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RB MORRIS EMPIRE | |
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| Listen to the tracks from the pre-release album. | |
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Buy a copy of Empire at |
EmpireNew songs from celebrated singer-songwriter RB MorrisEmpire totally reveals and documents the qualities that make RB Morris an artist unique to our time. Its five concise, complex songs explore locales both exotic and familiar, voices literary and colloquial, continuing the singer-songwriter’s lyrical odyssey through American musical genres and classic themes that inspired Lucinda Williams to call him “the greatest unknown songwriter in the country”. Empire is a bridge connecting Morris’s past and future, but it stands alone as a structure, a statement of the present. Empire previews what’s to come. “I think of Empire as a musical document unto itself—a short story, and the full CD will be like the novel,” Morris says. Recorded over the past two years during sessions at Nashville’s Eastwood Studios by Eric Fritsch (Sheryl Crowe and Scott Miller & the Commonwealth), Empire reunites the players who backed Morris on his 1997 debut Take That Ride (released on John Prine’s Oh Boy Records) and 1999’s Zeke and the Wheel (Koch): longtime cohort Hector Qirko (Lonnie Brooks), Kenny Vaughan (Lucinda Williams, Marty Stuart), Dave Jacques (John Prine), and Paul Griffith (John Prine, Greg Brown). Since Zeke and the Wheel (nominated for Americana CD of the Year), Morris has pursued multiple projects outside the studio. He has served as Writer-in-Residence at the University of Tennessee since 2004, hosting a regular series of readings whose guests have included Poet Laureate of the United States Ted Kooser, and singer-songwriter Steve Earle. He published two collections of poetry, Littoral Zone and Early Fires. And he starred in Knoxville and New York City productions of his one-man play, The Man Who Lives Here Is Loony, about Pulitzer Prize winning author (and fellow Knoxville native) James Agee. Morris has also memorialized the author by founding the James Agee Memorial Park, located in the Fort Sanders neighborhood that Agee immortalized in A Death in the Family and Morris has called home for many years. Throughout, RB Morris has written incredible songs and performed unforgettable live shows, resurrecting the rowdy roadhouse spirit of rock ‘n’ roll interspersed with Beat poet rhythms and tent revival fervor. That same poignant and vital energy fuels Empire, a resounding and much awaited musical return for RB Morris. To request a review copy of Empire or an interview with RB Morris, contact:
Taylor Shomaker |