FEATURE: Spotlight: Morgan Wade — Music Musings & Such

FEATURE:

Spotlight

Morgan Wade

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AN incredible talent that I am a bit new to…

I want to spend a few moments spotlighting the brilliant Morgan Wade. The twenty-seven-year-old Country artist from Virginia is someone who instantly caught my eyes. Not only does her amazing music and stunning voice stay in the mind. She also has a range of tattoos that, are both super-cool and unexpected! She is an artist that everyone needs to follow! Released through Thirty Tigers, Reckless is an album that won more than its share of good reviews. I will come to one of them at the end. I also want to source some good interviews that Wade was involved with last year. First, her biography on her official website provides more detail and backstory:

“Morgan Wade has never sounded like anybody else, and for a long time, she thought that meant her songs were just for her. “Honestly, I think that was really good for me,” she says. “It made me think, ‘Alright, well, I’m not going to sing for anybody else––but I’m singing for myself.’” Since then, Wade has figured out that when you grow up in Floyd, Virginia, where bluegrass sustains everyone like the Blue Ridge Mountain air but you hear other sounds like pop and punk in your own head, singing for yourself is the way to become the artist you were always meant to be.

Produced by Sadler Vaden––Jason Isbell’s longtime guitarist and an acclaimed solo artist in his own right––Wade’s full-length debut Reckless is a confident rock-and-roll record that introduces a young singer-songwriter who is embracing her strengths and quirks as she continues to ask questions about who she is––and who she wants to be. Her voice, a raspy soprano that can soothe liltingly or growl, is on brilliant display. “I feel like the last couple of years have been me trying to figure out where I fit in, who I fit in with, and what’s going on,” Wade says. “I’m almost four years sober, so a lot of the friends I had, I don’t really hang out with anymore. When I wrote these songs, I was going through a lot, just trying to figure out who I am”.

The first interview I want to include is from EF Country. They spoke with Wade back in March about her plans for 2021. They asked her, among other things, about tackling mental health and sobriety in her lyrics:

“This record has been a while in the making – is it quite strange that it’s now going out into the world

Yeah, it is weird because I was in such a hurry. I’m very impatient. So we get the record done and a week later the world shuts down ’cause of the pandemic. And so then I’ve just had all this time – it’s literally been over a year. So now that it’s actually time to put it out I’m like, “is it really time to put it out? Are you guys gonna let me?” But I’m excited, I’m ready for everybody to hear it. We worked really hard. But it’s a little weird. It doesn’t feel like it’s real.

Do you feel the way you’ve approached your music has changed at all since you made the record? Or is it still pretty much the same?

Yeah, I mean to me, towards the end there’s a couple of last songs that we put on the record that I’d written to tracks. It wasn’t me sitting down with a guitar or piano or whatever, it was just a track. And so I’ve been writing a lot of stuff like that now, because I enjoy it and it adds something different. It allows me to change things up so they’re not the same. So a little bit has changed but it’s kind of like here and there. Since working with Sadler and a lot of these really talented people out here it’s challenged me to work harder with my writing and challenged myself. So, definitely.

PHOTO CREDIT: Ethan Luck

You’ve also been very open on the lyrics of this album about your mental health and sobriety. Is that something that’s important for you to talk about – both in your music and more generally?

Oh, for sure. Like I feel like that’s such a big part of my life, and I feel like my fan base… I’ve gained a lot of fans through that because they connect with that, and so I feel like I owe that to them. It keeps me being honest and authentic. It’s something that I struggle with daily so it’s something that I shall always be open about. We have to talk about those things to be able to overcome them.

What’s next for you? Is the record and your upcoming shows your focus for the foreseeable future?

Yeah, just seeing what we can do, getting back to touring however we’re allowed to do that. But just pushing the record, getting out there and doing live shows. I’ve got some other TV stuff coming up to promote. There’s still the pandemic but at least we’re coming towards the end of it maybe, I can see the light so fingers crossed [laughs].

Are you thinking about the new project yet? Or is that still a way off?

Yeah, yeah. No, that’s not way off, not in my head. I’ve been sitting there thinking about record number two for months and they’re like, “well we kind of need to get the first one out”. I’m impatient, I’m always thinking about the next thing, so definitely I’ve been writing a lot and looking for future stuff”.

