James Morrison reveals how he's mending broken strings with new album release

Eight months into recording his fourth album, Higher Than Here, James Morrison downed tools and walked away. “It wasn’t working,” the singer says. “It was all style over substance, and I didn’t like it.” It wasn’t just the pressures of fatherhood that were weighing down on him, nor was it the fact that, after four years away from music, his territory had been overtaken by young pups like Ed Sheeran, George Ezra, Sam Smith and James Bay.

“In the space of three years, I lost members from three generations of my family: my father, my brother, my nephew,” he says. “Spiritually, I had the wind kicked out of me. I stopped believing the world was good.”

His father had died first, of liver complications brought on by alcohol addiction. Morrison (pictured below) did much of his mourning on his 2011 album, The Awakening. Then his brother had died, at 44, and his nephew at 21. He declines to go into details, out of respect for family members. But songwriting was the last thing on his mind. His resolve, he says, was broken.

“My whole upbringing had been negative, pretty much: never much money in the house, didn’t know where the next meal was coming from, all that stuff, but then I got out of it, I became James Morrison, singer songwriter, I had this new lease of life, and I finally felt OK about things… and then it all started to go wrong again.”

He says all this in one long breath, not looking at me. Instead, his gaze is trained into the middle distance, the detail around his eyes making him look older than his 31 years. He began to feel – not depressed, he insists, but not quite right. “I was just feeling, I don’t know, shit about myself, and I had to do something. But I didn’t know what.” Ultimately, he found a “spiritual lady” who ran a practice not 10 minutes from his front door in rural Gloucestershire. He promptly booked a session.

“I had to figure out why I was feeling so weird, why it felt like there was something on my shoulders holding me back. Anyway, so this lady told me I had to balance out the feminine with the masculine.” The feminine part of his brain, he explains, is the creative side, “and I was using that in my music, but she said I wasn’t really using my masculine side. She told me to go away and do something masculine: sports, weights, whatever…”

He took up snowboarding, and boxing. He bought himself a motorbike. He went on long rambling walks with his (male) dogs. “And it helped, it really did. I started to feel better.”

In time, he returned to the studio, and now the songs came. Higher Than Here is his most heartfelt record yet. On the opening track, “Demons”, he sings: “I close my eyes and talk to God/ Pray that you can save my soul.” The title track careens joyfully into something that sounds suspiciously like gospel, and elsewhere he sings: “For the first time in my life I feel I’ve done something right.”

“I’d spent a long time tormenting myself, feeling horrible,” he says. “I was a pain in the arse to live with. But I was just trying to find my self-worth again. It’s been difficult. I mean, I’ve been away a long time, and there are all these others out there now – Hozier, Paolo Nutini, Ed and James and all the rest. They’ve inspired me, and they’ve made me want to get competitive.” He looks at me now, and his smile is one-third wince. “There are a lot of male singer songwriters around at the moment, aren’t there?”

James Morrison was 21 when he released his debut album, Undiscovered. He had an appealingly raspy voice – the result of whooping cough as a baby – which helped lift his songs from the humdrum towards the memorable. The album sold two million copies around the world, and established him, with James Blunt, as the UK’s chief purveyor of middle-of-the-road, blue-eyed soul.

But while Blunt seemed to take well to fame, Morrison didn’t. He cowered. “I was embarrassed, to be honest. I’d always felt very unimportant growing up, so to become suddenly recognisable, in the limelight, was a difficult thing. I felt like a rabbit in the headlights, and I wasn’t sure I had earned it.”

Pressure came from his record company to follow the album up quickly, ideally with more of the same. Morrison politely complied. In 2008, he released Songs for You, Truths for Me, which did indeed offer more of the same, and included a rather deathless duet with Nelly Furtado called “Broken Strings”. “I was trying to write songs to fulfil the radio needs of the record company,” he says now.

By 2011’s The Awakening, he was busy dealing with his father’s death and also writing songs about relationship issues he was having with his partner, Gill. They had recently had a baby, and a hectic touring schedule was making the singer an absent father. “I went away when our little girl was one, and basically came back when she was three. That wasn’t good. I wanted to be a good father. That was more important to me than my career.”

He and Gill have ironed out their problems now, he says, and he has found the right balance. “I do have an ego, I suppose,” he says, blushing, “and part of me does want to be a legend, to be remembered as a great male vocalist. But I’m not in any rush. I’m just happy I’m comfortable in myself at last. I feel I’ve earned my place. I didn’t once, but I do now.”

‘Higher Than Here’ is released on 30 October