James Vincent McMorrow engages with songs that crave simple pleasures and pose big questions

Last year’s experimental gigs pay off as Dubliner’s new album Wide Open, Horses compares with the best of his early work but with a broader sonic palate

James Vincent McMorrow has released his seventh album, Wide Open, Horses

John Meagher

For his seventh album, James Vincent McMorrow adopted a novel approach. With a batch of new songs in his back pocket, he aired them at a pair of special concerts at Dublin’s National Concert Hall last year. Phones were outlawed. The idea, as the Dubliner made clear at the time, was to see which songs worked and which didn’t. The audience would be guinea pigs who would shape the ensuing album’s direction.

"I literally performed the album before it was recorded,” he says. “The whole point was to expose the flaws and also highlight the special little moments. It was an odd experiment, but it worked great. The notion is so simple, ‘Write songs and perform them live’.”

The result is Wide Open, Horses, an eclectic and engaging album whose songs crave peace, simple pleasures, connection, security. Big questions are posed, such as “What the f*** are any of us even doing here?/ Do we even exist at all?’, a striking line in the meditative, acoustic guitar-driven opener Never Gone. It is, apparently, McMorrow’s attempt to fight “meaningless” — his word. Eyebrows may be raised at that, but the track is uncommonly lovely.

McMorrow is a songwriter who has never been afraid to show vulnerability and that’s the case on several songs, most notably Day All the Lights Went Out. “I wasn’t ready for you to see me cry,” he sings above an evocative, textured soundtrack that features slide guitar.

The title track captures McMorrow’s sonic ambition. It begins as a comparatively countrified rumination before dissolving mid-way through into a sophisticated collage of multi-layered vocals and textured instrumentation. And, then, its final third ventures down a more experimental pathway, what an artist might release when they feel no commercial pressure.

McMorrow has had his dalliances with the big time. His We Move album from 2016, which saw him join forces with the US producer Nineteen85, felt like a song collection to deliver him a mainstream audience. It didn’t quite pan out that way and one can’t help but feel that he’s happy to remain in the margins somewhat.

That’s not to say that Wide Open, Horses hides its light. Much of this album compares with the best of his early work, but there’s a greater sonic palate now and even more determination to make the sort of music he wants to make on his own terms.

A word on the musicians present. McMorrow gave them two weeks to learn the songs before they played them at the Concert Hall. The thinking, presumably, was to help the songs sound as fresh and unlaboured as possible. He succeeds, mostly, on that front.

A documentary on the making of the album, Chaos in Atrophy, premiers on McMorrow’s YouTube page on June 20.