There were some great interviews with Morgan Wade last year. I got to know a lot more about her when researching. I was definitely interesting learning more about her musical influences. Off the Record discovered more about that when they spoke with her in September:

“Morgan Wade on her influences and her obsession with Elvis

Morgan Wade: I’m definitely a ’90s baby. And so, ’90s, early 2000s, Shania Twain, I called her ‘Nia Twain. That’s all I wanted to listen to as well. I was obsessed with her, and then especially it was the Tim and Faith era, and Garth Brooks, and all that coming about. But then, I discovered Elvis, and that changed everything for me. That’s all I would listen to. I was obsessed. And still pretty… We had a show in Memphis a couple weeks ago, and I went to Lansky Bros. They’re at the Peabody Hotel. I had to buy an Elvis leather jacket, and a bunch of stuff. I got a little carried away there, but super obsessed with Elvis.

Morgan Wade on being an old soul

Joy Williams: My question is, do you feel like you came into this world with an old soul, and do you think that’s something to be proud of, if so?

Morgan Wade: For sure. My grandmother was a hairdresser, and she had her salon in her house. And so, I would sit down there with these women in their 80s, and listen to their stories. And then, my grandmother would also go over to the nursing home and do hair, and I gravitated towards those, it was called the C Wing, which was the wing that was locked down. They couldn’t leave there, because they were flight risks. Those were my friends. I would literally-

Joy Williams: Those were your people.

Morgan Wade: My grandmother would take me there a couple days a week after school, and I just loved it, because the stories they would tell you. And they never would remember me, but they could remember these stories, and I would sit back there with them for hours. It was hard too, because there was a point where my mom really had to kind of sit me down, because all my friends were sadly dying off left and right, because I was becoming friends with… I learned about that pretty early on. It seemed like everyone that I was gravitating towards was, like Elvis, she had to break that to me that he was not alive, when I discovered him. It just seemed like everybody that I loved was in their final days. It might explain a little bit about me, I think.

Morgan Wade on what she hopes fan take away from her debut album ‘Reckless’

I was really nervous to put this record out, because I didn’t know if it would be country enough for the people who like country, and would it be too country for the people that don’t like country? And so, I had all these things going through my mind. But now that it’s out, I’m super proud of this record. My main thing is, I’m so glad I put that out there, and I did it exactly how I wanted to. If anybody could take something away from what I’ve done, it’s just do what you want to do, and don’t worry about what everybody else is going to think. Because at the end of the day, Sadler, my producer and I, we talked about it, we were like, “All right, we’re not going to go in here and just try to make hits.” It’s like, we’re going to go in here and make stuff we believe in, and then at the end of the day, if we’re really happy with this, we’ve got something that we worked really hard on together. I think that’s what made this so great, is that we had such a good time doing this, and I can stand behind this. It’s not like I put something out there that I’m like, “Ugh, yeah, it’s doing really well, but I don’t believe in it”.

There is one more great interview that is worth popping in before getting to a review of Reckless. Hopping back to May, The Big Takeover interviewed Wade - in which we find out about her more contemporary musical tastes and tips:

“Tour dates are starting to roll out. Are you ready to get out on the road?

MORGAN: I am, yeah. I played five shows since Reckless came out. I played zero in 2020, so that’s really a good feeling. Now that we’re slowly getting back out there and stuff’s not being cancelled anymore, it’s a good feeling.

The Big Takeover has a strong history in punk rock, dating back to the early ’80s. I know you’re a country artist, but wondering how you might identify with punk, whether it be an attitude, or clothes you wear, or the tattoos you have?

MORGAN: I don’t really know what punk rock is, exactly. I don’t listen to country music, really, which baffles people because when people ask what I’m listening to, it’s never country music. Machine Gun Kelly’s last record, Tickets to My Downfall, now that was a punk record and that’s probably my favorite record that came out last year. I can’t deny that. I listen to a lot of, like, punk-rap and more of that sad music, like Lil Peep and stuff like that. I can’t say it’s too far off from punk rock, pretty much if I like music, I like it.

I always wonder, who is this generation’s Don Henley or Huey Lewis or Phil Collins. I’ve had people say that Post Malone fits that bill which, at first, I thought was crazy – he sounds nothing like the middle-age arena artists from the ’80s – but he does write hits, gets a lot of radio airplay, and can fill an arena, so maybe that is a good comparison.

MORGAN: Lana Del Rey goes over a bunch of different genres, she’s one of those that hasn’t had a ton of radio play but she can sell out an arena and tour and she can put out 10 albums in a year and they would all sell and do amazing.

You grew up as part of an MP3/streaming music generation but vinyl is making a comeback. Did you ever buy vinyl when you were younger or did you consume stuff digitally?

