The Morning After is the 12th studio album by British rock band James, serving as the second of two mini-albums. As their first mini-album The Night Before was being released in April 2010, the band began working on its follow-up. Spending less than a week in the studio, the band self-produced the sessions, with Lee Muddy Baker handling vocal production. The Morning After featured slower and softer songs, in contrast to the happy, upbeat ones heard on The Night Before. Preceded by festival appearances in the UK, Greece and Portugal, The Morning After was released on 6 September. The album reached number 19 in the UK, and received a mainly favourable response from music critics, with some of them stating it was the better release out of the two mini-albums. The band promoted it with tours in North America, Portugal and the UK.
Background and production
In November 2009, the group announced they would be releasing two mini-albums in 2010, the first (The Night Before) being planned for released in April. The Night Before was released as intended in April, and promoted with a UK tour in the same month. Following the final date of the tour, they spent five days in a recording studio and planned not to make any overdubs. It was spurred on by how they recorded The Night Before, which saw the group upload material to a FTP server that Lee Muddy Baker would edited together. They soon realised they were writing two separate kinds of tracks, specifically softer types of tracks.
Since only one-to-two of these kinds of songs made it on to their albums previously, the band decided to do a whole record of them. Sessions were held at Fish Factory in London with them self-producing the recordings. They were aided by engineers Desmond Lambert and Antonio Feold. Booth's vocals were recorded and produced by Baker at L.A.B in Brighton. Class 4J of Coleridge Primary School recorded backing vocals for "Tell Her I Said So". Jonathon Shakhovskay mixed the recordings in The Engine Room at Miloco Studios, with assistance from engineers Bryan Wilson and Rhys Downing. They were then mastered by Geoff Pesche at Abbey Road Studios.
Composition
All of the songs on The Morning After were written by Tim Booth, Larry Gott and Jim Glennie, with lyrics written by Booth. Musically, The Morning After has been described as indie rock. In contrast to The Night Before, which featured up-tempo, happy tracks, The Morning After showcased softer and slower-tempo songs. Booth explained that they had previously written mellow songs that did not fit the sound of past releases: ""Because we like albums to take them on tour; we can’t have too many mellow songs, when you’re known as a live band". As a compromise, they put this kind of material on The Morning After.
Booth said it was easy and natural for the group to write songs of this ilk. He had previously joined a writing collective in Los Angeles, California; he theorised that being a part of that aided him in taking more risks with the material on The Morning After. It explored the themes of introspection, the vulnerability of life, and destruction. In a 2014 interview, Booth felt that the final form of The Morning After did not live up to their expectations: "The minute we started working on some of songs for The Morning After, they kind of ‘uplifted themselves’, just by the structure.[...] We’d had it like a hangover record, and it didn’t quite turn out like that".
The opening song "Got the Shakes" is a slow-tempo blues-esque track; it talks about an alcohol-fuelled assault with the man begging his wife for forgiveness. "Dust Motes" features slide guitar from Gott and sees Booth sing in a falsetto. It was a mix of Americana and Coldplay, and opened with a brief piano intro. It stars a man noticing dustmotes in fractions of light, while being stunned by the end of his relationship. "Tell Her I Said So" is led by indie rock-sounding drums and tremolo-affected synthesizers, which channel the work of Brian Eno. Booth's vocal eventually gives way to a children's choir in the vein of the one heard in "Another Brick in the Wall" by Pink Floyd. Booth wrote the song while his mother was on the verge of death in a care home; she was in an hallucinogenic frame-of-mind due to prescribed drugs.