Morris, Emmett

Websites:  https://emmettmorris.bandcamp.com/album/emerald, https://www.instagram.com/emmettmorrismusic/
Origin: Barrie, Ontario, 🇨🇦
Biography:

Emmett Morris is a singer, songwriter, and guitar player from Barrie, Ont. His new EP, Emerald, out December 1st, is a four-song EP that evokes, with joy and humor, the California country rock of the late 60s and early 70s with a vein of psychedelia. The record boasts taut songwriting, top-flight musicianship, a jaunty lyrical bent, and a surprising sonic immediacy that probably owes something to the punk, hardcore, and thrash metal that Morris grew up on.

Morris learned his instrument as a music-obsessed youth in thrall to Zakk Wylde, Kirk Hammett and Billy Joe Armstrong (in roughly equal respective measure). After almost two decades of playing in aggressive underground bands — touring the world, putting out independent albums — he released his debut solo EP, A Better World’s To Come, in 2021, a quick blast of jangly and twangy Americana that signaled a new direction and a maturing talent.

In the following months, the pandemic still raging, Morris sat at home and kept writing songs. When it was finally time to play these songs on stage, he put together an ensemble of familiar faces, including Zac Bishop (drums) and Johno Brown (bass), old friends and bandmates from Barrie who had recently returned to Ontario after having lived for years elsewhere in the country and the world. Rounding out the lineup was Dan Darrah (guitar), who had previously played in Total Love, a power-pop band that Morris fronted in the 2010s. The nascent unit immediately went to work practising and gigging the new material in earnest. They were quick to cohere.

“These are the first songs in this phase of my career that I’ve worked out with a band of steady collaborators,” Morris says. “I wrote the songs, but the band helped form them. There’s a lot of camaraderie in the gigs and practicing. The project has my name on it, but it’s a family affair — we’re at the bar before and after just about every practice.”

Speaking of family, the lead single, “Take You Down to Vegas,” released in October 2023, is a Gram Parson-esque high-concept male-female duet festooned with honky-tonkin’ piano, whose never-off-theme lyric (“My love for you burns bright as Fremont”) tells of a freewheeling run across Route 66 to a shotgun wedding in Sin City, a bet-it-all-on-us ode to fast living and lasting love. Vocalist Nicollette Hoang, of Guelph, On band “Nicolette and the Nobodies” sings harmonies and does Emmylou duty on verse two.

Earlier this year, Morris and his merry men laid down “Vegas” and the rest of Emerald at Gold Standard Recorders, a landmark east-Toronto studio housed in what was once the Donlands Theatre. Producing was Aaron Goldstein, who’s something of an institution in and around Toronto’s country scene, a go-to sideman (on pedal steel, usually) to the likes of Kathleen Edwards, Dallas Green, and Daniel Romano. Goldstein had seen Morris perform live about a year earlier and, liking what he saw and heard, suggested they work together. The basic tracks were cut live off the floor in a single day, in the best Nashville tradition (“No click track, Morris hastens to point out), with Goldstein adding pedal steel and guitar.

Rounding out the track list are the Glenn Freyish “Golden Meadow”; “Take a Beat,” which previously came on its own as a single in 2021 but has been reimagined as a swampy jam that Deadheads will love; and “Glimpse of Beyond” an existential 13th Floor-ish psyche number that shows, more than any other song, what the band is capable of.

Such a mix of material may, according to Morris, put him in an ambivalent position with regard to the local music scenes: “We’re not quite country enough for the country scene, we’re a little too rockin’ or jammy,” he says, “but we’re maybe a little too prosaic and fun-loving and boisterous for the psych crowd.”

But then again, if nothing and no one else in town sounds quite like you, you’re probably doing something right.