Top 64 Quotes & Sayings by James Vincent McMorrow

I moved to London with this really warped sense of expectation.

The idea of trying to predict what people will or won't respond to is risky.

When I first saw Drake, I thought I was never going to like him based on the person that I saw on T.V. He's just so full on, and he's got the ladies' man thing, which isn't necessarily something that would resonate with me.

My first record was made in Termonfeckin, which is a small town on the north-east coast of Ireland. I had been in London, but it didn't click. So, at home, I didn't think about making something, just whether something could be made. There was no grand plan.

The only thing that's ever made sense to me has been sitting in the house by myself making music.

I'm very ambitious, musically - I want to create great things, not mediocre work.

I've traveled quite a lot and become a coffee nut.

I like working by myself.

More often than not, changes had to be made in order for a song to make sense, and by the end of it, it would just be something different. Lyrically, I am usually fairly confused until something is finished, and then it makes perfect sense to me.

I grew up in a place called Malahide, which is by the water and is beautifully quiet, leafy, and part serene.

I heard of this Texas studio. The owner, Tony Rancich, wanted to fly us out for the day to see the studio. I booked it the next day. He's that rare guy that is in it purely for the love of it.

I'm mostly a keep-to-myself kind of guy, but you slowly find yourself getting folded into the musical tapestry.

I didn't start playing music really until I was 18/19, so it was a relatively new thing. I didn't play much music in school.

You play a couple of shows, and these label guys come - and they leave halfway through a show. Then the phone calls just stop. And your heart is broken.

With music, it feels natural that, in my head, I can pull things apart and then put them back together very quickly.

I was never a 'sit down with a notepad and write lyrics' kind of person.

My favorite records are not easy - they're not records that reveal everything to you the first time out.

I don't know if I'm attention deficit, but I certainly am easily distracted by other things.

All the really good guitar players - Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, or even Bert Jansch or John Martin - I love all those people. But I didn't start out thinking that I would be a guitar player. In the beginning, I played the guitar so I could sing. I mainly concentrated on my voice.

You can batter your guitar, and it won't distort too much, which is important for me because I play with my hands a lot - I don't really play with picks.

You just wake up and make music.

I didn't really learn how to play guitar until I was in college.

I don't function well in certain aspects of society, and you can read into that what you will.

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.

I don't know about folk music. I play guitar, so there's a feeling I make folk music.

I have no interest in making music that's built for an antique shop.

I just essentially stayed at home for three years and just learned to play as many instruments as I could and listened to as many singers as I could. Like, when I got to about 19/20, I started listening to singers. I normally just listened to bands. Now I listen to a lot of old singers, not a lot of new stuff.

I'm learning on the guitar all the time.

My mum was a big fan of E.L.O. and Elvis Costello. She used to play that, consistently, all the time when we were kids. And my dad, he would claim to be a singer... You know, he loves singing, and he used to sing a lot when he was a kid and at parties and stuff like that. So I come from a very party-musical family.

It bothers me when musicians listen to music from the '60s and try and recreate it. Those people weren't trying to recreate music from the '20s. Why do it?

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.

I have some vivid memories of walking around as a child with a cassette tape.

It's like half the campaign of selling a record is trying to convince people that you're an artist. Well, I am an artist. This is what I do.

You get one chance to make an impression, and coasting through is a disservice.

I like what I like, I don't like what I don't like, and I'm very bad at toning myself down.

I remember always looking forward to listening to country music in the car with my mother, and it wasn't even something I enjoyed in the sense of music, but just being around music itself was enough.

I think it's safe to say that if you talk to anybody in Ireland, they'll have a passing knowledge of the guitar. It was something that I couldn't get away from when I was younger: guitars played in shops and parties, just everywhere.

I've got an Avalon guitar - that's the company that used to be Lowden. They come out of Ireland, and they're like these folk kind of guitars. You can pick 'em, you can strum 'em - they're quite good.

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!

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.

I want to talk about things that are tangible and real to me, but I also want to do them in a way that's poetic and artistic.

You get one chance to make an impression and coasting through is a disservice.

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.

I approach every show from the same fundamental perspective: this is a conversation, and my job is to make people leave the show feeling like they've seen something singular. It's not about smashing someone over the head from the jump-off.

I never looked at being a musician any different than waking up one day and wanting to be an accountant or a lawyer.

Music is a self-propelling thing. You can not rely on anybody but yourself.

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.

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.

My love of R&B and hip-hop has influenced my life not even as a musician, but generally in terms of growing up and looking to America as an inspiration.

I really wanted to approach performing live differently than most people who just play guitar and sing.

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.

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.

Life is short. I'm here to make music, I'm not here to sit on a beach. That sounds really boring to me.

I'm an introspective human being and someone who likes to be alone in a room. The idea of going out and talking to people...there's something appealing about it, but also there's something that feels alien to me, as a cynical Irish man.

Sometimes my hands they don’t feel like my own; I need someone to love, I need someone to hold.

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.

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.

When I started out making music I thought it was about thrills and adding layers, but I realized I want to focus on saying the most with the least.

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.

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.