Neal Morgan is a singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, who’s worked as a percussionist with the likes of Joanna Newsom, Bill Callahan, and Robin Pecknold. His latest record, PAW, is out now.
(Photo Credit: Padraic O’Meara)
Anis Mojgani is the Poet Laureate of Oregon and the two-time champion of the National Poetry Slam; Neal Morgan is a singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, who’s worked as a percussionist with the likes of Joanna Newsom, Bill Callahan, and Robin Pecknold. Neal’s new record, PAW — which was seven years in the making — just came out last week. Right before the album’s release, the friends got on Zoom to catch up about it, and much more.
— Annie Fell, Editor-in-chief, Talkhouse Music
Anis Mojgani: I know we’ve already talked about this record so much over the last year and a half.
Neal Morgan: Yeah, well, you’ve known some of the songs for four or five years, probably.
Anis: Oh, man. You shared some songs when you invited me to perform with you at Turn Turn — that was in May of ‘22. I can’t remember which song or two you sang then, but I remember loving them. [Laughs.]
Neal: And here we are!
Anis: How are you feeling with it so close to being out in the world? Because it has been such a long time of these songs existing as [individual] things, and then also a long time for the album to be existing as a whole, but still not for other people to engage in.
Neal: I feel good. I feel happy about what it is. Releasing an album — it’s like releasing a book, there’s a ceremony around it, and you can choose what that ceremony looks like. I want to do the ceremony the best that I can. And I think I’ve been doing that, so I feel happy that people are going to finally get to hear it. Because I started writing these songs in 2018, and then started actually went into the studio to do the bulk of the recording in 2023. So it’s been a long process.
Anis: When some of those songs started first appearing in 2018, did they reveal themselves at that juncture as being something that was part of a record, or were they simply songs? Or were they even just things that were coming out of you to process certain stuff?
Neal: The first song that I wrote for it is called “Holding It Down,” and that one felt very much like processing. And this is my first album of pop kind of songs — I was like, “Can I make a song that’s verse and chorus?” Which I’ve never really been able to do. And that was the first one. Then when I wrote the song “Bald Eagle Bathing,” that was the fourth one in, and that was when I think I started feeling like, “OK, this is an album. This is starting to build into something.”
Anis: What was the prompting that was like, “Hey Neal, what if we write a more traditional song?”
Neal: I think I was at a pivot point in my life in a number of ways, where I had worn down enough of me and the feelings that I had about what I needed to be creatively, that I had really held on to on previous albums — like an adherence to, “It’s going to be just drumming and singing and that’s it.” I reached a point where I loosened up on all of that, and so that’s just naturally what was happening. Have you found this, where maybe in your early work, you were strict with yourself about form, or what you thought you were doing, or what you thought you were meant to be doing?
Anis: Maybe not so much under the lens of form — overall, I’m not much of a form person. But there’s ways in which, as I got older as a writer, structures of my own creating started revealing themselves much more. But definitely as a younger artist, there was at times an aspect of — as I think [it is] with everybody who’s exploring their creative self — “What is the art that I want to make? What is the art that I’m capable of making? What do I have to say? What do I want in the world?” I think often when artists are younger, there’s always that conversation happening, either with themselves or their friends or their classmates or teachers, of the elusive voice. “I gotta find my voice!” But ultimately, that voice is your voice, so it’s sitting in there somewhere. So I think there’s definitely a journey of removing those layers of, “I want to make work like this person whose work I love,” or “I want to make work like this person.” Like you were saying, [that sense of] “I’m supposed to make this kind of work.”
So with having that first song arrive to you in this pop-ish framework — was that something that arrived, or was that something like, “Let me see what happens when I write something that’s verse-chorus-verse-chorus”?
Neal: I think it just arrived. But all my favorite music is pop music. So I remember talking to friends over the years and wondering if I could write a verse-chorus-verse-chorus kind of song. And I think that innate wondering came out with this entire body of work.
Anis: It makes me think of how eons ago, when Broken Social Scene’s You Forgot It In People came out, I remember in some review it was talking about how the members had been in all these other Canadian bands, and one of the members was speaking to how they’d collectively made all these art records, and what happens if “the people that we are come together and make pop songs.” It’s such an interesting experiment — “What is a pop song as delivered through the machine of a person that does not make pop music?” Some of the things that I love about this record echo that record, and maybe it’s just because those two sentimentalities are present in my knowledge of both these records.
