Magherafelt singer- songwriter JC Stewart told David Hennessy about his debut album, writing songs with people like Foy Vance, Lewis Capaldi and Niall Horan and touring with Duran Duran and Nile Rodgers & CHIC.
Award-winning Magherafelt singer-songwriter JC Stewart has released his debut album Space Hurts.
The album features 14 songs including the single Space Hurts, Irish love letter BT 45, Tomorrow, Can’t Stop and Hey Babe, I’m A Mess, I’m Sorry which won him Song of the Year at the Northern Ireland Music Prize in 2024.
John Callum ‘JC’ Stewart has packed a lot into his 27 years.
A self-released single when he was 18.
A record deal with Warner Music, signed after a bidding war, when he was 21.
A Number One single in the Czech Republic underpinned by gold-selling success in Eastern and Northern Europe.
A touring and writing partnership with good friend Lewis Capaldi – the Irishman co-wrote ‘Hollywood’ (current Spotify streams: 88 million, give or take) from the Scotsman’s blockbuster debut album, Divinely Inspired to a Hellish Extent.
A co-write with Niall Horan on his own 2021 song Break My Heart.
He has also written with Foy Vance.
He also went viral in lockdown with his parodic cover of Friends theme I’ll Be There For You, which went from TikTok to ABC News to an American media storm after Jennifer Aniston reposted it.
More recently he has toured the UK and Ireland supporting Duran Duran and Nile Rodgers & CHIC.
He will back in Ireland, north and south, to play his own shows in October.
How’s it feel to have a debut album out there?
“Yeah, it’s good.
“It was a lot of work in the best way.
“It was the best two years ever getting to put it together and I absolutely loved every second of it.
“I kind of just want to start again a little bit which is, I think, what I’m going to do and do another one or just keep writing more music.
“It feels really good.
“It’s a bit of a weight off because I’ve been 10 years deep in this game and never got to do one so I’m glad that I did it.
“I’m glad that I like how it sounds which is always the hard bit.
“After two years of making something, you can very easily at the end go, ‘Oh, I don’t love that’.
“But I’m like, ‘No, I would do the same again’.
“So yeah, I’m very proud of it and just happy I got it out.”
Does it feel overdue in that way or is that just the way it went?
“I feel like a bit of both.
“It probably should have come out in 2020 or 2021 but then COVID happened and then loads of other stuff happened.
“Then it just never really was on the cards until this.
“It was just always something had sort of happened or wasn’t happening and I think this is the first chance I got to do it and I had to take it.
“I don’t know.
“I’m a very big believer in everything happens for a reason and I think having released it now and out the other side, I feel in the best place I’ve ever been with music.
“I’m glad it kind of went this way.
“As much as I wouldn’t have probably chosen it at the start, I think it’s the perfect way it could have happened in a way.”
You have had your ups and downs getting dropped by the record label and then going your own way..
“I weirdly wasn’t even that sad about it at the time.
“I was stressed about everything, but 99% of people get dropped.
“I think it’s a privilege to have gotten there in the first place to be honest.
“I just started to take every day at the minute and just feel very lucky to be doing this for a living.
“Getting to work with Warner Records there was good days and bad days but it’s still crazy that it happened.
“I’m still just a guy from a farm in Northern Ireland, I have no right to be able to do that.
“Yeah, it was hard at the time, of course and there’s still really hard things that happen every day but cool, that’s kind of part of it.
“That’s the same with your job, same with everyone else’s job. It’s just how it goes.
“If it was all easy, it would be boring, I think.”
But after being the subject of a bidding war between labels, it must have been some come down to be dropped..
“Yeah, it’s tough on the head for sure sometimes but you just gotta reset and I’m very lucky.
“I’ve got my fiancé and my dog and my friends and my family.
“You just gotta have people around you and realise that there’s more to life and also that you never have to stop making music, and I never will.
“And that’s kind of where I’ve landed with it all.
“Every time I get to play a show and people turn up I’m like, ‘Wow’.”
You bet, despite the setbacks, you never thought for a moment about jacking it in though..
“Yeah but also, what else would I do?
“I’ve no degree.
“I would be unhirable for anything else.
“But no, that wasn’t an option.”
