Little Rebellion Music

Australian entertainment chameleon, Craig Morrison, already achieved success back home, and now following the example of several of his fellow Aussies, has brought his songs to Nashville. For the next installment in the Songwriters Circle series, it was interesting to compare and contrast the approaches to songwriting in both communities, and examine the thoughts of someone who is both a seasoned entertainer yet still the new kid in town. With so much to talk about, an in-depth interview was inevitable.

We met up on Music Row on a hot summer day, just before the release of his self-titled US debut album to discuss his experience so far.

UCN: Do you remember why you started writing?
Craig Morrison: Originally, I started writing because I told a record label that I could.

UCN: Now, that’s an answer I’ve not heard before! *laughs*
CM: Oh, you’ll like this story. *smiles* My father was an entertainer so I’ve always been on stage and I’ve always sung, but I never really thought about songwriting; I was a cabaret performer. I also had a big acting career in Australia. During the last movie that I did, I had just mucked around writing a song with a guitarist with a cover band that I had. The producer of the movie heard the song and wanted to use it for the soundtrack. So we said ‘of course, no worries.’ They got a session band in Melbourne to record all the music and had me record the vocal. And then my dad sorted me out a meeting with a record label and said ‘Go in there and sell yourself!’ I took this one song into the meeting and they said ‘Do you have any other songs?’, so I said ‘Oh, we’ve got heaps of them! We write all the time!’ *smiles* So they said, ‘Cool, come back in two weeks and we’ll demo everything you’ve got.’ I walked out of that meeting in cold sweat, jumped in my car, drove back up the central coast, sat down with my guitarist and keyboard player, and wrote and wrote and wrote. We probably put together about 30 of 40 songs; it was crazy how quickly we put them together from pieces I’d written or they’d written. And we were a rock band really! My favorite band at that point was Van Halen, and that was kind of the style of music we were writing at first. That’s how I got into songwriting. We did two albums under that label before that all sort of disbanded, and actually, I stopped music altogether. It was a bad split and my girlfriend was pregnant, and then my daughter was born so I went out and started a business. The business was meant to supplement my music career but it ended up totally engulfing my life. It was successful, we had nine staff, and drove the BMW, and all that sort of thing. But after a period of time it just destroyed me. It was when that started falling to pieces that I started writing again for my own piece of mind. I never thought I’d be in the music industry again. I was just writing to self-medicate.

UCN: It’s interesting that when you were writing for a label, it didn’t last, it didn’t connect, but now you’re writing because you want to, it has a totally different feel.
CM: Well, those older songs, I had no creative control. Because of where my mind was at, and how much older I was, I started winding back from that and writing more about emotion. It became more important to me that what I was writing was what I was feeling at the time. It didn’t necessarily make them good songs, but they were written from my heart. At that point I wasn’t co-writing, I was just by myself.

UCN: So did that need to write again inform the fact that they were country songs, or did the fact that you wanted to write country inform you getting personal?
CM: This is going to get really in-depth… *smiles*

UCN: I warned you. *smiles*
CM: They weren’t specifically written as country songs, but I’d write them on an acoustic guitar and was singing them in the hallway at work, on the staircase, because there was good reverb in there. The whole story is probably too long but what happened was, there was a lady who came to my office to sell a product around the time things started to fall apart. That lady is now my wife. *smiles* She was the one who heard some of these songs and said ‘you should really be doing music.’ So, she entered me in a band competition. She got sick of listening to me singing these songs in the living room, I guess. *smiles* We were just work colleagues at this point, we were really good friends but not dating or anything yet, and she went and found a band competition online. She came downstairs and said ‘I just booked five return tickets to Rockhampton’, which is far north Queensland from where I was in Sydney, and ‘It’s in seven weeks. Go and put a band together.’ And I did. We rehearsed religiously, three days a week, in the warehouse. We flew up there and we won the competition. And it was so big, there was so much media attention, that it absolutely propelled me from being a nobody in the music industry, to being out there again. I then went out and recorded those songs, and some others that I co-wrote with my wife, and released that album in Australia. But that’s not the album I’ve released here now. I might release them here later, there a couple of good ones. And they’re dear to me, whether they’re good or not, I love those songs! *smiles*

UCN: Was your wife a writer before?
CM: She got involved in it because she got sick of me not finishing songs.