Some of the things that I love about this record are the ways in which there’s a constant playing with or — it never feels quite like a subverting of it, but pushing against the idea of a record, the idea of a song. There’s so much with pop music where there’s a gloss or sheen to it. It’s like you take these elements and you put them together in such a way that you forget there’s these elements making up this whole. And throughout this record of yours, there’s conversations with the engineer, little asides to the other musicians or to oneself. And it’s like this reminding to the listener, “You’re listening to people on the other side of this.” That conversation is a really interesting and beautiful part of the record.
Neal: Oh, gosh. Thanks for saying that. You’re talking about the song “Calf Kicks Calf,” when it goes into the kind of middle eight and you hear me counting in Mirabai Peart, who played the strings. Things like that — do you feel like you’re able to do that on the page?
Anis: That’s a really interesting question.
Neal: Because you’re dealing in different dimensions.
Anis: When I read my work in person, when I’m performing and doing a show, I think there’s always an aspect of that in what I seek to do with the work. I love pushing against what the idea of the veil between an audience and a performance is. So I definitely try to deflate that balloon of distance.
Neal: Yes.
Anis: But even in that, it’s a live thing, so it’s so much more easy to be constantly deflating that balloon. But also, there’s just less of the structure in which one is able to kind of dance outside of the theater of the thing. You know, the record, the song, the recording has a structure for one to dance against it, if that makes sense. And on a stage, one is seeing exactly what is happening all the time, so it’s like the structure doesn’t exist, or the structure and the dancing against it is the same thing.
It makes me think of a friend of mine, Annelyse [Gelman]. She’s this poet, and she and a friend of hers developed this literary journal that’s also a writing program called Midst. You open it up like a writing program, and you write inside of it, but what it’s doing as you’re writing is essentially recording every part of the writing process — anything that you erase, everything that you cut and copy and paste, whatever it is. So then you can access this playing timeline, and it shows from the blank page how this piece of writing takes shape.
Neal: Oh, cool.
Anis: I think it’s an amazing, wonderful, beautiful thing. I was thinking it’d be interesting to kind of do what you’re speaking of, in a different way and through the act of writing, where I’m able to start having conversations separate of whatever the final piece might be with the reader — like acknowledging my own notes within this, while keeping in mind that all those things are going to disappear at some point once we arrive at the finished form.
But that’s such an interesting question. I want to explore how a poem might do that on a written page. In having those things there, is it an opportunity for you to be in conversation with the listener in a specific way? Or, ultimately, what’s the reason for you why that’s there? There’s this part in “Starting Over” where first you say something like, “OK, are we recording?” And then you say, “Bring in the drummer.” Then the drummer doesn’t enter — instead, the electric guitar enters. Then there’s drumming going on, and right when some drumming is about to lift off, it sounds like the drummer tripped over their own kit and they tumble.
Neal: Yeah, yeah.
Anis: That’s something that I always return to on the record.
Neal: So, “Starting Over” was the third song that I wrote. I’d moved to Colorado, this little coal coal mining town, for a little while in 2018 and wrote that one there. What you hear there is — you’re right, the drums come in and kind of keep this steady beat, and it’s going to take off. But what happens is the drummer actually slows down and plays the part too slow and fades out. And then in the recording studio, I threw this bucket full of drumsticks, and things just kind of go everywhere. Working that out in the mix was really fun because it’s panned in a fun way, so it moves on the aural plane if you listen to it in headphones. The sounds of all those sticks bouncing moves between the left and the right channels.
So there’s that moment, there’s the “Calf Kicks Calf” moment. There’s a moment in the song “Sit Around Dumb,” where there’s the middle sort of abstract instrumental section where Miribai says, “Oh, wait!” Why are those in there? I think that they work musically, first and foremost. Like, the melody of her voice right there fits what’s about to happen.
Anis: “Sit Around Dumb” makes me ecstatic, for a number of different reasons. I remember her voice coming in, sort of slipping in there between a shift in the music. There’s some sort of prick to the chest in hearing her voice there that’s tender.
Neal: Yes, totally. And there’s my intake of breath there, like a gasp, sucking air into your chest like you’re about to get really scared. It’s so interesting how all this works. I knew in 2021 while I was still writing all these songs that I needed a woman’s voice on the album. I wanted someone to sing, actually — and I’ve never had anyone else sing on any of my albums. I had a vague idea of what everything was going to be, but I knew I wanted a female vocal. And it’s just so fun how things work out — that was it, Mira just catching herself, starting a take and saying, “Oh, wait!”
