James Vincent McMorrow

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

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.

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.

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

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

I like working by myself.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

I'm learning on the guitar all the time.

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?

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.

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

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

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