James Marriott rocked Glasgow’s iconic Barrowland Ballroom in a sold out show this November, where he was presented with RockSound’s Breakthrough Artist of the Year award during the Glasgow gig.
His recent album, Don’t Tell the Dog, soared to the UK number one in an experience Marriott feels has been rapid.
Brig sat down with Marriott before his Glasgow show and asked the questions his fans, some of whom had been camping outside since five in the morning, wanted to hear.
YouTube Regrets
The Brighton based singer started his career on YouTube in his final year at university, using the fame he found there to pursue his passion of music.
However, a part of him regrets getting involved in the toxic online world.
“Yeah, I regret the commentary,” Marriott explained. “It’s tough to regret commentary because it’s what got me here in the first place, but I was really mean.
“I was mean to people, sometimes, that were just trying to make things that they liked. In a way I was just punching down, which I was only really doing because it was working, and because people were telling me it was good, which is this reinforcing cycle of negativity at the end of the day.
“I try to do the opposite, I try to uplift as much as possible, and I try to keep an open mind about things, even if I’m not a fan of them myself.”
“On a personal level, I regret that, but it’s a weird thing, because I feel like one of the reasons I’m here is because I had that moment. If I could have found another way to have made it on YouTube, without doing commentary, I would have absolutely taken that route ten times out of ten.”
Now, he has completely left that world behind in favour of more positive pursuits. However, music has its own challenges, and adjusting has been difficult.
“It was tough,” Marriott admits.
“Towards the end of the YouTube stuff, I was starting to do a bit of music, but it wasn’t a direct ‘I want to be a musician, let me test the water here’.
“It was actually just ‘I would love to do music in these videos.’ I downloaded Ableton, I was playing guitar more, and I was like ‘Oh, well, I might as well do something with it, because then it’ll make the videos more fun to do’
“And then, I posted a joke song and it got 100,000 streams. So, if a joke song could, surely a serious one could also get close to that… So, it became viable for me to focus more on music.”
Putting his all into his music career wasn’t just mentally taxing. Financially, Marriott was spending all he could to try and make his musical career work.
“I was losing money a lot in the first couple years,” said Marriott, explaining a reality common for a lot of musicians.
“I was just throwing everything I had at it. Now that I’m in a much more comfortable position, fortunately, I can continue to invest in making the best possible things and having the live show be as good as it possibly can.”
“I still love doing a bit of content every now and then, especially with Will [WillNe]. Going and doing his stuff is just so easy and so fun that I never want to lose that. Both Will and I absolutely adore doing those videos, that’s the only reason we do so many of them”
Future Records
Juggling YouTube, touring, and writing is something Marriott excels at, with new songs being made even as he tours the world.
“I’m always writing,” Marriott said, smiling. “It’s my way of dealing with things, it always has been. I have some studio time booked this year, both with the band and with other writers, just to flex the muscle as much as possible.”
Somehow, Marriott has found the time among all this to write new songs for the next album which he promises will leave fans spellbound.
“I have seven songs which I consider to be the best songs I’ve ever written, and I am more confident than ever in the next record,” he says, confidently,
“I’m absolutely taking my time with it, because I want to have enough time to cook. Sometimes you write a song and a month later you hate it, but these ones, some of them were written almost a year ago, and they’re still in my head.
“All of those seven songs, I could tell you them by name, I could tell you the features of them, I could tell you the lyrics.
Those ones, for me, are going to be big, big songs on the next record.”
Favourite Songs
With such exciting promises for the next record, his own current favourite song of his is not a straight answer.
“In different scenarios, it’s different,” Marriot said, pondering.
“In terms of live, songs like ‘Ventriloquist’ and ‘Grapes’, and weirdly enough, ‘Going Postal at the Party’, are all very important songs to the live set. ‘Ventriloquist’ doesn’t get as many streams as the other songs online, it’s the opener of the show, and it’s exactly what I wanted the opener to feel like.
“It gets the excitement going in a way that I’ve really wanted to get right in an opener. Now it feels like I’m not going to beat that as an opener. So, I’d say those three come to mind in terms of the live set.”
Other than the live set, Marriott has a personal connection to a different song, he explains.
“In terms of songs that mean stuff to me, I’d say How Could I Say No. I don’t think it’s my best written song, but it was so important to me when I wrote it, and the kind of honesty in that song means a lot to me. I enjoy playing that one live, but I think it’s maybe just me that enjoys it at this point.”
Album Themes
Marriott’s Don’t Tell the Dog resonates themes of anxiety and personal struggles, with ‘How Could I Say No’ repeating the lyric “Don’t stick around, I’ll only let you down.” When asked about these themes and lyrics, Marriott revealed the emotions he experience during the album’s creation.
“I went through quite a lot while I was writing that record,” he said, quite frankly, “and, when I was a kid, I was such an attention seeker.
“My Mum told me that, when we went on holiday to France there was a German couple at the pool, and I would jump in the pool, and they would laugh, and I would get out the pool, and I’d run around to where they were again, and I’d keep jumping in.
“She said I would do it for hours, because they just kept laughing. It feels like there is an intrinsic part of my brain that has always been built towards making other people feel emotions and how important that is for me.
