Ruislip & Eastcote & Northwood Gazette
I kept quiet... it ruined what should have been the peak of my career
Singer-songwriter Jack Garratt talks to Alex Green about the pressure of success, self-doubt and the joy in his new record
‘IWROTE this album for me and I have successfully satisfied 100% of that target audience,” says a buoyant Jack Garratt as he sits down, albeit virtually, for a chat.
“With my first record I was way too obsessed about what other people thought because I was being encouraged to obsess about it – with the awards I won, with the opinion pieces that were being written about me.
“This time around I’m just not accepting that. All I know is what I can expect of myself – and I expect greatness.
“I really think I’ve achieved that on this record.”
He’s not wrong. Expectations for Love, Death And Dancing, Jack’s second album released in early June, were considerably lower than 2016’s Phase. But they were still high.
Jack, from the village of Little Chalfont in Buckinghamshire, was 24 when, in 2016, he won the Brits’ Critics’ Choice Award as well as the BBC Sound of 2016 poll.
His free-wheeling, genre-bending debut album saw him hailed as a mad scientist, with various critics attempting to pigeon-hole him as the UK’s answer to James Blake, Bon Iver and even Ed Sheeran.
However, Jack was not ready for the sudden fame.
His anxiety, a fixture of his youth, spiralled, only exacerbated by heavy touring, and plagued by self doubt, he recorded an album only to scrap it.
This was compounded by an increasingly sceptical, sometimes critical, press, with more than one publication labelling him a “Jack of all trades” over his sundry musical style.
“I love that. That’s great. And then I won these awards and immediately I was ‘award winner’. I was ‘the future of UK music’ and I was being compared to previous winners and therefore similar to previous winners like Adele, Sam Smith and Ellie Goulding.
“It immediately stunted my growth. And yet when I was going through the pressure, I was expected and encouraged to either just brush it off or deal with it.
“At no point was I really given the option to actually express my grievances.
“Because whenever I did express them or I did talk about how confused – confused is the best word for it – I was and how difficult I was finding it to deal with, I was simply told: ‘Be quiet. You’re privileged and lucky and you just have to be alright with it’ and so I did. I just kept myself quiet and it ended up ruining what should have been the height of my career.”
On release, the left-field Phase made it to number three.
But in comparison to his award-winning predecessors – Goulding with her chart-ready take on electro-folk or Smith with his neo-soul – it looked anti-climactic.
Jack started work on his next album but became disillusioned (“It was trash”) and took time away to deal with his anxiety.
Eventually, he was coaxed into the studio with Jacknife Lee, a veteran record producer who has worked with U2, Robbie Williams, the Killers and many more.
The result was a suite of songs exploring the events of the past four years – the joys of his marriage, the breakdown he suffered while living in Chicago.
“I didn’t know I was writing something positive until I started playing in front of people,” he enthuses. “I thought I was writing something that was intending to be honest, and at the time I was translating honesty to be something that was quite dark.
“It was only when I started playing it for other people that I realised that there was more vocabulary to it than that.”
Love, Death And Dancing’s 12 songs, with titles like Mend A Heart and Doctor Please, mesh tightly despite their eclectic styles.
“It’s about a time in my life that I feel like I lost,” he explains.
“This is my attempt to take ownership over a period of my life where my confidence was at its lowest, my opinion of myself was at its lowest, my trust in myself was at its lowest.
“And there I was expecting myself to make art that I liked from that.”
Jack has learned many lessons in the past few years, including how to take care of his mental health, a skill proving essential during lockdown.
“There’s an unrealistic expectation for every artist to sit at home and make something that’s going to entertain the masses,” he says.
“That’s an abusive way to look at artists in general, in any capacity. I’m not a social media influencer, so I’m not going to spend all of my time on social media engaging with fans.
“I also understand that that’s an important part of my job so I’m still active. What I really try to do is not give absolute control over to this horrific situation.”
■ Love, Death And Dancing is out now