Photo by Emily Isakson
Sarah Morris
It’s been over two decades since a young Sarah Morris made a move to Nashville to try her hand at making it in the music industry while waiting tables on the side. Right before her big move, she read a book that said, “To be able to be a singer, you have to be a songwriter.” Morris had never written a song, only covering artists she admired up until that point, citing Alison Krauss, known for her intuitiveness in the songs she covers, as her guiding light.
Morris sips from a piping hot cup of chamomile tea in the bright sunlight on a rare warm Minnesota afternoon in St. Paul by Lake Monster Brewing. Her long, ash brown hair is held back from her face with sunglasses as she recalls her four years living in Nashville and her move back to her home state. “I found two women to co-write with me, and they taught me a lot of what I know,” she shares. Despite how prolific she's become, it was something she had to grow into, and also something 22-year-old Sarah did not want to hear. “It scared me so much, because I love songs so much. Anytime I tried to write anything, I hated it. I wanted to be perfect from the start. I thought what I was writing was so cliché, and what came out was not what I wanted to be doing. I call that time in my life my ‘grad school years’ and when my husband and I moved back I felt like I had learned all that I could in Nashville. I was not finding my own voice there. I was learning skills and crafts, but I could not hear my own voice, because it was always, ‘Here’s how you get your song to radio. Here’s how you get your song to the next level.’ I realized I didn’t want that—that constant chase.”
Morris came home to find a career that took on a slow burn. As she talks, a group of young elementary school children file through the courtyard, triggering recollections of her time as a substitute teacher along with working retail for Penzey’s Spices. In between part time jobs and full time parenting for two young children, Morris collaborated with others and formed her own community of artists wherein she could create the work that truly brought her joy.
It was through growing into motherhood that she learned to push past the dip, that honeymoon space creatives often face when their work can either become something they were truly good at and enjoyed for a small amount of time or what they do for the rest of their lives. As it was, Morris found the songs came easier the longer she did it. She also committed to her craft head-on. “Before I became a mom, I was just kinda doing it. It was having kids that made me feel I needed to be the model for them. It kicked my booty into gear because it helped me find my voice. That was the other piece of it. I owe them everything,” she says.
Being a mother is a reason why songs like “Ruthless” off her latest album, Here’s to You, are so difficult to share publicly, since so many of her other songs are mainly centered around love and light. Morris shares and flips her hand over to show her fingers, “The first line is more autobiographical than anything in there. It's ‘Your calloused fingers, my calloused heart…’ The ‘calloused fingers’ really belong to me, but I would worry that my heart is also calloused—that I don't feel as much as I should, and I’ve allowed it to grow numb. It's safer to not feel. My husband worked on our family cabin, so I thought about that when I was writing that line, as well. I let myself go for it as I wrote. I watched a lot of soap operas growing up, and they always had these sordid stories. Even though what I write is not entirely autobiographical, I understand that that's part of all of us, that darkness, whether we should act on it or not, you know, it's all in there.”
Clarity is key in songwriting when you’re cutting to the heart of storytelling, a note Morris takes from Brené Brown, “Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind.” While “Ruthless” carries the underside of humanity, tracks like “The Longest Night” (written about the death of friends Jessa Roquet and Bekah Marx) and “Staggering” bring us back to humanity and what draws us close.
“I wrote ‘Staggering’ around November of 2021,” Morris shares. “We were back at it and getting back into the world, and everyone was still hurting. We were still in that space of ‘What are we supposed to do? How are we supposed to be good to each other?’ Some people were tired of doing things for other people, and there were a lot of ways to get your heart broken just by looking around. I'm always outside, and every winter—especially this last winter ‘cause it was so long—I would think about a tree, and their thin branches, and what they can hold. How do you do that and not break? That was the imagery that it came out of. It’s mind blowing all of the ways we can fall apart and be put back together.”
Morris excels when she centers her work around growing up and older. With Here’s to You, she wanted to put out good, strongly written songs that withstood the test of time.
“My last album, I worked hard in getting it out as much as I could, but this album cycle I’m content with it living on its own. I'm one person with a finite set of hours, and that’s enough. I'm enough. There is always a bit of ‘I'm not out there and going to shows and seeing people. They’re not going to think that I'm a nice person if I’m making time for my family.’ But I only get this time with the kids once.The goal with being a musician is that this is something I could do the rest of my life. Your voice changes as you get older, and that's a great thing, but with songwriting, I get to do that forever.You know, when you do press around an album, the question is always, ‘What is the story around this album? What’s the arc?’ I realized I guess the story of this album is love and kindness. I’m okay with not having drama that surrounds my work. Every day I wake up and choose love and kindness, and even that is a tough decision.”
Sarah Morris has an album release show for Here's to You on May 5 at Icehouse.
