James Vincent McMorrow

In 2023, McMorrow brought Wide Open, Horses to life—on stage. He booked two nights at The National Concert Hall in Dublin, recorded a handful of lo-fi demos, practiced the material for a week, and then hit the stage. Phones weren’t allowed, but James recorded it to “see what worked and what didn’t work.”

“I literally performed the album before it was recorded,” he explains. “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’. Without cameras, they were the best shows I’ve ever played—which is interesting because no one knew the music! Everyone was just experiencing it though. I had friends in the lobby talking to strangers. Who talks to strangers anymore? It was lovely. It was a heartening experience for everyone involved.”

Galvanized by this energy, he hit the studio and assembled Wide Open, Horses. The new single “Things we tell ourselves” – the last to come ahead of his new record - doubles as “a mantra” propelled by a hypnotic drum pattern. The cyclical, math-inflected instrumentation steadily builds as McMorrow repeats the lyrics “I’ve been thinking about how much I miss you around / If you come back, I’ll never let you down”.