UCN: She was more the editor?
CM: Well, I’d be stuck for lyrics. I’d be in the middle of a song or have an idea for a song and just have nowhere to take it. She’s a great lyricist; she’s very colorful in what she writes. It became really cool to be able to write together. On this album now, there’s two songs we co-wrote together. And, I don’t profess to be a great songwriter, but I like doing it. There are some amazing songwriters in Nashville, and I feel so privileged to be able to go to these publishing houses here. I had 150 songs to pick from, I picked eight that I put on my album, and I thank every single one of those writers! Whether I did the songs justice, well, I tried my very best.

UCN: Of your earlier songs you said ‘they might not be good.’ When did you start to feel they were? When did you get the confidence to say ‘we just wrote this and we have something here’?
CM: When I finish a song, I don’t know if it’s good or not. You know, sometimes when you’re that close to something, it’s difficult; you hear something that no one else does. In Australia, I did a lot of shows. So I would take newly-written songs and get with my friends, which are my audience, and play them my new songs. And then I’ll get a thumb-up or thumb-down. It’s an important thing to perform a song on stage. It’s all good to record a master piece in the studio, but for me, the studio part is really meant to be capturing what we were doing live. I’ve also got some songs that I think have potential, so I can’t wait to meet more songwriters in Nashville and go ‘Look, I have this. You brilliant songwriter, where can we take this?’ *smiles* Now…’Hot Kinda Love,’ won Australian country song of the year, but it’s just a fun song. That’s not a brilliantly written master piece. *smiles*

UCN: Well, at a show recently James Taylor introduced one of his songs as being ‘meaning-free,’ and I’ve been using that phrase already. That’s what those fun songs often are. *smiles*
CM: That’s good! I’m actually going to pinch that too. *smiles*

UCN: It’s not meant to have a point, and I bet in a live show that one really works.
CM: Oh, it works great! But the hard thing is that every time I get interviewed and they ask me ‘So what did you write this song about?’, I’m like ‘Well, what do you want me to say? Everybody needs a hot kind of love…?’ I had some of the most corny responses, but really, it’s about nothing. If I had said it was about my wife, she would have throttled me! *laughs*

UCN: I think it’s OK to say ‘it’s about nothing.’ I think the problem is people often don’t do that and make up some reason behind it, and then the song ends up getting judged on what it isn’t wanting to be. It then gets taken seriously and people go ‘this is really bad,’ but it’s not meant to be understood that way.
CM: Totally, yes. Sometimes songs are just written to be enjoyed and you don’t have to take it anywhere.

UCN: Where do you tend to find the first spark of a song, and then how do you develop it?
CM: Sometimes I’ll have an idea with regards to what I want to write about, but more often than not – especially with my little son now, I play a lot of guitar with just noodling around with him – I find melody coming to me and then that’s what I’ll develop a song from. I’ll think about what sort of mood the melody is putting me in and work from there. And if I’ll get really stuck, I’ll go ‘Nicole…!!’ *laughs* Like many writers I think, I have a list of things that have happened to me, and any kind of quirky things. When you hear somebody say something interesting or stupid, you write it down.

UCN: Does that happen when it happens or do you set time aside to write like the scheduled Music Row writes?
CM: I wish I could, it’d be really cool to be able to do that. I also haven’t had the opportunity to write like that. It would be cool, it sort of forces creativity on you.

