Nightflying: The Entertainment Guide

---David Hughes
    It’s a non-typical August day in Arkansas. A little overcast, breezy, a hint of rain in the air. It’s a great day to be lazy, to sit back and stare at the clouds that curtain the sunset, letting them shift their shapes and twirl around the mind, to let the breeze wash over and wisp away the cares of a fading summer. I’m taking this in and looking out over one of the lakes that surround Hot Springs, having a drink and chatting with one Jason Morphew.
    Morphew has recently done a very cool thing. He has re-issued his first recording, Holding Merle Haggard, on vinyl. In the liner notes Morphew states the he is “a dreaming fool”.
    “I guess so, yes,” he states. “By that I guess I mean that some people seem born with an instinct for sort of wrasslin’ with life, dealing with the nuts and bolts, knowing how things work and letting their presence be known. My instinct has always been to stand back and describe, to sort of think about what I’m seeing, rather than to participate. I’m oversimplifying, of course. And I’m not proud of it (the day dreaming)…in fact, I’m trying in all kinds of indecipherable ways to stop behaving that way, at least to stop behaving that way so often. I spend a lot of time staring out of windows, is maybe the easiest way to describe it.”
    A dreamer…a poet…a muse…a minstrel…a bit of a vagabond…all appropriate descriptions for Jason Morphew, who began his musical journey in Hot Springs around the age of seven.
    “I remember the big, sort of having my mind blown moment the first time with music when I was seven years old and my dad had bought me that greatest hits of the Beatles, 1964 to 1967…The double cassette tape. I think I asked for it to sort of impress him because I thought he liked music from the 60’s…I remember genuinely having a visceral, goose bumps response to just hearing Love Me Do for the first time on a little cheap cassette player in Glenwood, Arkansas, at my grandparents house. The early Beatles music…has so much energy and the harmonies…it was so exciting. That’s the earliest memory I have of really being excited about music.”
    Although excited by the music he was hearing, Morphew really didn’t start playing music until he was a teenager.
    “I was obsessed with music from 7 to 16 but I didn’t really start to play until I was around 16. It sounded so foreign and exotic. It never occurred I could play music or recreate or mimic that effect.”
“My dad bought me a guitar and I’d bang on it but I was such a loner kid I’d be in my room looking out my window all the time. I’d write poems and lyrics and imagine the sound in my head. It took a long time before it occurred to me that I might be able to make up songs and actually play an instrument. It was hearing early recordings of Bob Dylan and thinking ‘that’s a guy playing acoustic guitar and singing words’. That’s something I could do. It sounded really clear to me that I could do that by myself which was an obvious step because I assumed I would never have a bunch of guys with equipment. It seemed impossible. That’s when it occurred to me to sit down and do it.”
    Morphew has become a prolific songwriter over the years. He has seven full albums to his credit with an eight in the works at this writing. He’s been included on ten compilation CD’s, released a handful of singles, had his songs used in five movies and has recorded two musical scores, one for a television show and one for a movie.
    So, does he enjoy writing all this music or would he rather be playing?
“What compelled me about ‘Love Me Do’ was it was physical and made me want to move around and I couldn’t sit still. It made me want to sing along to it. What’s frustrating about writing is it’s so cerebral. Click save on the computer or put the piece of paper in a drawer or mail it or e-mail it to someone. It always leaves me restless like there’s a part of the experience that I’m missing. Playing music live or recording or playing music by myself you’re doing it from head to toe…for whatever reason it feels like a more complete… like I’m using everything I have to make it rather than just my mind. There’s something about doing the songs that feels like I’m activating the writing…it’s more alive. It’s a more physical experience. There’s something about putting the mental and physical together that I like about the music.”
    Morphew has wandered, quite literally from coast to coast over the years. After graduating from Lakeside High School in Hot Springs, he spent two years at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. In Fayetteville, Morphew began to find his musical wings with the band Dig.
    “I went to the U of A by default. I had horrible grades in high school, hated going to school, didn’t know what to do. My freshman year was a revelation to me…it really was one of the best times of my life. My band was playing constantly, making music that I found exciting… We were really busy for two years. We played a lot. We were a really loud rock band. I guess if you had to put a genre on us it was punk…very loose…not very rigid. We were not shooting for punk but it was along that line…lots of energy... and I met a lot of great professors who encouraged and inspired me.”