“That song is quite specifically about, how could I be a person that has that feeling and the fear of losing that. What if I get to a point where I can’t do that anymore? What if the negative side of it outweighs that at some point? I feel like I would feel incredibly lost.
“That song is about how no matter how bad it can be in the public eye, where you see every flaw you have, and every little feeling you have about yourself when you look in the mirror being amplified by people, how could I ever say no to this opportunity?
“It’s those two things colliding with one another. That song was felt in a very severe moment in my life, and I managed to get it across exactly in the way I wanted. That’s why I’d say it’s my favorite song of mine.
“It was never really one which anyone else involved in the album was like ‘that’s the one’. It was just one that was very specifically for me.”
Blowing Up on TikTok
Marriott’s most streamed song, Grapes, has over 18,000,000 streams on Spotify, but in no circumstances did he ever imagine it getting so big.
“It took so many rewrites, and usually, like any interview you see with a musician, they’ll be like, ‘that’s the death of a song’,” Marriott explained.
“If you rewrite it over and over again, it kills the song. I’ve only ever had rewrites with a couple of the songs that I’ve done, and Grapes was one of them. It used to be called ‘Oh No’, and the chorus used to be so boring.
“I said the ‘did nobody ever tell you grapes are better in September’ to someone, and then I immediately wrote it down, and then I just had that lyric like rolling around in my head for a while, and then I went back to write the lyrics of the other song, and I was like, ‘Oh, I could make that song the Grapes song’.
“Ever since then, it just completely locked into place, and now has become, weirdly, in my own niche part of the internet, a cultural thing within my audience, where it’s just such a well known song within my audience, even if people don’t listen to it that much.
“It’s one of those weird things, Girl in Red has a song about October, and every October it does well. I had no idea about that, and it’s something you can’t really force. Then a content creator called Vita did a eating grapes on the last day of August versus September 1st Tiktok last year, and it banged and then that kind of started this wave of grapes tiktoks, last September.
“So grapes had its biggest month last September, and then this September, everyone that felt left out from last year, did it this year, and it had an even bigger month. So, every year it becomes slightly more of a behemoth, in terms of a song to beat for me.
“It probably doesn’t help that it’s like the kind of the encore song as well. So everyone looks forward to that moment at the set.
“I’m just very honored to have a song that’s done that well. I think it’s a beautiful thing to have. So, yeah, very happy.”
Glasgow Crowds
Glasgow holds a special place in Marriott’s life, with his performance at King Tut’s sticking with him throughout his career. When Brig asked what his ‘I Made It’ moment was, he said:
“It was in Glasgow when I played King Tuts two years ago. I had a moment on stage where I just kind of started crying, where I realized I was on the other side of the country playing my music, and it was to a room of 200 people, but it was like 200 Scottish people that I’ve never met before.
“It’s not like doing a show in London or Brighton, where it’s like, ‘Oh yeah, maybe I’ve walked past a couple of these people in the street.’ These people didn’t know me, or they’d never been to an event of mine before now.
“Every time I come to Glasgow, I’m kind of filled with those memories again.
“To be able to play Barrowlands, I’ve been looking forward to this ever since. Like, King Tuts is great, and then Barrowlands is the one to play here, apparently. So yeah, really excited to be doing that.
“We purposely built a heavier set list, just with the idea of Glasgow prefer the heavier songs.
Every UK tour I do, if we miss Glasgow, a big mistake has happened, so we plan on playing it for as long as we can.
I love it here”
Legacy
Marriott spoke some words of wisdom for any young people reading, giving advice for students about how to navigate the world:
“Take risks. I’ve spoken about this on Twitter before, but there’s people that I know that have kind of gone into the kind of nine to five thing after uni, and maybe ignored some of their creative hobbies or passions to do that.
I think young people have the chance to make mistakes, and it’s okay to make mistakes, and it’s okay to fail at something for a year. I genuinely, wholeheartedly believe that, and I wouldn’t be where I was now if I didn’t do the same thing. So when I came out of uni, I was quite fortunate my final year to have started picking up the pieces of the YouTube stuff and make that work for me. But even doing music was a risk, and I think it’s good to take those risks if it means you end up doing stuff that you love”.
James Marriott’s legacy is not his music career, nor is it his YouTube career. He would like to leave behind something else:
“Legacy, I used to care so much about, but now I’m very much in the remit of just enjoying my life as much as I possibly can. I’d love to have kids one day. I want to be a really annoying, boring grandpa, and then to be like, ‘well, you should have seen me when I was playing Barrowland, Glasgow, I was on top of the world.’
I think in terms of legacy, I would care more about my direct legacy, in terms of kids and grandkids than in terms of what I leave behind with music.
I think music is mainly the kind of connections you make with people at the time that’s so special.
I don’t expect or desire my work to be revered like 300 years from now, but if I end up making something that is, maybe grapes are still in September 300 years from now, people are still talking about that, that would be great. I’ll be smiling in my grave.
I would say kids or grandkids, would be a wonderful legacy. That’s enough of a legacy to have.”
If you’ve not heard of James Marriott’s music, go do yourself a favour and give it a listen. It will be worth your time.
Featured Image Credit: Kerry Lloyd
Braw Magazine co-editor for Stirling University’s Brig and a third year English and Journalism student.
