I once wrote that I’d never tire of James Vincent McMorrow’s music and despite the years that have passed since making that statement, I still wholeheartedly stand by it. In a way I suppose his music is like an aged bottle of wine -- the combination of what’s inside mixed with anticipation is what makes it so special. As such you can imagine my delight when after four years of admiring his first release, it finally came time to crack open the bottle with his sophomore record, Post Tropical. In the time since his debut LP in 2010, JVM has amassed quite a following for the dreamy, atmospheric music he creates. Post Tropical is a pensive record, one that shifts focus more towards what’s behind the songs rather than what’s in them while still holding true to the core things we saw from him in the past. This album see’s him make a conscious effort to step away from many of the acoustic nuances Early In The Morning championed and into a more electronic realm where anything is possible. The result is a glorious glimpse into his musical mind and is an utterly pleasant journey from beginning to end.

On his most recent visit to Australia, we spent some time with the charming Irishman to see what he had to say about it all. Read on.

I’ve got to say -- Post Tropical is stunning. I understand you’ve been working on it for a while now, does it feel different releasing an album the second time around? It’s very different, yes. My memories of putting out an album in the past were putting out a record, no one caring than me going to work. Then slightly more people started caring and then a few more, so it was quite an even rise. This is obviously very different. Levels of expectation have risen since the first album, obviously once the first record had sold as many as it did there’s a certain amount of people in the world expecting a second one. It made for a different process, but its cool. My job now is to play it and talk about it, so right now I’m excited about that. Give me five or six months and I probably won’t want to talk about it anymore, but right now this is all new. People caring and expecting, people coming up to me and talking about how excited they are is a new thing for me. I don’t resonate on that level, I’ve never really thought about it like that. Obviously as a music fan I get excited about other people’s records, I never thought about people getting excited for mine until quite recently. 

And you’re okay with that? Yeah, I’m pretty confident in the record that I’ve made so I’m not a worrier in that sense. Just excited more than anything. Obviously you have those moments after you create something when you’re living with it by yourself for a little minute and haven’t played it for anybody where you’re like, “Am I crazy or is this good?”, so its nice to give it to people and for them to tell you that it is in fact pretty good. I’d be lying if I didn’t say there was a sense of relief. It’s not validation or anything like that, I make music because I like making music for myself, but it is a nice thing when people dig it. 

Is there a track from the record that you particularly enjoy performing at the moment? It jumps around, but at the moment the first single, Cavalier is quite nice to perform. We’ve been really enjoying it. The last two shows especially have been really fun, they were festivals, which are really tricky with an album like this because its so delicate and vivid, you lose so much of the nuance of the songs live. Cavalier is more physical and I think because of that we’re particularly enjoying playing it. The thing is, these are the first few shows that we’ve done behind this record, the first of 300 or something, so its at that point where everything is still fresh -- you’re not sure when you play a chord if its the right one, or if when you press a button on the keyboard its going to be the right one. Its tentative and quite in our heads at this point, so its hard to really enjoy them at this stage. As a track, Cavalier is quite far along in our heads because it was the first single. Its hard to say in terms of a favourite from the record though, I do listen to it a lot. It was important for me to make a record that I would want to listen too -- in the least narcissistic way possible. I think that’s a part of the job, I don’t really get musicians who don’t listen to their own albums. Be like fucking Kanye West who’s all about sitting in a room and listening to his own music. I do dig it all. There’s moments that will resonate with me from time to time depending on my mood, but that’s the point of it.

One that particularly resonates with me is Glacier -- are you able to elaborate more on that song? When it comes to what my songs are ‘about’, your guess is as good as mine. I don’t really understand that. My favourite songs are some that I don’t even know half the lyrics to, its about the general tone and feel of a song to me. People are becoming more aware of with this record than they were before, but I’m a big hip-hop guy. My background is there. I’m a drummer, and this album is a drum record where every song is based on a rhythm and a pattern. That one, (to a certain degree,) is a trap rhythm where the song came from the interaction between the snare and the hand clap. For the most part trap music is strip-club music, you know -- listen to a Juicy J record and they’re all stripper anthems and shit like that. I get these ideas in my head where I like the idea of creating a beautiful piece of music on top of something that usually wouldn’t have that. I love the idea of taking those rhythms and interactions that I love about trap music and applying it to songs that I make. So I guess that’s where the song came from -- me trying to write a trap song. It’s funny what the ear is drawn too. There’s certain things in hip-hop music that people are drawn towards and if you take those elements and apply them to other things it doesn’t always have that same affect. Then, if you talk to them about it they go “oh, yeah -- I get that”. That’s the trick, to not make what you’re doing overt. I don’t want to take the exact things that I love and just plonk them in a song. The job is to try and make them unique and special... Which is why it takes so long to do. 

