James Morrison is a major sensation in the U.K., but he’s basically starting fresh in the U.S. And that’s just fine with him. His most recent album “The Awakening” is a fresh start musically for him, too, as he shifts from romantic pop to a more soulful sound.
“I just wanted to get rid of all the preconceived ideas about me — but not worry about it too much, either,” Morrison told MusicRadar. “My main goal was to come out of the studio with an album I could be proud of, and if it didn’t do well, I’d still feel the same way; to make a proper record that people could put on and not categorize as ‘pop’ or this or that — I wanted people to just ‘get’ it.”
| Onstage |
| James Morrison |
| When: 7 p.m. Wednesday |
| Where: 9:30 Club, 815 V St. NW |
| Info: Sold out at press time; 9:30.com; 202-265-0930 |
That’s a brave approach when you consider that his 2006 debut album “Undiscovered” went Platinum a short time after it was released. Although many musicians would stay with the sound that won them their fan base, Morrison felt the need to move ahead musically. And it has certainly paid off in many ways, most recently this sold-out U.S. tour.
Perhaps his musical wanderlust is connected to the way he was raised, on a steady diet of such R&B masters as Otis Redding and Al Green. Now he finds singers who combine folk with soul — he mentions Amos Lee and Gavin DeGraw as among those whose sound he most admires.
So it seems somewhat natural to use that sound to takes his personal stories and craft them into his sonic statements.
“You know when you just look out the window late at night? Your mind is searching for things, you want answers. … I don’t know, but it’s like that,” he said of his songwriting. “I just play my guitar and hum a melody, and if something happens, I’ll get a rough structure together, some chords, and I’ll let my subconscious ramble out lyrics.”
That’s not to say, of course, that all critics have found his music awe-inspiring.
Though the BBC gave the albums a general thumbs up, they opined that “Morrison has a truly great album in him … but for the third time in a row, this isn’t it.”
The criticism likely doesn’t matter to Morrison, or his fans. Nor should it. Morrison is a man who truly creates music for his spiritual side.
“I wanted it to be live, I wanted it to be personal,” he said. “Just the fact that I lost my dad and had some other things going on in my life [including the birth of his first child], it made me reassess what I was doing musically. So I wanted it to be a record for me and not to fulfill any idea of what it should be.”