MORGAN: Honestly, because I’m 26, I still remember cassettes and being in the car with cassette tapes. And then I remember my grandpa being like, “What the heck?” when we moved over to CDs. So, CDs was my big thing. I remember going to Walmart or something and going back there to look at CDs. It’s funny because I was at Walmart today and I looked and there are almost no CDs. I guess it’s been so long since I’ve looked, but there was more vinyl at Walmart than there are CDs.

Is there a particular lyric that you’re really proud of, like after you wrote you said, “That is good!”?

MORGAN: In “Met You,” I took that from reading a book about Ernest Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley. If you read A Movable Feast, he talks about, “We would be happy, we have our books in bed every night.” So, there’s the line, I don’t know if people picked up on that – you know, in the bridge I talk about “But like Hemmingway and Hadley / It’s not the end of our story” – but in the second verse, I’m like, “We didn’t get our books in bed every night.” I kind of worked that throughout that whole song. I felt kind of artistic on that, I’m like, “I’m going to give myself a little pat on the back for that one”.

To round things off, I am getting to a review from SLATE. They sat down with a remarkable album from last year that went beyond the realms of Country. I think that modern Country is a lot more diverse and genre-spanning than the classic image of the form. They note how other musical elements and flavours are at work through Reckless:

“Morgan Wade grew up in the heart of Southwest Virginia—the same area of Appalachia from which the Carter Family and the Stanley Brothers hail—and her voice, a raspy soprano drenched in twang, is shaped by that geography. It’s a voice that sounds like it was built for murder ballads and songs about cheatin’ and drinkin’. But the 26-year-old singer-songwriter isn’t that kind of artist, and on her debut album, she refuses to be typecast.

Produced by Sadler Vaden, Reckless is striking in the way it upends expectations. Although country music is unmistakably present in the DNA of these 10 songs—from the glossy Nashville sheen that underscores opener “Wilder Days” to the aching sway of “Mend”—it’s not the driving force. You won’t find a lick of banjo, fiddle, or steel guitar on the album, and Wade’s songwriting steers clear of country music’s most common tropes, like religion and family, and the caricatures of rural identity that have become the hallmarks of country radio.

Instead, Reckless revolves around issues like addiction, mental health, and isolation—plights that are central to exurban life but mostly ignored by the music that claims to represent that culture. Wade navigates these topics with stark, evocative storytelling. “Tonight I am numb from a cocktail of pills,” she sings on “Met You,” the album’s haunting final track. “I hallucinate, think I’m touching your skin/I’d much rather die than think of the bed that you’re in.” It’s an affecting lyric in its own right, but it’s even more so when considered in context.

Like many of America’s rural communities, Appalachia has been ravaged by the opioid epidemic over the past two decades. For those, like Wade, who grew up in places like this, addiction is omnipresent, a defining characteristic of their hometowns. So it’s no surprise that it shapes almost every song here in ways that are often subtle but deeply consequential. With a few exceptions, these are songs of desire, dependence, and desperation—of a narrator who’s searching for a way to make things better, even if that means settling for a temporary reprieve.

At the same time that vital stories like these are excluded from country music, singers with voices like Wade’s are also denied a place in the broader popular culture. We rarely hear pop or rock that features thick mountain accents or deep Texas drawls—not a surprising fact considering the structural bias that exists against regional dialects (especially Southern ones). Faced with this dilemma, most artists choose one of two paths: cater to the stringent demands required to fit into the country music machine—which dictates everything from what you can sing about to how you dress—or learn to perform in ways that belie their roots.

Wade makes no such compromises on Reckless. She blends pop and country without subjugating either, all the while covering a wide swath of stylistic ground that runs from searing country ballads like “Mend,” to the sauntering Southern rock of “Take Me Away,” to the radio-ready shimmer of “Last Cigarette,” a perfectly crafted track that takes cues from Halsey and the Chainsmokers. That Wade is equally compelling in all of these modes is a testament to her powerful, versatile, and unique voice.

It’s also a remarkable accomplishment considering the scale of the project. Only seven musicians, including Wade, appear throughout the album, but Vaden’s production offers Wade plenty of space without leaving the arrangements too sparse, which—given the rustic character of her voice—could have made Reckless come off like a roots record. Instead, each of the album’s 10 tracks features just the right level of polish and embellishment—especially the ballads, where Vaden’s masterful guitar playing shines, and where the occasional, well-placed synth or Mellotron adds depth to an otherwise guitar-heavy album”.

If you have not found Morgan Wade or know much about her music, then go and listen to Reckless and check out an amazing artist. I am looking forward to seeing what comes this year. Maybe we will see her come to the U.K. to play. That would be great. It is obvious that Morgan Wade is a fantastic talent who is…