Music Week
Last year, Morgan Wade released Reckless, the stunning debut LP that is poised to make the Virginia singer/songwriter country's next crossover star. Here, she tells Music Week her story....
Morgan Wade is a creature of the dawn, sometimes getting up as early as 4.30am. "It's special," she says. "The streets are empty. My phone's not ringing. There's no email. It's just me and my thoughts."
She visits the gym, then comes home to make coffee and write in her journal before settling down to write songs. "It's just the best time," she elaborates. "It's when creativity comes most naturally to me."
The Virginia singer/songwriter's natural affinity with the beginning of the day is currently coming in useful. Today, speaking to Music Week, she's multi-tasking, dialling in just after clearing airport security in Kentucky. She's been playing at Mile 0 Fest in Florida's Key West ("which was quite a lot colder than you might have thought"), and she's now heading to Boston for the first in a series of gigs in northern US cities. She is thoughtful, switched on and chatty. It is 5.30am.
Wade's work ethic, coupled with her songwriting ability and emotional honesty, led to her becoming one of last year's breakout crossover country stars. She released her debut album Reckless via Thirty Tigers, a Nashville services company that organises marketing and distribution while artists get creative control and retain their rights. Reckless is a country album, but it also leans heavily into alt-rock, classic rock and pop. Wade currently has almost two million monthly listeners on Spotify, where her most popular song is single and BBC Radio 2 favourite Wilder Days with 23m plays. "I didn't expect my debut to do so well," she says. "It's incredible to work so hard on something and really see it pay off."
Wade decided to form a band while in college. She did it - and if only all musicians were this transparent about their intentions - because of an ex-boyfriend, thinking she'd either win him back or really annoy him.
"Oh yes ma'am, that is very true," she says. "I found my bandmates on Craigslist, which looking back does not seem like a good idea for a 19-year-old girl. I went to meet all these dudes in a basement. But luckily it worked out in my favour and I didn't become a true crime podcast." The boy remained an ex and her band eventually broke up too. But Wade had become a musician.
"Before Reckless, I didn't have a label, manager or agent," she says. "I wrote that album while I was working and waiting for all that to happen." Reckless (out via Sony Music Commercial Group in the UK) is surprisingly world-weary for an artist who is still only 27. It's full of tales about doomed romances and reflections on wilder times.
"Country artists write about real, true heartbreak," she says. "Look at someone like Loretta Lynn, who I really admire. She was so honest and so vulnerable, and her songs were considered quite explicit at the time, although they wouldn't be now. She didn't care. She was true to what she wanted to say."
Wade's vulnerable lyrics don't just deal with love. "I'm almost five years sober," she says. "And a lot of the lyrics are me trying to work that out, what it means, how to do it, how to be in the music world as a sober person." She stopped drinking, she says, on another early morning: "I woke up in Manhattan and I couldn't remember the night before. And the feeling of loss lasted for weeks, it wasn't just a hangover."
She also realised her drinking was aggravating her depression. "I was drinking to cover it up, which obviously doesn't work," she says. "And it's still hard to remain sober, but I just reflect back on that moment." Aside from Loretta Lynn, Wade is a big fan of Miranda Lambert, Kacey Musgraves and Dolly Parton ("I love and respect Dolly, of course").
But the artist she is "a total nerd" about is Elvis: "I've read just about every Elvis book there is, I've been obsessed with him since I was a kid." At seven years old she would get Elvis biographies, well beyond her reading age, from the library and pore over them. She has visited Graceland twice so far. "He really made his own path," she says. "And he really helped blend rock and pop and blues. I just love him."
As a child, however, the first music she heard was bluegrass. "I would listen with my grandfather," she says. "It was all bluegrass. It's very heavy in Virginia." Wade grew up in the very small town of Floyd, Virginia, where the last US census listed the total population as just 425. "It has one little stoplight," she says. "It's very rural, very isolated. You need a car. There's nowhere you could walk to."
And although she says she's looking forward to seeing more of the world as she tours, dislikes small town gossip and knows that her politics might not match her neighbours', she would still move back.
"If I had children, I would want them to grow up somewhere like that," she says. "There's a real community that you don't always get in other places. If you lost somebody, you wouldn't cook for a month. There would be people bringing you food all the time. The town would look after you. And that kind of community is really valuable."
It will be a while before she goes back to her roots in a town like Floyd. At the moment, people want her to be everywhere, and her place on the bill at Country To Country Festival generated huge buzz among UK fans.
"I've always thought you guys have really cool, really interesting taste in music," she says. "I think I'm going to come over to England and not want to leave..."
But, with more touring in the offing and work on her next album already underway, you get the feeling she'll be used to traversing the globe soon enough. Morgan Wade, it seems, is country music's new dawn.