How long were you working on this material then? Maybe February 2012 is when I started working on it. We were still touring the first record, the nature of it was that it just kept going and going. I think I’d started this record before my first Australia trip actually, which was March of 2012, so I’d started working on it then. It was just ideas at that point though, nothing was well formed yet. It didn’t actually become well formed until the end of 2012. 

Post Tropical definitely has similar characteristics to Early In The Morning but it does move into new territories for you. Was it where you were going with music anyway? What do you think brought about the changes? I don’t really understand how it happens. I grew up making certain types of music and listening to various types of music. I listen to different things, like I love classic songwriting but I also love the production value of a Flying Lotus record more than I love the production value of... I don’t know, any standard modern release. I’ve produced both of my records, although I wouldn’t go as far as to say the first record was produced -- I sort of just fell across the line with it. This was more of a production. Until the very end I think I was a producer more than a songwriter, so much of the record was based on instrumental sections and movements. It wasn’t until the very end that I started to tie the songs into it. That’s my world -- I understand production more than I understand songwriting, I don’t really sit and write songs. I think its easy to sit with a guitar and construct a melody and build a song out of it. Its a lot trickier to find a song in a production and to make it work, flow and stay interesting. Lyrics are less for me than for other people, I think. They come at the very end, sort of like the icing so I understand why people are so interested. The people that I admire manage to move through a song in a linear fashion but keep it interesting. They know when to make changes and when to make things move. I think that production has always been where its at for me, it’s where our art form is being pushed forward. Songwriting is songwriting, you have a classic structure that you work with which kind of bores me to a certain extend. I like the idea of trying to do things differently which isn’t really an option in songwriting. I like doing things differently then not making it overt that you’re doing it. In production world, its not like that. I genuinely don’t understand someone who wouldn’t want to delve into production because there’s so much shit that’s available to you nowadays. With the first record, I didn’t have money. I had a guitar and I had a microphone so I did what I could with that. I guess its the same with this record, I just did what I could and this was the result. 

If you could produce with anyone else in the world, who would it be and why? I mean, there’s people that I’d love to be in a room with to see how they work. I think I’d pick moments in time to see producers work. I’d like to be in the room with someone like Pharrell 10 or 12 years ago when he was, well he still sort of is, really ahead of the curve. Like some of the songs that he built, for example that first Justin Timberlake record or the first N.E.R.D record were just amazing to me. There was this moment when everything he did was gold and I’d like to see those kind of things. Even like, Timbaland when he was working on the Missy Elliot record. Logistically though, I do like working by myself. In the real world I think I like the idea of working with producers but by the time it gets to the point where I could bring someone else in I’ve already gotten so far with the ideas. There are people I love, John Congleton is a modern producer that I’ve a huge amount of admiration for, he’s brilliant. But I inevitably end up working by myself... Maybe I’m just anti-social. It’s not a dictatorial thing, I just have strange ideas musically and it take a while to make them real. If I exposed them to other people too soon they might tell me I’m a bit crazy. 

All that being said, who’s your favourite hip-hop artist at the moment? I’m a huge Drake fan. When he was working on his last record there was actually a window of time to submit stuff for it, which I highly considered. Drake’s team put the call out to everyone working on a record who might remotely be in his world to submit something...

How does it feel to be in Drake’s remote world? Oh well I don’t know about that. It’s more like the world that his management are in. I have some incredible producer friends and pretty much everybody submitted a song for the Drake record. Only Sampha made the cut. Anyway, I feel like his world is very organised. I love people that curate work and he does that really well. I mean, I’m also a big Kanye fan... Even though he doesn’t make it easy. I really appreciate people that curate on a hip-hop level. Kanye’s genius I think is in his ability to segue what he does into what other people do. His new album is amazing because its 10 of the greatest production minds in music at the moment doing their thing. I’m a huge fan of them all, but no one knows they exist right now. He sort of found them all, brought them into a room together and curated it. Drake does that really well too. I think Take Care is one of my favourite albums at all time. People have this perception of him that he’s this crooner-ish, cheesy guy, which I guess he can come across as, and singing live he’s not the greatest thing in the world, but production wise on his records, he’s amazing. 

If you only had 5 albums to listen to from now until forever, what would they be? Voodoo by D’Angelo, Boxer by The National, Take Care by Drake, probably something like On The Beach by Neil Young and then... I don’t know. It’s a tricky thing to think about because when you talk about these things your mind tells you that your favourite records are the most obscure things you can think of, but I’m trying to think of the records I listen to the most consistently. Maybe something from my youth, like At The Drive In’s Relationship of Command. I feel like all that would cover the gamut of introspection.