independent artist

“Loser Monologue,” by Sign Crushes Motorist, is 2:56 of uncut, unrequited longing. “If you knew how I felt, I wouldn’t even be writing this s–t,” the singer-songwriter says at one point, pivoting towards self-disgust as a haze of sustained notes swells around him. “I wouldn’t be so lonely.” There is no percussion and little change to the melody, just Sign Crushes Motorist discussing romantic fantasies that he knows “will never happen.” 
A drumless dispatch from the perspective of a despondent loner — not usually what people imagine as pop music. Yet “Loser Monologue” has more than 55 million plays on Spotify alone. “People are just drawn to that kind of stuff once in a while,” says Liam McCay, the 19-year-old behind Sign Crushes Motorist. His theory is that, while listening, “you can pretend like you’re not as mature as you are.”

In addition to Sign Crushes Motorist, McCay records under more than a dozen other names, including Take Care, Sweet Boy, Birth Day and more. Across these monikers, his most popular tracks often share some characteristics: leisurely tempos, short lengths, simple guitar melodies but often little else in the way of instrumentation, and vocals that are hushed to the point they can be hard to make out. 

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When they’re discernible, though, the lyrics often conjure what McCay describes as “a sense of longing for some kind of a connection.” “You weren’t supposed to leave, and now you’re gone,” he sighs on Sweet Boy’s “I Still Think About You.” Take Care’s “Everything Reminds Me of You” echoes a desperate wish from “Loser Monologue” — “All I want is to hold you” — while “Nothing Happened At All” is so self-effacing that it borders on self-erasing: “I’d do anything for you, I will be anything for you.”

“I was an angsty teenager — I’m starting to grow up a wee bit,” McCay says sheepishly. “I never seemed to have much luck with the women and all that.” Plus, Ireland can be “a depressing place” at times, especially in winter. 

All that angst is resonating with a growing audience; McCay recently pulled in 16 million streams a week across his catalog, according to Luminate. “His ability to craft full albums that soundtrack specific moments in your life, even at such a young age, stands out,” says Conor Ambrose, whose company Listen to the Kids serves as McCay’s publisher.

Despite the melancholy and futility that courses through the singer’s most popular tracks — McCay named a Take Care album Agony — he is quick to crack jokes, especially at his own expense. Before touring the U.S. earlier this year, he had to revisit some of the songs he had recorded and released in a frenzied spurt of activity. “I had to actually listen to them again, like, ‘This guy’s just going on about nothing,’” McCay quips. 

When performing his records, he continues, “sometimes it’s a wee bit embarrassing having to sing the lyrics.” And in a YouTube interview earlier this year, he cheerfully announced a plan to “lock the doors” and “make some stuff that no one’s really gonna like.”

McCay grew up in Donegal, a pint-sized town in northwest Ireland, and his first foray into music was playing traditional tunes on the fiddle. When he pivoted to guitar and started to try to write songs, “obviously it sounded like s–t” at first. But during COVID-induced lockdown, he began to improve.

In 2021, he concocted a “big two-year plan”: He would put out a pair of EPs followed by a science fiction concept album. “That’s always sometimes been a fault of mine, big ideas,” he cracks. But after working extensively on the first EP, McCay was unsatisfied with the result. 

He took a break, temporarily writing other songs “to express something different,” and the resulting music sounded way better. “After that, everything became a side project,” McCay explains. In the summer of 2022, when he released Boyhood (as Birth Day) and i’ll be ok (the first Sign Crushes Motorist album) within two months of each other, some of those side projects started to gain a following.  

Major labels have made overtures, but he has rebuffed them. McCay is not completely on an island; he has a manager, plus Ambrose to help with the famously complicated world of publishing. 

Ambrose believes McCay “embodies the essence of a modern independent artist,” and the singer seems content to continue operating in this fashion. “Every musician’s goal is to be able to live off their music, and I’m able to do that,” he says. “So I think I’m going to keep going the way I’m going.” (An independent solo artist consistently earning more than 15 million streams a week is making a robust six-figure annual income.) Plus, it’s likely that a major label would interfere with his way of working — spraying out music rapid-fire across a dozen different artist projects — and want him to focus on making a single moniker as big as possible.  

Even as McCay stays the course, there is one difference: He has moved to Los Angeles, a world away from Ireland’s cold, dark winters. “I feel a whole lot better now coming out to the sun,” he says. And that means “I just haven’t been really as interested in making sad music as of recently.” 

That’s not to say he’s lacking inspiration. His recent tour — 17 dates across U.S. cities, mostly in 500-cap clubs — introduced him to flesh-and-blood fans who had once seemed like a distant mirage. “Numbers on the screen are all well and good,” McCay says. “But to actually meet somebody and hear them talking to you about the music feels really nice.”

He might launch yet another side project, this one named Flesh World, after a magazine he spotted in Twin Peaks. And he also wants to put out a “midwest emo album” that he made a few years ago. 

“I think I’m going to make two more albums and try to have four albums out in January,” he says. “Why not?”