Did you always know it was music for you or do you remember a time that penny dropped?
“Yeah, the day I wrote my first song when I was like 16.
“It was a council ran music workshop.
“I literally wrote my first song that day.
“It had never occurred to me before and I went, ‘That’s what I do for sure’.
“That was the weird day where it just clicked because I was kind of into music and I knew I could sing a bit but I was like, ‘Yeah, I don’t want to be a singer’, but then songwriting happened.
“I went, ‘Oh, I want to be a songwriter. That’s the bit that kind of connects to me here’.
“So since that day, I kind of knew and I’ve been sort of running towards it with a few variations along the way.”
Have we heard that song you mentioned there, your very first one? Has it made it onto an EP or even this album?
“No, it’s terrible. It’s terrible.
“It’s about like the Troubles in Northern Ireland, nobody needs to hear it. It’s really bad.”
Song writing did speak to you first before even being an artist, singing yourself was secondary for a long time, wasn’t it?
“Yeah, I think it was just a bit of lack of self belief in it but not a negative lack of confidence way.
“It was more just like, ‘Well, that’s a bit ridiculous to think that from mid Ulster you’re gonna go try and be a big singer. But songwriter, that seems like something you could try and break into’.
“And so I started listening to songwriters and there’s something about the idea that there’s this sort of man or woman sitting somewhere writing these songs that nobody really knows who they are and they’re making these incredible pieces and putting words into people’s minds.
“I don’t know. I just find the whole thing fascinating still.
“And so the songwriters became my heroes and even now I would see myself as a songwriter first, everything else is kind of second.
“I just think it’s a really weird, cool job to be able to do.”
Space Hurts is the title track, that track must mean a lot for you to name the album after it..
“Yeah, I think it’s my favourite song I’ve ever made.
“I wrote it sort of over a few different time periods with two really good friends of mine and I wrote it three years ago and started playing it live three years ago.
“It was just one of those songs that sat there forever and I went, ‘Yeah, well that’s what the album is so let’s just build it around that’.
“And so that’s kind of what we did.
“And yeah, I love that song.
“I know when I’m like, 70 years old I’m gonna still be in a pub going, ‘I wrote this when I was a kid’.
“I just think I’m gonna be able to stand behind it forever which is so rare when it comes to writing songs.”
Another big song off the album is Hey Babe, I’m A Mess, I’m Sorry. That’s another one that’s so meaningful because it’s so reflective and so personal..
“Yeah, obviously everyone has mental health challenges in this world.
“It’s a mental place and I think that was just a song that got me out of the hardest time of my life ever after that record label stuff and it still feels nearly too vulnerable a little bit.
“I get a bit cringed out listening to it but people really like it and that’s the one that I get a lot of messages about and people go, ‘Wow, this means this to me’.
“And that’s always cool.
“Yeah, I’m proud of that.
“I’m proud of the whole thing and I think they all work together.
“And, as I said, I’d do the same again probably.”
So did it get really rough after the label dropping?
“Yeah, it was low.
“It was low like everybody gets but yeah, it was hard and luckily my partner is here and she helped me get through it.
“That’s kind of an apology song to her about me being rubbish essentially through that time and not being like a bad guy but more just being completely uninterested and un-present in life so yeah, coming out the other side of it I was like, ‘Oh, that must have been really hard for you’.
“And she was like, ‘Yeah, I’m sorry, that’s bad’.”
Tell us about the song BT 45, that also has personal meaning..
“Yeah, that was a little silly one.
“Sometimes you write, I call them silly songs, where you just sit down with a guitar and write something and never think about it again and then years later you’re like, ‘I didn’t even write that song, it just kind of appeared one day’.
“But yeah, that was written ages ago.
“That was after I came back from COVID to London and I’d had such a good time at home in Northern Ireland.
“I was just, ‘I’ve never written a song about my home and I feel like everybody needs to write a song about their home’.
“My parents have this house where we grew up underneath Slieve Gallion and I just wrote a song about that, really simple.
“And then two years later, my sister heard it and she was like, ‘What’s this?’
“’Oh, it’s just a song’.
“She was like, ‘You’ve got to play it for mum and dad’.
“I played it and they started bawling crying and then I played it at their New Year’s Eve party and then I went to the local pub one time and the local musicians were playing it.
