it comes with a synthesiser, sometimes a drum kit. It’s not binary. It’s a very nuanced, complicated thing.” 

• Grapefruit Season is released July 16.

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James Vincent McMorrow debuts ‘Call Me Back’ ahead of new album and tour

James Vincent McMorrow releases 'Call Me Back', a new single from his forthcoming album, with a tour spanning the UK, EU, and North America.

Irish singer-songwriter James Vincent McMorrow has unveiled his new single ‘Call Me Back’, setting the stage for his upcoming album Wide Open, Horses , scheduled for release on 14th June via Nettwerk Music Group ( pre-order here ). The artist also announced a comprehensive tour across the UK , EU , and North America this summer, including a notable performance at London’s Barbican Centre.

‘Call Me Back’ continues McMorrow’s exploration of intricate themes within his music, focusing on the subtle dynamics of relationships. James sings, “For newness / We decorate / Brand new paint / To lessen complication,” highlighting his thoughtful approach to songwriting. Musically, the track features McMorrow’s signature blend of folk influences, intricate guitar work, and harmonious vocals.

Reflecting on the new album, McMorrow shared, “To me, the album is about finding relief from the cycle of life’s pressure. I don’t think the theory ‘modernity equals better’ holds much water these days.” He aims to offer listeners a break from the relentless pursuit of meaning in modern life, hoping to provide a sense of nostalgia and happiness through his music.

McMorrow’s journey with the album included a unique live preview, performing it in Dublin before its official recording to refine the material. “I literally performed the album before it was recorded,” he noted, describing the experience as an effective experiment in bringing the music to life without digital distractions.

Wide Open, Horses marks a significant chapter in McMorrow’s career, capturing a period of personal and artistic growth. “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,” he reflects.

Following the album’s release, McMorrow will embark on a tour, bringing his new music to stages across Europe and North America:

EU/UK Tour Dates:

• June 15: Barbican Centre, London
• June 17: Maroquinerie, Paris
• June 19: Carré Theatre, Amsterdam
• June 21: Saalchen, Berlin
• July 1: Noches Del Botánico, Madrid
• August 2: All Together Now Festival, Waterford, Ireland

North American Tour Dates:

• July 15: El Rey Theatre, Los Angeles, CA
• July 16: The Chapel, San Francisco, CA
• July 18: Aladdin Theater, Portland, OR
• July 19: The Crocodile, Seattle, WA
• July 20: Vancouver Folk Festival, BC
• July 21: Mary Winspear Centre, Sidney, BC
• July 23: Red Bird Brewery, Kelowna, BC
• July 24: Myer Horowitz Theatre, Edmonton

Tickets for all shows are available now , with more details expected to follow on additional dates and venues.

Photo credit: Rich Gilligan

Keep up to date with the best in UK music by following us on Instagram: @whynowworld  and on Twitter/X: @whynowworld

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James Vincent McMorrow

James Vincent McMorrow is an indie-folk songwriter from Dublin. His writing and vocal talents attracted the attention of EMI resulting in a publishing more...

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