Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Nothin’ Wrong With Tradition
Artist maintains classic sound in cross-genre world
William Michael Morgan’s easygoing presence is immediately apparent even over the phone. He’s a little late for our interview a few days ahead of his arrival in Northwest Arkansas because he just lost track of time in the studio, and his slow and deep Mississippi drawl infuses his apology with charm.
After this call, Morgan will go back into Nashville’s Mucho Love studio where he’s working on writing with fellow country singer/songwriters Trent Tomlinson and Jim Collins.
“Heck, it’s been about two and a half years or so since we put our debut album out there. I’d say it’s just about time!” he enthuses.
Morgan did follow up that 2016 release with a batch of individual songs out near the end of last year, but none of those were tied to an album. The songs had a slightly more diverse sound from that of his debut album “Vinyl,” and they served to give the artist an idea of what people may gravitate to, Morgan explains.
“So we took all of that and are still taking all of that, looking at the numbers and just seeing people are coming to the show for this or people are downloading this or streaming this,” he says cheerfully.
The fact that Morgan has lived a lot of life since the release of that last album — big changes personally and professionally — has also had a huge impact on his writing, he shares.
“It’s never easy when the two worlds collide, and I will say that they do collide a lot more than we’d like them to,” he muses. “But, I tell ya, I love country music, and that’s just something that I’m gonna always do ‘til the day I die, in one way or another. I’ve been blessed to be able to do it as long as I have been doing it now, and I’m going to sing what my heart wants me to sing.”
And Morgan’s heart has never veered from what it wants him to sing: honest lyrics about real life, with that real country sound. He does admit it’s becoming harder and harder to define what “real country” is these days. But for Morgan — an artist raised on titans like George Strait, Garth Brooks and Mark Chesnutt — good ol’ country music isn’t trying to dress up to be something else.
“I feel like we’ve just kind of allowed, as a genre, anything to fly. I think that we’ve allowed so much influence from outside to come in,” he says. “I think you just need to make the music that you want to make and you can either put a genre on it or not. But as a whole for [the country] genre, let’s still save some of that realness, that wholesomeness, that tradition.”