“It was just one of those things that spilled over.
“There’s a pub in London called the Devonshire where I play a lot of music and it’s a song that just kind of took off there.
“It’s so much fun.
“And it’s just a little song about Magherafelt, BT 45 being the postcode.
“It’s not really a deep song.
“It’s just a song about that but I love it. It’s fun.”
I have often seen you mentioning the Devonshire on your social media..
“The Devonshire is the local now.
“It’s just good because there’s so many musicians.
“I’ve never really had a hub like it in London.
“You can go and there will be just the most ridiculous musicians and everyone’s playing music together and drinking Guinness.”
You’ve just come off doing dates with Duran Duran and Nile Rodgers and Chic, was it a bit surreal?
“Yeah, very weird.
“It’s definitely not a line-up I ever thought I’d be on, was just completely bewildered the whole time.
“It was so much fun.
“I was backstage talking to Nile Rodgers about writing songs and you’re like, ‘This is wild that I’m even allowed in the same compound as this man’.
“But we had a great time and the shows were really fun.
“Playing Malahide Castle is not something you take for granted at all so it was a really good time.”
How did your stuff resonate with that kind of audience?
“You know what?
“I was kind of worried about that because we played with them last year in Athens and I’ll be honest, I don’t think it landed at all.
“But these ones in Ireland and especially, we did one in Essex, in Chelmsford, and it went off. It was crazy.
“You know, there was like 30,000 people clapping and jumping.
“And you’re like, ‘Great’.
“I think it went really well and we were talking to Nile Rodgers’ band after and these guys are some of the best musicians in the world and they were talking about all the songs going, ‘We love when you do that bit and that’.
“I’m like, ‘This is so cool’.
“It was kind of like playing to your teachers a little bit going, ‘These guys know everything I don’t know’ but then they’re giving you compliments about it so it was really nice. It was cool.”
I was wondering what has been your highlight of playing live up to this point?
“I’ll never forget touring with Snow Patrol all those years ago.
“As a Northern Irishman, they are my heroes and always will be.
“That was pretty incredible.”
You’ve performed with some incredible people including Begoa who joined you on a version of BT 45. You’ve shared the stages with some some greats really, haven’t you?
“I’ve been very lucky.
“Beoga in particular, they’re from my hometown.
“My favourite thing to do is to make music or even just be in the same room with these sort of people.
“The two I always think about is writing songs with Tom O’Dell and Foy Vance.
“I’ll never not be happy that I did that.
“I remember the feeling so well of just being there going, ‘This is crazy’.
“These two guys are just on the piano singing ideas and we’re just jamming together’.
“That’s my favourite bit of this and hopefully it continues.”
Tom and Foy, as you mention, were both people that you were fans of and inspired you. You looked up to both of them, didn’t you?
“100%, yeah and I still do.
“And Ed Sheeran and Lewis Capaldi, and all these people that I just love, I’m massive fans of and I get to just kind of be around and be involved in it.
“It’s the greatest privilege I’ll ever have potentially.”
There’s one track that was a late addition..
“There’s a funny one at the very end of the album.
“I think it’s called Loving You, I don’t even know.
“I can’t remember what it’s called properly because I got a phone call on the Monday, and the album was being submitted on the Tuesday and that was the final deadline if we were going to meet release date.
“Somebody had messed up somewhere and they’re like, ‘We’re one song short so we need a new song. We need another song to add to the album by midnight’.
“And so I went down to the studio, found an old voice memo which was just like a hum and wrote this song in 20 minutes.
“Recorded it, mixed it, mastered it, then sent it off, never thought about it.
“And so many people have messaged me saying, ‘That’s my favourite song on the album’.
“I’m like, ‘Really, I spent zero time on it’, but I love it.
“Maybe I’ll do a proper version of it someday.
“But I like the fact that it just was the spur of the moment, off the cuff thing and sometimes those are the most fun and that made the album in the end.”
I just bet now you’re looking forward to your Irish shows in October..
“Yeah, just to see off the album and then it’s back into properly recording time after that.”
Space Hurts is out now.
JC Stewart plays The Button Factory in Dublin on 7 October and Empire in Belfast on 8 October.
For more information, click here.