Jack Garratt on burnout, resenting success and new album, Pillars

Almost 10 years on from his BRITs Critics' Choice award-winning debut album Phase, Jack Garratt is back with his new album, Pillars. But the time in between his first and soon-to-be-released third album has been far from easy. The UK singer-songwriter reflects on going from wanting to quit music altogether to writing his best songs yet.

Jack Garratt is name-dropping. “As I begin to say the words out loud, let me just lie down on the floor, so I'm ready to pick up all the names I‘ve dropped,” the singer-songwriter laughs from his new studio in East London, which, although Headliner doesn’t comment on, he immediately confesses is a complete mess. 

“That’s my obsessive-compulsive need to hyper focus on certain things,” he says, rapidly volunteering that he’s “saying everything he can without being diagnosed with ADHD.” One of the names he’ll be picking up off the floor is Stevie Wonder’s, whom he met once at a festival.

“I didn't know what to do with my hands,” he cringes. “I went into a fugue state. But my fugue state was one of avoidance. It was the most intimidating and strange experience of my entire life. I feel like you get one opportunity to meet someone like Stevie Wonder, and I absolutely fumbled it. He was like, ‘Someone I know was at your show earlier today, and they say you're pretty good on that guitar. You should play Superstition with us later'. And I went, ‘I don't have a guitar’. 

"It’s a funny story now, just because, what the fuck was I doing? Why didn't I just say yes? Something took over my body and just came up with an excuse because I didn't want to let myself or anyone down, which is so heartbreaking now, when I think about it. 

"I've dreamt of that moment of being at a show and they’d say, ‘Our drummer is sick. Does anyone know all of our songs?’ That was me when I was eight! And there I was, standing in front of Stevie Wonder, and he's like, ‘Hey, come and play Superstition with us’, and I'm sitting there going, ‘I can't’. It was too real!”

Garratt's name-dropping is anything but obnoxious, though, as meeting one of his musical idols is at odds with how he sees himself as the artist Jack Garrett. There’s a strong sense he finds it hard to reconcile the two versions of himself, and it could be the self-deprecating Brit in him, but there’s an unmistakable ‘how the hell did I get here?’ feeling to his tales of chance encounters with big-name artists. He recalls another time when Katy Perry invited him to a Beyoncé concert:

“I was in L.A. working with Katy Perry on her record,” he says. “I remember I was supposed to fly home, and she was like, ‘We're going to see Beyoncé. Do you want to come?’ I pushed my flight so I could go, because I'm not an idiot. I mean, I am, but at that point, I was smart enough not to be an idiot. I was in a box at Dodger Stadium with Katy Perry and Sia. It was a time in my life when I would see people like that.”

This was after Garratt rose to prominence in 2016 with his debut album Phase, which won a BRITs Critics' Choice award, topped the BBC's Sound Of...poll and was shortlisted for the Mercury Music Prize. Following the whirlwind success of his debut, Garratt found himself overwhelmed by the weight of expectation. 

Struggling with anxiety and self-doubt, he ended up scrapping his follow-up album entirely and stepping back to regroup. When he finally returned with a new record, it scored him a Top 10 hit; however, it dropped just before lockdown, robbing him of the chance to tour or promote it properly. And in his personal life, he was navigating the emotional fallout of a divorce. 

These days, as evidenced in his insightful self-aware comments throughout this interview, he’s done a lot of work on himself, and is happy to confirm that he’s doing just fine – “As I said to my therapist recently: fine, the state of readiness from which I can make decisions,” he quips.

He’s in promo mode today to discuss his forthcoming album Pillars, his first record in five years. It’s taken a lot for him to get to this point, though, as he grew to resent his early success.

“A big part of the work I've been doing emotionally over the last couple of years is facing that resentment head-on, because there's a lot of it,” he shares, although he’s quick to clarify that he is nothing but appreciative for the awards he won for his debut.

“I'm so grateful to those awards and for the opportunities that they gave me, but I compare it to the idea of weight training as a teenager and stunting your growth. The irony is, you're getting bigger, but it stunts your growth in the long run. There are parallels there with what I went through and the way that those awards ended up creating opportunities, but they were only good for so long. 

"It seemed to have a shelf life that was not as long as I thought it could be. But then on top of that, I worked really hard and I got really tired. 10 years ago, there was not a lot of care being taken for the emotional well-being of the artists who create music within the industry. My burnout was absolutely insane.”

Garratt recalls doing around 530 shows over the 2015-2017 period, which led him to suffer from physical and mental burnout. He's determined to avoid this time with Pillars. “A big thing is how to avoid that, and the album is out in August…It's dancing on the horizon at the moment. I have no idea how to survive that again.”

With the emotional and physical toll having been greater than the input that goes into creating an album, it’s not surprising that Garratt has considered walking away from music entirely. “That thought comes to me regularly,” he admits. 

“It’s not that it's getting harder, but more than anything, it's hard to know what your place is in it all. There's always been an element of: you play the game and you scratch people's backs, and your back gets scratched, and if you've got good music to follow up your back-scratching, well, then the fucking sky's the limit, right?

