“When you’re being as honest as possible and when you feel as honestly as possible. I really believe that the melodies and the lyrics and the art or whatever it is, that comes out is not a coincidence. To get it down on paper or in a recording is like bottling it. So that when someone else opens it, they’re like opening up that feeling I’m so convinced that is there’s some extra human communication going on in with creative stuff.“ Morgan Harper Jones is talking about the songs on her heartfelt debut album Up To The Glass, an album ripe with emotion and history. A experience hewn, exploration of growing up, in your twenties against a backdrop of love, heartbreak, loss and self acceptance. On the outside looking in and finding your voice, your ability to be honest with everyone including yourself. It’s an approach to song writing that will make these songs speak to countless other people: a comforting “you’re not alone” in musical form.
“I think it’s Paul Simon who said “we’re humans with finite emotions, wit infinite stories and like infinite personalities, but we have a finite spectrum of emotions.” She continues “He used to say in his writing that he knew that if something was really true for him, it was guaranteed to be true for, not everybody on the planet, but a lot of people on the planet.”
Morgan Harper-Jones was raised by her grandparents in Rochdale, an upbringing which surely explains her possessing a maturity beyond her years. Raised to a soundtrack of their favourites proved the spark that ignited her own musical passions, eventually leading her to study songwriting at BIMM in Manchester before releasing two EPs, ‘Breathe’ and ‘While You Lay Sound Asleep’. Her music featured prominently in Netflix’s recent international smash ‘Love At First Sight’.
From folk tinged indie pop, to country pop and beyond each of Harper-Jones’s songs are imprinted with a heart and shot through honesty and personable warmth despite dealing with difficult subjects. With echoes of everyone to Laura Marling, Kacey Musgraves or even Taylor Swift, she has a voice that has weathered experience and trauma, despite her young years, and a richly drawn song writing palette that’s been honed and grooved onstage and on record.
“It just feels so important to be to be honest,” she confides.
Album opener and first single ‘Swimming Upstream’ came out of ongoing sessions with producer Iain Archer (James Bay, Snow Patrol, Lisa Hannigan). Cycling through tumbling acoustic motifs and Harper-Jones’s affecting tone that hangs with the pain and struggles of long-term ill health issues and injury, she tells the story of meeting someone whose life was changed by injury. Replete with the twinkling chorus, it’s hanging on to hope and light amidst a dark road. It’s wonderful.
“It came from an injury I had last year which took about 10 months to fully heal,” Morgan details “I was so pissed off that I was missing going out dancing or hiking or on holidays with friends. And I met someone who had a terrible injury when they were younger, but it led them down a particular path in their life and they said how if it hadn’t happened they’d be totally different. I become a bit obsessed with reading about people who had suffered but were ultimately grateful for their suffering because of where it led them when they let go of fighting it.”
‘Main Character’ is ‘an anxiety-spiral-slideshow featuring all of my biggest regrets, safely decanted into a 3 minute 30 second song” she says. With an immersive intensity and ability to connect her songs to emotions this is another impressive offering ripe with self awareness and underscored by wry humour. Building from small beginnings, it travels through her flood of worry, into a cathartic outro, another superlative song from a songwriter who has an ability to craft wonderful songs that tap into the depth of trauma and pain.
“It has been so healing for me to write not in the kind of the sense of like, oh, it was like, letting my emotions out,” she explains. “But for me that song was the first time ever I said to myself, I don’t care who likes this. I don’t need to put a spin on it. it was the first time that I was just really, quite brutally honest. Wanting to please everybody had crept into my music quite a lot. I always thought I needed to hide myself. And this song, anyone who’s listened to the album, they’ve all picked that one out completely unprompted? And that has been so healing, because I really thought that was a bit of myself that I needed to hide and that has been the bit that everyone has said, that’s our favourite.”
‘Boombox’ is a rush of country tinged pop melodies with scampering percussion, Morgan’s voice is steeped in a knowing that belies her years, it’s both vulnerable and defiant as she implores a love interest to “let me in or let me go.” It’s a song which started as a sombre empty threat, but one that braves rejection, celebrates youth and commits wholeheartedly to discovering what the future holds. It’s another impressive instalment from this songwriter who has proved the depth of her writing.
“When I when I wrote ‘Boombox’, I remember knowing so clearly, if I just listened to myself that this person wasn’t right, but I just wanted to give them one last chance because I just didn’t really want to accept the fact that it wasn’t right. Like, ‘Swimming Upstream’, I was frustrating myself and breaking my own heart over and over. The person was telling me very clearly with their behaviour that they didn’t want anything, and I think we went as poppy as we could with it.”
The album’s intimacy comes from a streamlined approach to her creative process. Whereas her previous two EPs featured a wealth of collaborators, the majority of this record was initially written on acoustic guitar in her bedroom before being developed with songwriter and producer Iain Archer. “He brought so much space as well and patience for me to explore loads of things and like, yeah, he just is brought so much and like, so many of his ideas, like it felt like yeah, like, I think he’s just totally on the same page as me in terms of like, how important the feeling is..”
The haunting ‘Joshua’ with its slowly enveloping suite of brittle acoustic motifs, and Morgan’s gorgeously haunting vocals, that rise in a double track like two voices in either ear, taps into a well of intimacy and connection. “I’d met this person and I thought I really wanted them to be present with me. And I could see all of their flaws, like, as clear as day. So I wrote that song.”
“I have the belief, when you can see the the darker side to somebody, or the things that someone else is struggling with usually, it’s because you also struggle with the same things. It takes one to know one. Have you ever done that where you give someone advice? And then you think, huh, this is advice that I need? So Joshua is like me, giving this person advice. And a year later, I’m like, oh, that’s exactly what I needed to hear. And this is this is just as much about me as it is about them.”
Up To The Glass is out on the 22nd of March via Play It Again Sam, pre-order here.
Photo credit: Katie Silvester
Live dates:
3 April Bristol, The Crofters Rights
4 April Brighton, The Folklore Rooms
7 April Glasgow, The Hug and Pint
8 April Leeds, Hyde Park Book Club
10 April Manchester, Gullivers
11 April London, The Courtyard Theatre
18 May Sheffield, Get Together Festival
