“Sorry I’ve been away for ages, but hopefully it’s been worth it. I’ve spent a lot of the last while at home in Northern Ireland, making music that I love with some of my best friends. It's been a rollercoaster…"

So wrote JC Stewart on his Instagram earlier this year.  True to the emotional honesty in his songs – true to who he is as a performer – he wasn’t lying, exaggerating or being #instacool. The singer-songwriter from County Londonderry has indeed been MIA for a while, a considered move that was fundamental to a genuine, necessary artistic reset. He has been bunkered down, following his own musical path, forging his own musical future, creating and recording with a crew of deep, deep soulmates, not in forced writing camps with strangers. And boy oh boy has it been a rollercoaster – an up-and-down saga of dizzying highs and plunging lows.  

But now any hints of fairground-ride nausea are long gone. John Callum Stewart is back: refreshed, rebooted, retooled. After a long period in London and then Los Angeles, pursuing (with gritted teeth) one kind of musical success, he went back to his roots – to the farm in Magherafelt he grew up on, and to the inspiration-giving Northern Irish coast. And on the strength of the new songs he’s written, the ones he’s poised to start releasing as part of a whole new professional set-up – and whole new JC Stewart – fans can be reassured: it has been worth it.

That feeling is front and centre and immediately apparent in JC’s new single, the first fruits of his new deal with Stanley Park via The Orchard – a relationship that’s “very much on my terms for the first time, which is amazing”. Hey Babe, I'm a Mess and I'm Sorry, sung with a spine-tingling catch in the throat, is a glorious piano ballad that foregrounds his songwriting prowess. It’s also the sound of an artist alchemising the murk of his recent past into musical gold, defiantly reshaping the void of recent events into a future rich with possibilities.

And in that regard, it’s the perfect encapsulation of what JC does so well: turning darkness into light.

“That was a song I wrote at the end of my last record deal,” he begins. “Looking back, I was pretty depressed. It was a rough six months. It got to the point where I've never been before or since: complete numbness. I wasn't a person. I remember me and my girlfriend having a massive argument about it.

“It wasn't that I didn't care,” he clarifies, highlighting his weariness and frustration at how that record deal had failed to allow him to fulfil his creative ambition. “It's just that I had absolutely no emotion about anything. I was like: ‘I don't really want to do any of this anymore…’ Then that song started coming out, and there was something about it. It took me six months to work on it. Then I decided: ‘If I'm ever going to do music again, this is what I would want it to sound like.’ My favourite songs are Tom Waits songs or Jeff Buckley songs. They're slow and they're real and they're lyrically heavy.

That, he admits, had been an aspiration with his song writing for a while.

“But this is the first one I did where I believed I’d managed it. I wasn't just trying to be something I wasn’t. Then that dictated the whole record a bit. In terms of: all the other songs I write will have to fit with Hey Babe… Because this is the blueprint. This is me.” 

JC has packed a lot into his 27 years. Teenage years spent playing, solo, any pub and club and party that would have him. A self-released single when he was 18. A record deal with Warner Music, signed after an old-fashioned bidding war, when he was 21. A Number One single in the Czech Republic in the teeth of lockdown, 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: 84 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. An EP with Tom Odell, one of JC’s North Stars and true heroes. A proper viral moment with his parodic cover of Friends theme I’ll Be There For You, which went from TikTok to ABC News to American media storm after Jennifer Aniston reposted it. A deep-seated creative bond with Foy Vance, aka the patron saint of modern Irish songwriters.

And yet: the Warner experience didn’t pan out how he expected it. The music JC was encouraged to make felt ill-suited to who he was. The few songs he was able to put out didn’t speak to the entirety of his musical worldview. When he saw Raye’s game-changing tweets about her own experiences feeling trapped in a major label deal, unable to release her music, he knew exactly where she was coming from. He could relate, one hundred percent.

As he puts it now: “I think there was a bit of a discussion and confusion behind my back between what my old management and the label wanted me to be, versus what I thought they wanted me to be – and what I thought I was becoming. Those were two completely opposite strands. Which is why I was so lost.  

“They really wanted me to be the UK Shawn Mendes,” he elaborates, still incredulous at that aspiration – no shade on Shawn, but that was never the kind of artist he wanted to, or could be. Equally, “I was obviously complicit in terms of I did all the stuff they asked me to do. But I was like: ‘OK, that's cool. But I get to do my own stuff as well… the stuff I'm making at home, right?’ They're like: ‘Yeah, just do this. And once we have a hit, then we can do whatever we want.’”

The international breakout hit never came, but the trauma did. “I am a bit embittered by certain elements in the experience, but there's nothing I can do about it,” he says with a sanguine shrug. “Although I went and did a lot of therapy about it!”

But at the same time, he’s definitely not complaining. “It was an amazing opportunity for someone like me, from where I'm from, the countryside in Northern Ireland. So I don't want to be too label bash-y. And don't get me wrong: I had a good time in my early twenties! Being signed to a major label, living in London, going to LA, flying all over the world, parties – it was class!” he says with a laugh. 

