Singer James Morrison settles into fame at last

bike. 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 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.”

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, blueeyed 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 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. ”

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.” – The Independent

Higher Than Here is out now.