    As it always seems to do, the good things come to an end. Dig had broken up and the shine of life in Fayetteville had begun to dull. One of Morphew’s professors handed him a list of potential schools to consider for transfer at the beginning of his sophomore year. Morphew chose and was accepted into a school in Connecticut.
    “I had no idea what I was doing, but I’ve always been willing to roll the dice. I transferred to Connecticut. I hadn’t planned on playing music. I was going to buckle down and get serious and focus on studies and write poems. I found it frustrating and then impossible to stop my ideas for songs and to stop playing music. So, I started playing there and in New York a lot. Through playing in NY a lot people from labels encouraged me to move to New York after I graduated. I lived about two years playing in clubs and put out two CD’s while I was there. I toured the region a couple of times.
    During this touring, Capitol Records took notices and offered Morphew a deal to do a demo in Los Angeles. Leaving New York for Los Angeles, Morphew had no idea he was actually moving his residence.
    “In the process of going to do the demo in Los Angeles the A&R guy got fired. Someone in publishing heard the demo and liked it. So they signed me. They also thought it was a good idea that I stayed there.”
    Once again, Morphew was in familiar unfamiliar territory.
“I had no idea what I was doing. I was only out there a month or two before all this happened. Before I went to Connecticut as a junior I’d never been out of AR for more than a month at a time and I never would’ve admitted it but I was in hard core culture shock. A good part of my 20’s, maybe all of my 20’s, were spent in this extended, culture shock trauma to tell you the truth. Which was compounded by the fact that I was always acting like I wasn’t in culture shock…trying to hustle and fake it and act like I knew what I was doing. I never felt like I was anyplace where I knew I was in the right place for my music. I can say this. It’s easier to be broke in Los Angeles than New York as a musician.”
Los Angeles was apparently a good move for Morphew. The music scene in Los Angeles was an unusual fit for the star-struck young man from middle America trying to find a niche for himself and his music. Morphew is comfortable in an area that is an ongoing permanent audition.
“There are little pockets (of music) but by and large people move there to get famous which creates this really mercenary, cold feeling scene. Clubs will book maybe five acts in an evening with completely unrelated styles. Sometimes they pay you to play or you pay to play or you won’t get paid unless you get 200 people to come. It’s a thing where your friends and maybe some industry people come. You start at 7:00 and you’re done by 8:00 and a whole new crowd will come in.”
    “I feel like I grew up without a music scene and without being very connected. I just expected there to be an absence of a scene. I expected to go it in this sort of weird lone way. It’s a strange thing to say but I feel sort of comfortable with these mercenary feelings…I don’t ever play those clubs anymore but I know why they exist. There’s something about the itinerant tourist nature of this entire endeavor that seems right to me and is really compelling and interesting to me. It’s familiar. “
    At this writing, Morphew is finishing work on his newest CD, tentatively titled The Beggar’s Opry.
    “I’m right in the middle of recording a CD in Austin at Proper Credit Studio. I’m thrilled with how it is turning out. It’s sort of a stripped down sequel to the Duke of Arkansas. I used to not be able to stand country music. It was all around me but it bored me. I wanted something faster and weirder. In that time I absorbed the aesthetic of synthesizers. I loved Gary Numan (sings a bar of the song ‘Cars’) …but even his more obscure stuff like ‘I Die, You Die’. There’s a sound I hear in my head with synthesizers a lot when I write songs, even the folky sounding acoustic songs. This CD is more of a stripped down sort of synth & drum machine beats with acoustic guitar record. The beats aren’t extravagant. I’m constantly stripping it down. It’s poppier and will sound slicker than my last studio record, Sunday Afternoon, which was sort of raw and recorded live. It’ll be somewhere between there, a really raw, live, sort of pedal steel guitar drenched, more traditional sounding record and the Duke of Arkansas, which was me experimenting with really nice studios where when I heard a note in my head I put it down on the track, which I learned is not the right thing to do because as a listener you want to hear space. You want to hear your own notes and interact with the record. You don’t want everything crammed in there. With this project I’m leaving lots of notes out but people may not think it’s less with all the beats. It’s not so overproduced. I love that kind of music. That synth pop stuff.”
“I’m really thinking about sound not so much attached to strings and boxes but sound as a liberated thing and sound as sound and notes as notes. As a kid it got to me in a mental way that I’ve never been able to shake even as I’ve embraced Hank Sr. and Merle Haggard and that sort of stuff. So, I’m real interested in integrating those two seemingly disparate musical ways of thinking. It sounds weirder than it will be because it’s all built around songs I’ve written on an acoustic guitar. It doesn’t sound like a Spandau Ballet record or anything.”