UCN: Yes, but on the other hand…it forces creativity, you know what I mean? I know people who absolutely thrive in that environment, and others who have been broken by it.
CM: Yes, the better part of Nashville seems to thrive on that. With me, my head has to be free of everything else before I can start to write. My writing, since I’ve moved here has almost slowed to a halt, because there is just that much going on. I mean, I’m starting over. I will have plenty of time to write, what I need now is to have people appreciate what I have already. I had a meeting yesterday and the gentleman asked ‘So, who have you been writing with?’ and I have to sit there and say ‘Nobody, at this stage.’ But you know, I don’t have an infrastructure here like I did in Australia. I have maybe 40 people at most here who know who I am, and that’s because I’ve met them. To just go out and start writing would be quite daunting. It’s not like a friend of a friend said ‘Hey, why don’t you write with such-and-such?’ It doesn’t happen that way. So, hopefully I can get some traction here, and then from that extend myself out and meet people. I like to meet people first. I don’t know how I’d handle walking into a room with someone I’ve never met and going ‘So, what are we going to write about?’ I’d prefer to get to know them a little and get inside their head a little bit first.

UCN: Those sessions are amazing. They’ll walk into that room, go ‘so where are you from?’ and then just start sharing really personal stuff sometimes about old girlfriends or something. And I’m sitting there going ‘how are you doing this?’ And then when the write is over, that information just gets forgotten.
CM: I think they’re onto a good thing; I think they’re giving themselves therapy. *laughs*

UCN: Basically, Music Row is a big group therapy session. *smiles*
CM: I am looking forward to becoming woven into this cloth Nashville has. I’m not going to force my way in, I want to be accepted for who I am and make friends. As far as being an artist and getting on stage, I’m hammering that as hard as I can, because that’s my living. The songwriting, I don’t want to force myself on anyone, I’ll just slowly start to meet people.

UCN: When I look at the people I know and how long it’s taken them to get in – Eric Paslay, Jaren Johnston – and this year they broke through suddenly. When it happens, it happens really fast, but the run-up is slow and you’re right, you can’t force that.
CM: Well, I’m looking forward to going through the process.

UCN: I’m still interested in how you know you’re writing good stuff. Is it, you either have it or you don’t, or is there a part that you can learn, where you learn to craft a song, learn about melody and rhymes?
CM: I think you need a certain amount of creativity, but I’ll never say to someone ‘you’ll never be a songwriter,’ because if you want to do something bad enough, you can learn it. It may take a hell of a long time, but you can. My motto is ‘Dare to dream,’ and I live by that. This I basically the third time I’m starting my life over, when I moved here.

UCN: Same here! *smiles*
CM: Yes, so, I wouldn’t have done it the first time if I hadn’t dared to dream and believed that it was achievable. I think you need to have that psychologically, to be able to say ‘I know I can do this.’ Once you have that, anything is achievable. So as far as songwriting is concerned, I believe anybody can learn to write. I plan to learn how to write. *smiles* That’s one of the reasons I am here, I want to get among the best songwriters in the world and be taught by them, and have fun learning. If I’m ever a really good songwriter, that would be fantastic, but if not, I’ve had a really good time.

UCN: How is the songwriting different here? I mean, I know you can’t really compare the community in a city to that in a country the size of Australia…
CM: There are a lot of similarities, actually. But also, we’re literally half a world apart. There are a lot of artists there who are fervently Australian. There’s an artist there who recently put something on facebook about how her album was “100% Australian written, produced, and recorded.” It’s almost like she’s sick of hearing about these people who go to Nashville to write and record their albums. And, I’m sorry, but for me she’s got a little bit of a chip on her shoulder. I don’t see the drama. Both countries have a passion for country music. It’s just, you’ve got 300 million people and we’ve only got 30 million. I think Australia is also slowly catching on to co-writing. People are fairly set in their ways about who they write with, but the younger people coming through are experimenting and they want to write with different people. A lot of them make the trip here to Nashville, because this is where it happens. I mean, I still pinch myself every time I drive down 65 to come into town. *smiles* You can’t put this many creative people in one town and their not be some sort of magic. There’s nothing like it anywhere else in the world!