“But now it's so much more: you play the game and you won't win, but if you don't play, you'll never win, which is so fucked,” he considers, warming to his theme. “It's such a crazy way to do art. Art and commerce have always existed side by side. No art has ever existed that hasn't been paid for by someone, somewhere. So, yeah, thoughts like that enter my mind, and I think, ‘Maybe I shouldn't do this anymore.’”

What keeps him sticking with it is simple: despite everything, he still loves making music more than anything. “I love doing it for myself, and it nourishes me,” he nods, his enthusiasm palpable. “For the first time in a long time, it is nutritional. And then when I get to surrender it to the world, people enjoy it. 

"Writing a song isn't tending a beautiful garden. It's draining an abscess. It's hard, dirty and disgusting work. But when you listen to it afterwards, and it sounds like it has come from you, music like that gets to me in a way I just don't understand."

Almost a decade on from Phase, Garratt presents Pillars as a self-produced record of fan service and personal service. It’s a project which sees him thriving in a mutually creative partnership with big-thinking indie label, Cooking Vinyl. Pillars is Garratt at his most honest, to himself and his artistry, although this has not been a straightforward mode to switch into:

“I wanted to say more than what I was feeling, because I felt like what I was feeling wasn't deep enough,” he says of writing more authentically for this record. "But then, I just went, ‘No, but it's what I'm feeling; I feel confused, hurt and sad’. I came to the realisation that this is an album of love songs, and when I've written love songs in the past, I tried to layer them too much with something more interesting, or with something smarter, like trying to be a thinking man's love song. Whereas this time around, I'm like, ‘None of that.’ 

"I've written a collection of love songs that are the pillars of my love,” he explains. “It's my self-love, my platonic love and my romantic love. It’s songs about the ways in which I love or don't love myself, songs about how much I love my friends, songs about my very confused and strange relationship when it comes to loving partners, and my relationship with sex. The challenge was to write about things authentically for the first time.”

He points to the last song on the soon-to-be-released album as an example: “It’s some of the best lyrics that I've written, and it wasn't because I sat there and worked on them. It's because they kind of fell out of me rather than having to chisel it out. 

"The authenticity that exists in Pillars is embedded in the way it came out of me. I'm so proud of these songs. What I attempted to do with this record is sit down and be a better songwriter. I think the only way that you can be a good writer of any kind is – and it's an adage for a reason – to write what you know. 

"When I was writing this, what I knew was all of the emotions that were swirling around my head. I got them into as many songs as I could, and then picked the best 11,” he says, suddenly sounding unsure. “I think it's 11. Might be 12. I can't remember,” he laughs.

Garratt shares that a lot of the songs on Pillars remind him of the way in which he has loved anxiously, including his past habit of people-pleasing, which he now recognises as an unhealthy trait. With that in mind, has this ever extended to writing songs that he thinks people will like, over what he really wants to say?

“Yeah, I've definitely tackled trying to write what I think people want to hear versus what I actually want to,” he nods. “I'm a self-diagnosed people pleaser, and when I act in ways that are people-pleasing, I'm doing it to keep people close to me. Rather than behaving authentically, I am showing a veiled version of myself to keep people around, and it's cruel and it's unfair and it's harmful to other people and to myself. 

"So one of the sessions was me excavating that feeling in myself and confronting it. As much as I had my tiny violin out and felt like I was a victim, I wasn't. I've done this to myself. So one song is a self-aware anthem… from the perspective of someone who hasn't got self-awareness yet,” he deadpans.

Garratt suddenly recalls how, in the past, when promoting a new body of work that had been years in the making, he noticed that he would always be asked the same question: “I got this a lot during the press tours for Phase: ‘When's the next album?’ My answer would always be, ‘I had 20-plus years to write the first one, I don't have that kind of time for the second one. But just give me a minute’. 

"My first album came without any external voices,” he says. “Those songs came when I was sitting in a bedroom just channelling and reflecting and surrendering in a way that was probably the purest way I have been able to in my life, because everything that happened afterwards dilutes the purity of that essence of myself. I feel like I'm speaking in riddles….” he trails off. “I'm really not meaning to.”

He points to his 2016 track, Weathered, as an example: “That was one of my biggest songs. I wrote that sitting on my bed in my bedroom, which didn't have any windows and just had a hole in the wall for ventilation, and recorded it on my shitty laptop with a Focusrite Scarlett interface. So many of my songs came from that environment. 

"The first album then obviously did well, and suddenly there's expectation, and it's hard, because on the one hand, the expectation is coming from other people, but it's mostly coming from myself. I was translating other people's thoughts and opinions, looping back that expectation and turning it into pressure on myself. That's why the first and second albums were so far apart from each other. That's why the second album and Pillars have also been so far away from each other.

“The thing I doubled down on was making an album that I wanted to make, and that I wanted to listen to. The way I say it is a bit self-effacing: Is my taste basic enough that people are going to like what I like? As long as I like what I make, other people are going to like it. So I don't need to worry about that. They'll hear it in August,” he grins.

Pillars is out on August 15th.

Photo credits: Wolf James