Jason Morphew

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Jason Morphew is a musician who started his career in the late 1990s.

Morphew's songwriting evolved from his attempts at poetry, started while he was attending the University of Arkansas and Yale University. He came to the attention of Capitol Records and Sony Music Publishing and to the director Bob Gosse, who co-founded the highly successful film production company The Shooting Gallery. A demo deal with Capitol fell through when the representative who brokered the deal was fired, but the demo that Capitol passed on provided the impetus for Sony to sign Jason in late 1998.

Since then, Morphew has resided in Los Angeles, California, releasing three acclaimed albums on the Ba Da Bing! label and placing songs in several films, including Gosse's Niagara, Niagara. A fourth album was slated for release in September 2005, around the time when Morphew's first film score was scheduled to appear in Tim McCann's Runaway.

Notable artists who have appeared on Morphew's albums include Claudia Gonson from The Magnetic Fields, Jason White from the Green Day circle, Matt Snow, Andrew Park and Josh Gennet from Holiday, Josh Schwartz of The Beachwood Sparks, and Ikey Owens of Mars Volta.

According to his MySpace,[1] Morphew's newest album, Sunday Afternoon, was due out in spring of 2006. His album, "Holind Merle Haggard" was re-relased in 2007. He is currently a Graduate Student at the University of California at Davis and teaches short fiction classes.


Contents

[edit] Discography

 This section about interviews with Jason Morphew regarding his CDs does not cite any references or sources. (December 2006)
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[edit] Not For the Faint of Heart!

Though the album came out before the Morphew album The Duke of Arkansas, it was recorded first. In interviews promoting Not For the Faint of Heart!, Morphew noted that the album comprised recordings he made immediately after writing the songs--in other words, these are the acoustic demos recorded to remember the melodies and lyrics. Other facts revealed in interviews include: the track Elvis Was a Mama's Boy was recorded using singer-songwriter Franklin Bruno's guitar amp, Spiritual Librarian was written after hearing a story bespectacled duetist Krissy Clark told Morphew about an encounter she had with a homeless man in Santa Cruz, California, and J-A-S-O-N was inspired by the label on a Brooklyn Brewery beer bottle.

In interviews with Canadian music publications since the album's release, Morphew has expressed frustration that people think this music is "down-trodden," noting that, "I've never written or recorded anything as goofy and vulnerable as J-A-S-O-N. I've never written a sad song that doesn't make fun of itself or have a joke somewhere in it. People call me 'haunted.' Well, my sad songs are haunted by happiness'"

[edit] The Duke of Arkansas

In the Canadian music press, Morphew explained the title of this album--it refers to the Scottish economist John Law, who was known as "Duc d'Arcansas" by the French when he was promoting the colonization of the region of the New World now known as Arkansas. Morphew's girlfriend jokingly suggested that he call his next album The Duke of Arkansas, which led to a brainstorm about possible cover photos, and the title was decided. The original plan seems to have been to feature Morphew's girlfriend in the cover photo, but they broke up before she got the chance to pose for the photo. The woman featured on the cover is a friend of Morphew's from Little Rock, Arkansas.

Morphew has described The Duke of Arkansas as more of a compilation than an album, noting that it took four years to record and was made in studios in Los Angeles and Little Rock. Several of the tracks were recorded in former Ratt bassist Matt Thorne's home studio--apparently, Morphew and Thorne are friends and record together from time to time. Sex and The Living End feature Anna Pagen and Nancy Buchee, veteran singers who have worked with Lena Horne and Engelbert Humperdinck), among others. Though promotion materials for the album claimed the two sang the theme song for the popular 1970s sitcom The Jeffersons, Morphew admitted in interviews that he had never confirmed this fact with the singers themselves, saying, "That's what Matt told me, and I was too intimidated by them to ask them if it was true."

Morphew also said the title of this album has caused him some grief among local musicians in his native Arkansas, even noting that he'd received an angry e-mail from a Little Rock drummer that said, "Everyone knows you're not really a duke." Morphew said, "If I'd been living in Arkansas when Krissy suggested that I call this album The Duke of Arkansas, I never would have done it. I'd forgotten about the details of that beautiful cultural isolation. I must admit it's a pretty strange joke. I just never dreamed anyone would ever think I was seriously claiming to be the Duke of Arkansas. No one outside Arkansas missed the joke, I'm fairly certain."

[edit] Transparent

Though Transparent is usually referred to as Morphew's first album, that distinction actually belongs to the 1995 Brassland Records cassette tape called Holding Merle Haggard. Comprising tracks recorded in New York, NY, Alameda, California, and Fayetteville, Arkansas, Transparent's tracks range from raw four-track recordings to the slick-sounding results of Morphew's experiments in the high-dollar JSM Studios in Manhattan. One of the JSM tracks--Bring Your Sorrow Over Here--is probably the best-known of these selections, due to its inclusion in the film Niagara Niagara and on that film's impressive soundtrack album (on V2 Records), which also features Lucinda Williams and The Cowboy Junkies. In an interview in Toronto in 2003, however, Morphew expressed bemusement with the song's reception, saying that it was a "throw-away" song he'd written "that week" and one of approximately thirty solo acoustic songs he recorded that day at JSM. He chose to include it in the album, he says, because "the performance sounded a little different than the other things I'd recorded that day."

Morphew said that backstage at a Green Day concert, Billie Joe Armstrong once walked up to him and sang the opening bars of the song to him, adding that it had "helped me through a hard period of my life." When Morphew (an Armstrong admirer) didn't know how to react, he said that Armstrong "barked" that "I'm not bullshitting you, man." Other memorable tracks are Call Me With Your Love, on which Claudia Gonson of The Magnetic Fields duets, the blistering Turning to the Suicide (on which Jason White of Green Day and Pinhead Gunpowder plays drums), an early version of Badass With a Heart of Gold, a song Morphew revealed to have written on the beach in Mystic, Connecticut. Badass, revised and re-recorded, later appeared on The Duke of Arkansas and on the 1999 CD that accompanied the popular magazine The Oxford American's annual southern music issue, alongside tracks by Nina Simone, Alex Chilton, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Leadbelly, and Bob Dylan.

[edit] Holding Merle Haggard

Thought by some fans of Morphew to be his finest moment, the 1995 cassette tape Holding Merle Haggard remains sadly out of print. No doubt its obscurity has added to its allure. HMH is a concept album that Morphew began in the waning days of his tenure at Yale, built around the tragi-comic idea of a romantic couple who are obsessed with the music of Merle Haggard--the woman gets to meet Haggard and leaves her boyfriend to run away with the famous singer. This is an early example of Morphew's oft-misunderstood sense of humor at work. "I used to think I was a contrarian," Morphew said in 2003. "People in the South think I'm a rock singer and a liberal, while people on the coasts think I'm a country singer and a conservative. It's actually not a unique phenomenon. We call each other "rednecks" in the South, but we respond bitterly when a Yankee uses that term. Southern singers often don't know who they are, because they hate the restrictions of their culture but can't help but love its hard personality. It feels suicidal to hate the South, ultimately, but the South is a severe place, so loving the South isn't a much less violent option. When you're raised by loving sweethearts who tell you when you're a baby that you'll go to hell if you don't say a certain prayer when you get older, who teach you that the physical expression of love is a sin, you grow up tortured and tittilated. Guilt is magical, as James Dickey says."

  1. ^ "Jason Morphew's MySpace", 2006-09-06.