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photo credit: Shervin Lainez / click for hi-res version
photo credit: Jen Rosenstein / click for hi-res version
album artwork / click for hi-res version
MORGXN
BEACON
“I don't want to say that this is the end,” explains MORGXN of Beacon, his latest album, an emotional deluge wading through darkness towards love. “This album is a journey, and a reminder that we're always on that journey. Where I'm at might be the end, but it's actually the beginning.”
Half a decade ago, the young Nashville-raised artist released vital, an exquisitely atmospheric debut, after dropping its transcendent queer anthem “home.” (It’d go on to clock a staggering 32.5 million Spotify streams.) Roughly the same number years before that, just after moving to Los Angeles, he’d serendipitously meet Stevie Nicks at a party. There, the bewitching legend presciently warned him, “This world will walk over you if you don’t just keep going.”
He took that to heart, writing and recording vital, touring the world (with X Ambassadors, Skylar Grey, among others), collaborating with everyone from Sara Bareilles (“Wonder”) to Tiësto (“Fighting For,” "Change Your World”), and inspiring countless LGBTQ+ youth along the way. Then, between the shifting music industry and a sudden pandemic, all that forward movement just…stopped. “What I wish I could tell Stevie now is that I fell down. “I broke. I was really lost. I was scared. I didn't know where to go. But I kept going,” MORGXN says. “Part of this process was getting back in touch with art for art’s sake, as a form of expression — not as a bottom line for some record company.”
His latest album’s spacious title track, “Beacon,” is a rousing affirmation that meets him on a path back to self-expression and musical salvation. “The hero's journey is sometimes just about letting it all fall apart, breaking through like there is something on the other side of this,” he explains. “Sometimes you don't see that there is light out there, that you are the beacon.” But of course MORGXN is all-too-human, so tracks such as the poetic, piano-driven lament ”Getting Older in a Modern Time” also chronicle the heart-palpitating perils of riding that storm.
Last year, in a self-imposed act of tough love, the artist did the unthinkable: He moved back to Tennessee. “I've got a hit song called ‘home’ that's sending me around the world, and yet I was terrified of going home,” says MORGXN, who wrote and recorded all of Beacon from his hometown (the title track was even penned on his childhood piano). “Talk about being in Nashville, at a time where queer lives are on the line, drag is on the line, trans rights are on the line, women's rights are on the line…” And yet, in his gut, he knew he needed to confront his past.
“Home is where all the trauma is,” MORGXN continues. “It’s, like, in every corner. I see the ghost of my late father every time I meet somebody, and they're like, ‘You're so-and-so’s son!” MORGXN lost his father, who encouraged him to take up the piano and write songs at a young age, in 2015. He never really got over that loss. “On the day he passed, I picked up a journal and wrote down the word ‘backbone.’” That would shape-shift into the track “Backbone,” a declaration (co-written with Madi Diaz and Gabe Simon) about having the courage to fully live his truth. “That began this huge journey for me, which brought me all the way back home and to this album.”
There was a time where practically every song MORGXN wrote was about the death of his father. Although the grief hasn’t dissipated (and it probably never will), he’s learned to turn the ache into life-affirming lessons. “My dad didn't know how to love himself. I think that was the hardest part of my relationship with him,” he says. Although it’s a shimmering disco track, “Modern Man” (cowritten by Trent Dabbs) is actually a rethinking of masculinity as a retort to the pressure his dad felt to be a conventional provider. “In a way, I'm reclaiming the idea of being a man, one who feels every emotion.” It’s a full-circle moment, which was set into motion just after his father’s death, when an emotionally raw MORGXN went viral for his soulful rendition of The Cure’s “Boys Don’t Cry.”
The lead-up to making Beacon was a rush of creativity for MORGXN. He began with more than 100 songs, whittling them down to the most powerful tracks, with help from producer Marshall Altman. “We recorded it with a band, which I've never done before. It’s real musicians playing the songs. Real strings! It's not synthetically created in a laboratory, dude,” MORGXN says. The energy is palpable, and at many moments, joyous. “And there’s a choir! With first album, I was told I could not record a choir on my song ‘home.’” Of course, he did it anyways, by gathering friends to sing in his living room. “But for this record, I wasn't playing — I put a choir on almost every song!”
“We're seven years away from my first album, and I’m a completely different person than who I was when I made vital,” MORGXN marvels. For one, he’s in love for the first time. “I can't believe I met, like, queer love here in Nashville, Tennessee. I can't believe I kissed a boy on the steps of my high school. I wish I could kiss him in front of my dad and be like, ‘This is love. And this is loving yourself.’” MORGXN is truly himself now, and the feeling is intoxicating for all of us.
The synth-churchy vibe of “My Revival” captures the beautiful collision of these emotions — and serves as a loving shout out to his boyfriend, who happens to specialize in religious-trauma therapy. “If leaving home was my salvation, then coming home is my revival,” MORGXN says. “I didn't grow up religious, but somehow, this euphoria has found its way into my music.”
The soaring pop-twang of “Where I’m From,” the final track on Beacon, is the closest thing to a gospel on Beacon. It’s a rousing testament to his suffering adding up to something greater than its parts, and ends, meaningfully, on the last voicemail his father ever sent him. “Life is messy. You know what I mean? I have such a hard time embracing the mess,” he says. “But that felt like a stake in the sand. And now I’m at the beginning of another chapter.”
For more information, please contact
Kate Rakvic, Samantha Tillman or Carla Sacks at Sacks & Co., 212.741.1000.
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