UCN: Is the co-writing also harder in Australia because everyone is so far apart?
CM: Yes, I think so. Here, you could come downtown and do four sessions a day if you really wanted to. In Australia I was driving from Camden to Sydney, like an hour and a half, to go from one person’s place to the other.

UCN: The writing you have done here, do you feel you approach it differently?
CM: Every time I pick up my guitar or write something, I feel like I am getting better. That’s one of the things I love about being here. You’re expected to work hard at it. I play my guitar every single day here. If it’s not to write something then it is to practice. It’s definitely different here, even if it’s just psychologically.

UCN: That’s probably a big part. How aware have you been of the history here, of the footsteps you’re trying to walk in?
CM: I just feel like I’m in the heart of where country music was born and has been refined over generations. I am a second-generation performer, but there are second- and third-generation songwriters in this town, where their granddad was a songwriter. That’s amazing! I know a lot about entertaining, my dad taught me, so how much must that person know about songwriting!

UCN: How much of you makes it into the songs?
CM: Oh…that’s tough.

UCN: Do you protect anything?
CM: No, I don’t. I mean, there’s a few things that happened in my life that I’ll probably not sing about, and if I did I’d say it wasn’t me. *smiles* But no, I put my heart into a song. I don’t hold back, I don’t need to hold back, I’ve got nothing really that I need to hide.

UCN: How are you with message-driven songs? ‘Fences’ comes to mind, even if you didn’t write that.
CM: Yes, Danny Simpson and John Edwards wrote ‘Fences.’ That song, be it the best song on the album or not, it’s my life theme song. That was the first song Mark [Moffatt] sent me, and I only got halfway through listening to it and I rang Mark and said ‘I have to record this!’ 48 hours later I was back in Nashville, in the studio and we recorded it. I love it, and I love Danny Simpson and John Edwards for letting me record it, neither of whom I’ve even met.

UCN: When you’re picking outside songs like that, in order to have a connection, when you listen to these songs, do you put something of yourself in them?
CM: Definitely. There’s love songs on there, like ‘Somebody’s Girl,’ the story for me, it’s something I could imagine myself living, and who hasn’t, you know. It’s that thing about being shy, should I ask her or should I not, being scared of rejection, and possibly missing out on that opportunity because of your insecurity. Same with ‘Where I’m At,’ another amazing song. That’s about being happy with where I am right now. If someone gave me a ticket to anywhere in the world to start over, would I want to? Well, no, because I’m 100% happy where I am. All the good and the bad things had to happen to get me to where I am; what a fantastic story for a song. ‘Doing Country’ is another one I love. I started that and then Nicole added her colorful lyrics. Written in Australia about being in Australia, it’s really just about what being country is all about there. I know there’s a million songs written in Nashville about trucks, water holes, fishing poles, and things like that; it was a song that I had to write.

UCN: You have to. Here it’s ‘Do you have a song about trucks? No? Go write it.’ *smiles*
CM: It’s funny coming from a rock background, now, when I write I tend to lean more towards the more meaningful. I’ve got a few that I’ve started… You know, that’s the other thing here, they walk into a room, four hours later they’ve got a song. Bang, it’s written. I’ll start a song and then I’ll get to a point where I feel like I’m forcing it, so I’ll step away and come back to it.

UCN: How do you edit a song? What makes you decide whether a phrase stays of goes?
CM: That happens quite regularly, but I don’t know, I guess it’s just the way my gut feeling is when I’m singing it. I’ll sing the song I’m writing so, if it feels good to me… I’m not at the stage where I’m writing songs for someone else to sing, so it’s just how my intonation and phrasing wraps around that word. It’s fun around here too, because sometimes the words that I say aren’t quite understood here because of my accent. I do need to think about that too. In ‘Doing Country,’ the line ‘barefoot in cowboy boots’ used to be about thongs, because in Australia, flip-flops are called thongs.