    Morphew’s re-release, Holding Merle Haggard, contains songs written around 1994-95. That period of time was prolific in terms of songwriting for Morphew. The album is a unique concept album and is testament to being able to share one’s world-view in song.
“If you could imagine that record as a story or a novel it could’ve been much longer because there were lots of other parts to it that I left out. Basically what happened was I got back from college in Connecticut and I didn’t know what to do next and before I went to New York. I was in LR for a few months and I had just gone through this break up and was so restless and so distraught over the dame I just wrote songs. I had a four track recorder at my dad’s house and I just wrote and recorded songs like crazy. One day in July I wrote three or four songs, all of which I liked. I think they turned out pretty well and they all sounded different. I was really manic and on fire.”
“I was raised to love Merle Haggard. It’s kind of a Morphew man thing. My dad had twelve brothers and sisters and there were certain passions that came with them. He was the youngest of twelve so he was raised to sort of love the Dodgers, love Merle Haggard. His older brothers passed their passions on. He raised me to sort of have the same passions so I had the Merle Haggard knowledge in my DNA and just from growing up. When I went to school in Connecticut I went through that period of trying not to do music and trying to be more scholastic and be more of a scholar and I found myself going back to music and because I was out of Arkansas and in such deep culture shock I was craving country music. So, for the first time I was buying those records and writing music that way and it came out of me that way. When I was back in Little Rock I found myself continuing that and exploring that style of music.”
“I went to the library and checked out Sing Me Back Home, Haggard’s biography, and read it in two nights. The girl I was distraught over and I had seen Merle Haggard play a lot, we’d gone to his shows. She loved his music too. I was jealous imagining she was living in Manhattan. When you are young and you’re distraught over a woman and jealous you imagine that everyone must be in love with her like I’m in love with her. That coupled with listening to Merle Haggard all the time it began to dawn on me… I imagined ‘What if she ran off with Merle Haggard?’ Wouldn’t that be the ultimate?”
“It was a way to exorcise this creative energy and give it some sort of focus and channel it…to exorcise those demons…so I came up with this sort of loose narrative…very loose, thinly veiled…That’s where that came from.”
Over a decade later, the songs on Holding Merle Haggard remain strong songs, applicable to life in the present. There aren’t many, if any of Morphew’s recorded songs that aren’t strong which is a testament to his ability to observe every day life and relate it to the listener through his music.
“That’s the joy about the songs and songwriting. They just drop out of the sky. I dream parts of songs. I’ll wake up and realize I’m writing. I keep a tape recorder by my bed for that purpose. Or when I’m driving down the road and a phrase comes to me that I’ve heard. But if it comes to me with a melody attached that will be a song maybe. It comes all at once and sort of really fast in a fever or it doesn’t come at all. You are listening and overhearing yourself. That’s how it happens.
    The re-issue of Holding Merle Haggard, as mentioned earlier, is on vinyl, a very cool concept from this writer’s vantage.
“It’s harder to lose than a CD. They lied to us when they rolled those out (CD’s). They said they were indestructible, you can’t break them, they wouldn’t scratch, they sound better. Everything they said about those things were lies. You should take those people to task. They (vinyl albums) are bigger…they can’t fall out of your car when you open the door…you keep them…there’s lots of space for color and you hold them with two hands. A lot of people that I love, like Lucinda Williams and Tom Waits, put out stuff on vinyl. I haven’t put it out on i-tunes or anything. I decided that it’s such a weird idea to re-issue anything. It was on a cassette tape when it came out. So it’s kind of cool that it potentially will never be digital although there is a label that is considering putting it out on a CD but I doubt it will happen. I highly recommend it (releasing an album on vinyl) to people on the fence about it. Go ahead and do it.”
    The album has already exceeded Morphew’s expectations in many ways. It has sold better that his last two albums to date. He receives requests and comments from Japan, England and all across the United States.
“I didn’t think it would be some big hit. I just wanted to commemorate it and get it out and available again. I’ve been pleased with the way it’s turned out. Anything that is not the status quo is a big shock to me.”
Morphew is expecting the new album to be out in December of this year. That’s the target date anyway. He is working with Max Recordings in Little Rock which looks to be a good relationship.
