Martinsville Bulletin
Morgan Wade Band to perform at Rives
Group will open for Yarn at New Year’s Eve show
Many country music songs are about love - either lost or won.
The Morgan Wade Band actually was formed over a love song.
Before she had a band, Wade, now 21, wrote a song in response to a break-up with her boyfriend, Joe Link. Both live in Floyd.
The couple started dating in 2012. “He was the one who really pushed me to play” music in a band, “and after we split, I knew that was a way to win him back,” she said.
The song is “Kelley’s Drive,” named after the road on which he lived.
Wade has played guitar for about 10 years, she said. Link was the mandolin player in a band.
”I knew the only way to get him back was to write him a song and I started a band - and it worked,” she said.
“I never would sing for anybody,” before “Kelley’s Drive,” she said.
The song begins, “Sometimes to help me feel alive; I take a ride down Kelley’s Drive; just to see if you are home; to help me not to feel alone.”
She played it for other people and “that’s when I realized people seem to enjoy” it, she said. She got together with Ed McGee of Martinsville on bass, Justin Emmert of Martinsville on steel guitar and Keith Bowles of Franklin County on drums and began performing.
She said when she wrote “Kelley’s Drive,” she had “no intention of ever playing it for him.” However, they were on friendly terms, and she did play it for him.
“We got back together, and we’ve been happy ever since,” she said.
And, of course, he joined the new band as the mandolin and electric guitar player, she added.
That was last year, and the band performs in public now at least five times a month, she said.
Wade, 21, describes her band’s music as “outlaw country.” It’s “definitely not the country that’s on the radio. We’re more of a… gritty type of country,” she said. “We are leaning a little toward the rock side, but no matter what I sing, it’s going to have a twang to it.”
The band’s music is “not necessarily all depressing, we have more of a darker sound, more of a true” sound, she said.
Wade writes all of the band’s songs. Their shows are mostly of their own songs - with perhaps only a cover or two thrown in, she said.
Her musical influences are American Aquarium, a six-piece band from Raleigh, N.C., and Jason Isbell. They “are paving the way for musicians that aren’t typical pop country, paving the way for what I would call actual musicians,” Wade said.
When she is performing, “I’m very, very honest in my music,” she said. “When I am playing my song I don’t feel like I am actually there with you (the audience). For the hour and a half or two hours, I’m reliving those past moments. It definitely is an emotional thing. I get up there and play, but we always have a good time as well. It’s not a sad show. We always have a good time.”
She said that becoming a musician taught her to “support local musicians. That’s a thing I didn’t really understand until after I started playing music.”
Wade also is a student at Jefferson College of Health Sciences.
The Morgan Wade Band will open the New Year’s Eve concert at the Rives Theatre. They will play at 9pm, followed by Yarn, who will play through midnight. Tickets cost $20 in advance and $25 at the door, and the cost includes a complimentary champagne toast at midnight.