UCN: Yeah, that doesn’t translate well here. *smiles* But, you know, that could be a cute idea for a song, where you have an Australian character over here saying ‘chook’ instead of ‘chicken’…
CM: Oh yeah! I’ve got heaps of them. Even my wife pulls me up on it now, about teaching the kids Australian words, and she’ll go ‘He can’t say that in school, they’re going to laugh at him.’ *smiles* What’s really funny is that in Australia we don’t even drive trucks. I mean, ‘a truck’ is an articulated trucks for transport. In Australia, we have ‘utes’!

UCN: Yeah, that wouldn’t translate either. *smiles*
CM: And it doesn’t sound good in a song anyway.

UCN: So, as in a utility vehicle?
CM: Yeah, it’s just an abbreviation. It’s like a pick-up truck, but smaller, we don’t have any of those jacked-up trucks. But hey, I was only here for three months and I bought a truck, you know. I just had to own one. *smiles* And now I spend my lazy days under the bonnet, because it’s an old truck. But I love it, it’s my therapy.

UCN: See, this is what talking to songwriters has done to me, now I have an idea for a song about an old truck…
CM: Yeah, that’s how it goes. *smiles* Who are the other Australian writers you know here in town?

UCN: Phil Barton. I love his material, he’s amazing! And he works so hard, so seeing him win the MusicRow Breakthrough Songwriter of the Year award for ‘A Woman Like You,’ that Lee Brice cut, was really wonderful. And then there’s Sherrie Austin, who is so great. And she’s very much understood Nashville songwriting to the point where she can flip back and forth between writing meaningful or commercial songs. I think that’s probably one of the keys of making it here.
CM: Well, yes, look at ‘Truck Yeah.’

UCN: Well, friends of mine are on that song so I’m not really objective about that… *smiles* But yes, that came out of a flippant comment really.
CM: I am absolutely amazed at how – and I’m not knocking it, it’s a fantastic play on words – at how well it’s been embraced by the Bible belt of the United States! *smiles*

UCN: Well, it’s just clever. Jack Ingram has a song called ‘Love You,’ where the ‘love’ really means another four-letter word, you know, and it’s fantastic! And for me, that’s going to be the benchmark if you do that kind of song, that’s the one you’re going up against if you’re going to do that play on words thing.
CM: I actually bought some shelves off one of the guys who wrote that.

UCN: That is so Nashville! *laughs*
CM: *laughs* Yes, I guess it is. He gave me his CD, and I bought some shelves. *smiles*

UCN: Ingram is also often my example for what Nashville can do. He’s one of my favorite writers, I think he’s phenomenal. When I say that, some people go, ‘really?!’, because they only know the Nashville-produced commercial stuff of his. I think he’s struggled to get that foothold here because that’s not what he really does. I hear some of that in your stuff too, that slight Americana sound.
CM: Really?

UCN: That’s a good thing. Let me say that before anyone says anything; it’s a compliment. *smiles*
CM: No, thank you. One thing that’s come up on a number of occasions is ‘who do you sound like?’, and it’s hard with the combination of my register, which is not what male vocalists are singing in here, and my Australian accent, which I did watch in the studio. I got called out on that in Australia but it’s just me refining how I sing.

UCN: Plus, like you said before, sometimes it gets misunderstood if you speak with your own accent. You are allowed to choose the communication that you know is going to work.
CM: Yeah, exactly. I know that everyone in Australia can understand what I’m singing on this album, and I know everyone here can understand it. But there were times in the recording studio where mark would go ‘I didn’t quite understand that,’ where I’d run two words together or something.

UCN: So the rest of the year you’ll be promoting the record, touring, or trying to get some writes here?
CM: Well, I’m daring to dream. *smiles* It’ll be about promoting what I have here, and I plan to release another single in February, around CRS 2013, and then plan to be touring by next summer.

UCN: Well, we’ll see you out there! Thank you for your time!
CM: Thank you for coming in to do this, it was great.

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Liv Carter

Liv is a career coach for creatives, and the people who work with them.
She holds several certificates from Berklee College of Music, and a certificate in Positive Psychology from UC Berkeley.
Her main influences are coffee, cats, and Alexander Hamilton.

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