Anis: That aspect of wanting someone else’s voice involved in this — all your other records, it’s just you on the whole thing, right?
Neal: Yeah.
Anis: What was that like for you, to have these other contributors?
Neal: Well, I’ve never worked with material that was provided by other people, so this time — gosh, shout out to Ian “Yuck” Lindsay, a bassist in Portland. I love this guy. He’s in a band called greaterkind. He plays with everybody, he’s a true master of the bass. And Akila Fields, who also is just incredible. He plays keys, he does a lot of jazz stuff, his project is called Palm Dat. With those guys, I gave them the recordings of just my voice and guitar and said, “Look, I’m going to pay you either way, but I may use some of what you give me, all of what you give me, or none of what you give me. Just give me three treatments for each song.” With Yuck, for example, for “Plums Coming In,” I was like, “Give me a James Jamerson, Motown version, and then give me something that’s just very simple, straightforward, and then do whatever you want.” And then I collage and grab the tastiest hooks and pick and choose.
Anis: And did that collaging serve as ultimately the final recordings? Or were those demos like, “Now can you recreate this?”
Neal: That’s what appears on the on the album. And in fact, on the song “Plums Coming In,” there’s some bass stuff that I comped together that I’m not sure if it’s playable. [Laughs.]
Anis: One of the things that I love about the record is the words. They’re just so tender, and there’s such a yearning in a really beautiful and mysterious way. The way you use language on the record feels very evocative of the ways that poetry uses itself to speak heart-to-heart versus brain-to-brain. You’re a writer — I’m curious what made it that these, essentially, poems were things that you wanted to give music to.
Neal: Well, maybe if I felt like I were a poet, it could be another way, but it can’t be another way for me. Those words couldn’t really exist out there. I’ve thought about what it would be like for someone to read [my] words, and it just doesn’t feel right at all.
Anis: I totally get that. But the lyrics — I’m stupefied by them.
Neal: Oh, wow. We’re recording, right? [Laughs.]
Anis: [Laughs.] The syntax that you choose throughout the record is at times so beautiful and so unique, and other times so weird and bizarre. I love how all that mixes together. And at the same time, there’s something that the music is doing to the words — and there’s something that the words are doing to the music — the two together are definitely delivering some specific feeling.
Neal: And isn’t that the intangible X-factor of music, and of pop music in particular? I have a friend who has essentially lyric blindness. He listens to tons of music, but he says that even his favorite songs, he could not tell you the lyrics. Do you know anyone like that?
Anis: I mean, I feel like the older I get, the more that happens. I’m just like, “I cannot hold these lyrics in my thoughts.” But, yeah, when someone just doesn’t listen to any aspect of lyrics, like it just doesn’t land, I’m fascinated by that.
Neal: I’m a lyrics-first music listener. If the lyrics are great, I’m in. The music could be whatever it needs to be. I mixed the album so that the voice, in all but a few cases, is very unaffected, so it’s very legible. I just want people to know what the words are.
Anis: Which from a sonic level works really well and beautifully. There’s something about the record that feels like from a time past, you know? I think there’s something about the timbre of your singing that aids and supports that.
Neal: I don’t have this great, magnetic singing voice or anything like that. So there is this appeal and attraction to adorn and affect your voice. You listen to a lot of music, and people throw a ton of reverb on the voice or there’s a bunch of effects. Grouper comes to mind — the lyrics aren’t often legible at all, but that’s part of her thing. It’s kind of about, “I’m here, but I’m not.” And actually, in the last stages of mixing, I lowered the volume of the vocal in a couple songs, just because I was like, “Man, this voice is way out in front, and it’s so naked and unadorned.” I was really worrying. And one of my friends was like, “No, this sort of reminds me of the opening song of Beach Boys’ Smile,” where it’s just so dry and so present and unadorned and really close to the listener. She was like, “Have courage. It’s cool. Don’t worry.”
Anis: A number of the songs just have a feeling that’s evocative of the ‘70s or something. It’s something that makes me echo inside of myself to when I was younger — not even specific records, but just the sound that records had when I was younger. I think it works really beautifully for this record.
Neal: Well, thank you. And thank you for doing this.
Anis: Thank you!