And, ultimately, JC recognises that to even get to that point was a win.

“Because I had a shot. I had a big shot when most people never have that. We just executed it really wrong. So this time, I’m clear. I've an idea of how this needs to be done. That means I have to step away from everything I did before essentially. And try and implant my vision and get people around me to implement my vision, rather than me being a pawn in somebody else's vision. Which is what I think it was last time.”

In what we might term the post-Raye music industry landscape, then, JC isn’t going to try to airbrush his past – nor deny his future.

“I want to change those perspectives of people going: ‘Oh, he's that major label pop kid that didn't really work.’ Yeah, I was that. But it wasn't ever actually me. And this new music is what I really do. This is authentic.” 

That authenticity has been achieved by JC Stewart resetting his business: new label, new management, new visual aesthetic and by going home and going back to basics.

Having returned to Northern Ireland when Covid hit, JC spent the first few months reconnecting with his heart and hearth, with family and friends. Then, slowly, carefully, he started from scratch to rebuild his musical world. He wrote and wrote and wrote, setting up shop at his parents’ holiday home on the coast at Portrush, fleshing out new ideas and new songs on guitar and piano.

“We put in a makeshift studio there, which is where we recorded most of it, by the beach, which was so cool. We had Two Door Cinema Club come in and record the guitars. We've got a whole video of all of us sitting on the kitchen chairs trying to record this stuff on rubbish mics. It was really the best way to do it. It was so fun.”

By his side he had two core wingmen, writers and collaborators he’d connected with while in the US: Mark Schick and Todd Clark, who’ve previously worked with Dermot Kennedy, Dua Lipa, Elton John, Megan Thee Stallion.

“Mark's produced every track and Todd's been across most of them as, I guess, an advisor. He's my right-hand man. If I've got an idea, I send it straight to him. And he's the one who kind of goes: ‘Yeah, it's really cool…’

Ticking that “really cool” box is future single ‘Play Dead’, with JC’s voice reaching for the rafters, the percussion and rhythm stretching for the dancefloor. 

“It's one of my favourites. It started as a simple guitar thing, then we built it up a little bit – I wanted to do that so it has an impact live. Lyrically it's about numbness and the search for something – and sometimes the avoidance of everything. It's definitely something I was going through when it was being written,” he notes wryly.

Of the 13 songs currently being worked on, Used To is a standout. It’s a big tune worthy of big man Capaldi, and was written at Clark’s house in Nashville, with JC building outwards from the key lyric he had saved on his phone: “You don't look at me like you used to.”   

“Honestly it was written in about 20 minutes. Todd and I have a really good relationship, and it just came out – although we still haven't nailed the production nine months later! But that has the potential to be one of my favourites on the record. Lyrically, too, I love it – I got a little Seamus Heaney reference in there, just to be really pretentious. It's just a really simple lyric – a pop lyric that goes in a couple of different ways that I wouldn't have sent it a few years ago.”

As for that man Vance: his presence is there on Space Hurts, a soulful, gospel-flavoured anthem that already feels like a centrepiece song on JC Stewart’s keenly anticipated – very keenly, not least by the man himself – debut album.

“Foy's one of my heroes,” he enthuses of the County Down legend who was also a formative inspiration to the teenage Ed Sheeran (and who’s now signed to his label, Gingerbread Man). “The way he writes music, the way he plays music, everything he's done is what I've looked at my whole life and gone: this is the guy. So when I got the chance to work with him, I jumped at it.”

Working together at Vance’s studio in Highland Perthshire, they hit a streak and wrote multiple songs. “But Space Hurts is the one that came out the strongest. Foy is one of the best, most raw, most authentic, most talented people I've ever come across. And I wanted a bit of energy in what I'm doing. He's the Northern Irish musician I look to and go: I'd love to be doing that. So, it was really cool to have him involved.”

That sense of place, of home, of Northern Irishness, is at the heart of who JC Stewart has always been. As he puts it: “It's just such an important part of who I am.” Crucially, that means it’s also at the core of his new music – the songs wouldn’t be real if JC’s pride in his identity wasn’t in there.

That drive also informs how these songs will be performed, since making them work onstage is a key part of their DNA. So, the singer has called on various friends from the local live music scene he was obsessed with in his teens, and on which he himself played literally hundreds of pub gigs.

“All the old Northern Irish boys from the bands I used to love, they're all in the band. We've all played cover gigs together from when I was 16. So it's brilliant – people I've known for 10, 11 years are going to be doing it with me.

“When I go and see Hozier or Tom [Odell] or Noah Kahan or any of these modern singer songwriters,” he concludes, “I love what they do: it’s live and real and big and heavy. So I want to make sure that that comes across with my gigs. That's the other dream for this: to do proper big shows, to as many people as possible.”

That feeling, he concludes, is what’s brought JC Stewart to this place, to this time, with these tunes.

“It's why I wrote these songs: that search for something honest and truthful and meaningful. That's what's real to me.”