Everything will be alright.
Singer Morgxn needs to be reminded of this every night he goes on stage to perform in a different city. He also knows that there are people in the audience who need the same reminder.
Since the beginning of November, Morgxn has been moving around the United States as a part of Smallpools’ “The Life In A Simulation” tour. The tour will extend through the end of February. Morgxn and Smallpools visited The Blind Pig in Ann Arbor on November 10.
“[An audience member] said the other night that [the show] recharged their soul,” Morgxn said. “For two years of this pandemic, it was just so hard to find the way through it and these songs were what I did in [the] space of trying to keep going.”
Morgxn considers music concerts to be sacred and struggles to articulate completely how he feels about live music experiences. He is one of many artists starting to play live music again and is excited to be blazing the trail for others while acknowledging the many hardships along the way.
“I forgot when touring [you] surrender your body clock to the universe and you just ride the waves.” Morgxn said. “There’s also a definite coming back together and awkwardness as we remember how to be human and how to be together.”
For his performances, Morgxn includes both original songs and covers of songs that are meaningful to him. On his first album, he received special permission from Robert Smith to cover “Boys Don’t Cry” as sort of a tribute to his father who had passed around that time. On their current tour, Morgxn incorporates two covers some nights. One song he always sings is Jimmy Eat World’s “The Middle”.
“The way that I think about covering a song is that I have to uncover something in the song that is not already uncovered in the original version,” he said. “Everyone knows [“The Middle”] as upbeat and emotional, but when I strip it back to just piano, the words become like ‘everything will be alright.’”
When he first started performing, Morgxn would perform primarily covers while also including some of his own songs without initially revealing this to the audience.
“It is not enough to just sing other people’s songs. There’s more that I am trying to say and communicate,” Morgxn said. “Every song is it’s own discovery. There are times in my life where I think I have an understanding of how to communicate something and then there are days where I’m like ‘I have no idea’ and the truth is they coexist.”
As a songwriter, he recognizes that he does not always know what he is writing about during the process.
“There is a line from ‘Wonder’, which is my song, that says ‘why are we looking for the answers when the questions are way too hard to understand’,” Morgxn said. “I am not really a proponent of writing songs that are trying to give a lot of answers because I am out here seeking them.”