Maroon 5’s Morton returns to his gospel roots
PJ Morton is going home.
The Maroon 5 keyboardist and successful solo artist — who distanced himself from his gospel roots as he pursued a career in pop and R&B — has just released his first-ever gospel album.
But he’s certainly not going it alone on this “Gospel According to PJ” album. Rather, the 39-yearold Morton is working with an all-star cast of gospel artists, such as Kirk Franklin, Yolanda Adams and the Clark Sisters, as well as other talents.
It’s a project that has been years in the marking — pretty much 39 years in the making, when one thinks about it.
Morton was immersed in gospel music and church teachings from an early age, growing up in New Orleans as the son of two pastors — Bishop Paul S. Morton and Dr. Debra Brown Morton. His father was also a successful gospel artist, known for the singles “Let It Rain” and “I’m Still Standing.”
It initially appeared as if Morton might follow in his father’s footsteps, as he sang his first solo at church — on the song “Humble Yourself” — at the age of 8 and later started his own gospel band CC (which stood for Christians Combined). And he could feel the pressure to continue down that path, but he decided to go a different direction and pursue a career in secular music.
“Just because I got his name don’t mean that I am him,” Morton went on to rap in the memorable 2010 solo track “Son of a Preacher Man.” “People look at me like I’m supposed to be his twin. We’re so different, yet we’re still the same.”
Morton’s career got a turbocharged boost in 2010 when he signed on to play keyboards with the mega-pop-rock act Maroon 5. It started out as touronly gig, but then Morton was made an official band member in 2012 and has appeared on three of Maroon 5’s platinum-plus-selling albums — 2012’s “Overexposed,” 2014’s “V” and 2017’s “Red Pill Blues.”
Meanwhile, his solo career was also taking off as he signed a deal with Young Money Entertainment and released the major-label debut “New Orleans” in 2013. He’s followed with several other efforts, winning Grammy awards for best traditional R&B performance in 2019 (for his cover of the Bee Gees’ “How Deep Is Your Love”) and best R&B song in 2020 (for his duet with JoJo, “Say So.).
He also had some involvement with gospel music over the years, working with Fred Hammond, Heather Headley and others, but has only now decided the time was right to take fans back to church with his own full-length album.
Like I mentioned earlier, this is far from being a solo record. It’s probably more helpful to think of Morton operating in a Quincy Jones-style role — writing songs, finding the right voices for those songs — than it is to think of him as a typical solo artist here. He’s often working behind the scenes, orchestrating specific songs to their artful culminations while keeping a bird’s eye view of the overall project.
And it’s definitely an impressive project, featuring such winners as “All in His Plan” — with Mary Mary and Le’Andria Johnson — which is already a major radio hit.
Other highlights include “Here He Comes Again” featuring the amazing Clark Sisters and “Gotta Have You,” with Jermaine Dolly, Lena Byrd Miles and — in a really cool turn of events — Kirk Franklin.
“It sounds so crazy now, but Kirk wanted to sign me years ago, but he wanted me to do gospel music,” Morton said in a news release.
In a nice touch, the artist’s father — Bishop Paul S. Morton — is featured on a number of “Dad’s Interlude” segments on the album. In the first one, which opens the album, the two Mortons celebrate the son’s return to gospel music.
“I’m finally doing a gospel album,” the younger Morton says.
And his dad’s response is simply perfect:
“Yay! Yay! Yay! Yay!”
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If you’ve read one rock ‘n’ roll tell-all book, then you’ve read them all, right?
Wrong. You’ve probably never read anything like the memoir from Adrian Smith, the guitarist of the third greatest metal band of all time — Iron Maiden.
Smith loves to fish and he (ahem) tackles the subject in depth in “Monsters of River & Rock,” which is due out Nov. 3. In other words, you’re probably more likely to read about groupers than groupies in this work.
“If you’re a trout fisherman, there’s a bit of trout fishing in there,” Smith says of the book. “There’s a lot of course fishing. There’s some sea fishing, fly fishing. There’s a lot of different kinds of fishing.”
But it’s also a story about life on the road, given that the guitarist/ angler — who joined Iron Maiden in 1980 — takes his fishing gear with him whenever the band goes on tour. And like his life itself, the book mixes both rocking and fishing.
“I could have written a straight-out fishing book,” Smith says. “I thought, to make it different, it would be good to include some music stories.”
Fishing helps keeps Smith balanced during those epic Iron Maiden tours, and this book shows, Smith says, “Why you look forward to going fishing when times get a bit hard.”
Readers follow along with Smith’s adventures, which have ranged from “his first sturgeon, a whopping 100-pounder from Canada’s swirling Fraser River that nearly wiped him out mid-Maiden tour; to a close shave with a large shark off the Virgin Islands while wading waist-deep for bonefish,” according to a news release.