“An Irish boy, with an English voice, living in the States.”

Son of Cormack is the musical project of British/Irish singer-songwriter George McCormack.

His earliest memories of music come from the English pubs he grew up in, where the jukebox provided the soundtrack. It was a wild, unusual place to spend a childhood — a shifting cast of characters and wayward souls from every walk of life, alongside family both real and adopted, all part of the unconventional community he grew up in. Life never seemed to follow a particular script.

Normal was something everybody else seemed to do.

Music was everywhere: an old gent playing harmonica in the front bar; a five-year-old George watching a band in a smoky pub at closing time where he definitely shouldn’t have been; later, guitar lessons from his French teacher, school rock shows and the strange power of hundreds of voices singing in unison in the school chapel.

Rock, ’90s grunge and trip-hop became touchstones, Radiohead and Tom Waits among the names that stuck. Influences were eclectic, with no particular genre ever in focus. What mattered — then and now — was whether something connected.

Exactly why music has always had such a pull is harder to pin down. McCormack has been writing songs for so long that the process was never particularly intentional. With hindsight, perhaps it became somewhere to put the bigger emotions — a way of taking the inner monologue and putting it somewhere outside himself for a while. Sometimes understanding it, sometimes simply getting it out.

What he’s chasing isn’t particularly a genre or a style. It’s a feeling.

Then, as it does, life simply happened.

The London years brought work, moving around, relationships, friendships and the general business of trying to survive in a city that doesn’t make it easy. Music never disappeared. Songs were written out of the turbulence of those years, including She Rages and She Walks on Fire, both of which would eventually find their way onto the album.

The songs waited. Life, and everything else, moved on.

Meeting his wife brought records and live music firmly back into everyday life, followed by a move across the Atlantic to Austin, Texas — a city that put live music literally back on the doorstep.

Eventually McCormack decided that waiting for the right time to make music was a fairly reliable way of never making it.

Son of Cormack grew out of that decision.

The original plan for making a record was considerably more romantic than the reality: go to California, hire a studio and some session musicians and record the songs in a week. Fortunately, he was talked out of it.

Instead, making the album became a slower education in how records actually get made. Working in Austin with producer and musician Don Cento, McCormack developed his songwriting, learned to build better demos, became considerably more acquainted with a click track, and discovered the peculiar rollercoaster of listening to the same song so many times that you begin to wonder whether any of it was a good idea in the first place.

Three recorded songs became ten.

Working alongside Cento and a group of accomplished Austin musicians meant learning when to hold onto the picture in his head and when to let it evolve — and required McCormack to up his own game along the way.

The finished record moves between quiet acoustic intimacy and a more visceral electric blues-and-rock pulse, occasionally shadowed by the darker, atmospheric edges of trip-hop. But the album is perhaps better understood as a collection of different versions of its author.

Some of the songs began many years ago and carry something of the person who originally wrote them; others look back on moments only recently passed. Some are relatively direct — Panic Attack circles around wanting to fix things for someone you love, while knowing that sometimes all you can really do is ride it out together.

Others are harder even for McCormack to completely explain. Mother’s Son, written almost as a stream of consciousness, sits somewhere between self-reflection, identity and unanswered questions.

The songs favour mystery over paint-by-numbers storytelling. They document lived experiences without necessarily explaining them, leaving room for the listener to find their own way through the imagery.

Early recordings caught the attention of BBC Introducing, leading to radio play, a live appearance on BBC Hereford & Worcester and a performance on the BBC Introducing stage at Lakefest. Son of Cormack has also performed at SXSW in Austin.

The self-titled debut album Son of Cormack arrives independently on vinyl and digitally on 6 November 2026.

The music took the long way around. Then again, so did he.