“LOOK UP BARN OWLS ON YOUR phone!” insists John Grant as he flicks through The Illustrated Lyrics, a handsome new book that sets words from the Michigan-born singer-songwriter’s six solo albums alongside photographs he’s taken. He’s poring over a shot of his crumpled bedsheets which have folded themselves into a remarkable semblance of the bird – think the Turin Shroud, only avian – and is keen to convince MOJO of its similarity to the real thing. Grant likes finding patterns, he says, but he’s loath to call himself a photographer. “I just do it with my phone – that’s why I say I ‘fancy myself as a photographer,’” he says with Victorian delicacy, “because I don’t really know how to deal with a camera.”
Such imposter syndrome is a recurrent theme in Grant’s conversation – even today, when he is clearly at the centre of his universe, emerging from a rehearsal studio in Putney where he and his band are putting in nine-hour days ahead of his tour. The mood is focused and slightly tense, the musicians eager to return to work, but Grant amiably surrenders his lunch break to an interview, with the polite proviso that his colleagues bring him a tuna melt.
This year, Grant released The Art Of The Lie, a record that further probes the faultlines between the personal and the political, family and ideology, love and harm, and ranks high among MOJO’s Albums Of 2024. Born in 1968, Grant grew up gay in a Christian family where his hidden sexuality was a source of corrosive shame. Inspired by Neue Deutsche Welle star Nina Hagen’s 1982 album NunSexMonkRock – “It changed me forever” – in 1988 he escaped to Germany to study German and Russian. After six years, he returned to America, co-founding Denver alt-rock band The Czars in 1994.