“I’ve always looked for a situation where I can put out one CD a year because I’ve got so many songs. However, it’s always been a prolonged campaign. Max Recordings wants to put it out by Christmas. My only plan is to keep pursuing opportunities as they arise and keep writing songs and making CD’s and releasing them until I don’t want to anymore and to not expect anything to happen. At this point I’ve realized I can’t stop doing it and there is something I get from doing it that I value and treasure and really enjoy doing it and want to do it. It’s been hard to find a balance between knowing that about yourself and doing it at any cost in any way and getting your heart broken all the time. It’s hard to find your own way. It’s sort of useless…it’s not like being a farmer…music’s really a pretty useless thing…it’s something in the ether…it distracts…you’re trying to make something beautiful and it’s not going to feed anyone down the road. I’ve thought that beauty is sort of useless and has no value but it adds so much that it makes going to work or growing food on farms doable because you have some sort of song to hum.”
“My only plan in the future is to continue to be grateful to have an outlet for these ideas and notions and concepts.”
Morphew combines making music for the sake of the song with an ambitious side, something that motivates him to strive to connect with his audiences. Trying to make a distinction between creating music and making a dollar is a very thin line.
“I don’t think those two things can be separated. There is a funny thing that happens when you make up something. You have a funny idea or thought and you write a song. Ok, you wrote a song. That’s neat and maybe it was rewarding for you. But there is something weird about feeling compelled to go sing it to somebody else or try to sell it to somebody else. There is a need to connect.”
Coupled with making music and making money is the ever-present feeling that one is being pushed to maintain the status quo in the industry. To ride the current wave until it hits the shore and leaves nothing more than a residue.
“I’ve come to realize that even as poppy as my music is, even at the height of the interest in me, I resisted the sort of push to recreate the sound that was fashionable. If you think about the history of popular music and what makes certain bands and certain songwriters popular at certain times, it’s a fashionable sound that comes together. I’ve never been willing to compromise too much with following the fashionable sound because I’ve always been suspicious of it. I feel like it’s going to change any second and I’ll be too married to it…almost certainly to my detriment. I’ve learned that you overhear a phrase and you create a song…you overhear the way you live your life and what that says about you. I think what that says about me is that it is more important to do this and try connect with people than to be rich and famous.”
“What makes me hesitant about it is that I’m also extremely ambitious. I’m always trying to do something that I haven’t heard before. Not that I’m trying to reinvent the wheel but that I haven’t heard something quite that way. There’s a different point of view on it. I’m not willing to dumb anything down. But I want to take it as far as I can. And I’m not willing to quit.”
    Playing his music live is still a thrill for Morphew. He continues to do some touring on the left coast and plays from time to time in Arkansas. These days he is a little more selective about when and where he tries to connect with people through his music.
“I used to play anytime anyone asked me to play. I’d go at people all the time. Now, I’m more selective about when and where I play. The money and the venue have to be right. You’d be surprised the looks you get from people when you say that…’C’mon man you’re losing your heart.’”
Morphew has developed a sort of underground, almost cult-like following for his music. He is humble about it and seems almost surprised by the fact that people recognize him and his songs.
“I expect no one ever to recognize me because it would be absurd to expect it but yeah, every now and then it happens. In Olympia,Washington, they were requesting songs and singing along. I’ve had a really strange, sort of secret music career. Sometimes I feel like I know everyone who listens to my music but clearly I just know people who are more laid back and want to know me and e-mail me or come to shake my hand. When you send CD’s out to radio stations and they play them and you’re getting nationally distributed and getting CD’s reviewed in national magazines from time to time there are some people who hear your stuff and like and follow you. There are those people out there and it’s nice when you run into them.”
In the liner notes of Holding Merle Haggard, Morphew writes ‘I was twenty-two and I knew I was ancient.’
    “I felt like I was an old man when I was 22. I’m a melodramatic guy. I hadn’t accomplished what a lot of my heroes had at that age and I felt like maybe I’d missed my chance. And I’d never been around any grown-up men that I wanted to be like…to live like. So growing up felt like a death sentence, which, in a way, it was. It’s just not exactly the death sentence I thought it was when I was a younger old man. The prison’s not as bad as I thought it was, I guess. They let you cook your own food.”
    “I do still feel like I’m ancient, yes, but now I find it liberating. I like being old. At some point I realized that I’m walking my journey, no one else’s, and that since no one else was born into my world and presented with my obstacles and blessings and goofy details, it’s dumb to compare myself to anyone else.”
    Dreamer…poet…muse…minstrel…vagabond. At the risk of making comparisons, one can say Jason Morphew is a dreamer. But, he’s not the only one.

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