The Roanoke Times
National album debut coming for Floyd County native Wade
Plenty of Southwest Virginia music lovers know Morgan Wade’s music well. The singer and songwriter from Floyd was a presence on stages including FloydFest, Rooster Walk, Harvester Performance Center, Martin’s Downtown and 5 Points Music Sanctuary.
A much larger audience is getting a chance to discover her now.
Wade’s album, “Reckless,” is due March 29 from Nashville, Tennessee, indie entertainment company Thirty Tigers.
She collaborated with producer Sadler Vaden - who plays guitar for Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit - and Grammy Award-winning producer Paul Ebersold, who engineered the project. Two advance cuts from the album, “Don’t Cry” and “Wilder Days,” are already out there, and the music is getting love in online reports from Rolling Stone Country and The Boot.
“It’s been a fun process, but a long one,” Wade, 26, said in a phone call last week. “But I can see the finish line.”
The starting line was an open mic night with a pickup band at Dogtown Roadhouse, in Floyd, when Wade was 19. She clicked with the bass player that night, Ed MeGee, and they kept playing together until she started working with Vaden.
She was a screamer at first, always on the edge of shredding her vocal cords as she lived at or near the top of her range. But within a couple of years, her voice lowered a bit, McGee remembered. Her soprano was becoming a powerful, commanding instrument.
“I remember one of the coolest things about playing with Morgan was always soundcheck, when we’d go into a bar and I’d test her mic,” McGee said. “Everybody at the bar would turn around, just because of that voice, they just knew it was something special.
“I’ve played with a lot of people who could sing. But she could sing a line and would have everybody’s attention. It was really cool.”
Meanwhile, the young woman who grew up hearing bluegrass and old-time music at Floyd Country Store was developing some Americana - and rock - style songwriting chops, too, with an insistent rhythm guitar style to accompany.
Her live work caught the ears of Jason Isbelle’s sound tech at FloydFest, in 2019. He approached her at the merch tent after her set and bought her music, telling her he was going to play it for Isbell’s band. She was skeptical.
“I was like, oh cool, you know,” Wade said. “But by that point, I had learned that [sort of talk] doesn’t meet anything. I’ve met a bunch of people.”
Within a couple of days, though, Vaden hit her with an email. He wanted to chat. He loved her voice and songwriting. He was looking to produce a record. They wound up growing a musical partnership and friendship.
“He was on tour, so we FaceTimed,” Wade said. “We played songs back and forth and talked about some ideas. He said, let’s get together when I get back to Nashville. We just started playing together and writing, and things just felt really organic. Sadler’s such a great guy. He’s obviously a musical genius, so really it just fell into place.
“After we started working, we started working hard. And we’ve been working on this for like two years.”
They co-wrote the album-opening earwork “Wilder Days,” which is also the latest single release, and three other tunes together. Wade teamed with Ebersold to write “Don’t Cry” and “Mend,” while all three combined for “Last Cigarette.”
With this record, Wade has honed her voice and songcraft in ways that set up “Reckless” for a real shot at success.
“They’ve challenged me, in like a good way,” Wade said of her collaborators. “It was really different to go out there and work with that level of people. They’ve really pushed me to work harder and push myself more. Obviously, I think this record shows it. We worked really hard on this, and we didn’t rush anything. Everything was just real natural and happened how we wanted it to happen. That’s how everything’s been with them.”
She got instrumental support from other 400 Unit members - bassist Jimbo Hart and keyboardist Derry deBorja - and drummers Fred Eltringham (Sheryl Crow) and Jamie Dick (Rhiannon Giddens, Della Mae). Vaden and Ebersold laid down plenty of tracks, too.
“I know that’s where I’m supposed to be,” Wade said. “This is what I’m supposed to be doing. I just feel like I’ve grown up a lot, being out there working with them. I was nervous, and you’re surrounded by all these super-talented people, so it really pushes you to work hard and not slack on it.”
Wade wrote three “Reckless” tracks including “Other Side,” which features the opening lines: “You knew my skin back before I had all these tattoos/You Remember me on late nights strung out from pills and booze.”
McGee said that Wade wasn’t the kind of drinker who “just wandered around drunk all day.” He was there when she had her last drink, on a band road trip to New York City.
“I think overall she got overwhelmed by the entire experience and realized that maybe she was a bit out of control, and that was it,” McGee said.
Wade said she’ll be four years sober in June.
“I don’t think I’d be where I’m at if I was still drinking, but I wonder if I would be alive, too, so I really had to clean it up,” she said. “I don’t think it messed up any of my gigs. It was after the shows. It was the heading home, it was the being alone. It just came down to… the day after, picking up the pieces and that sort of thing.”
The gregarious Wade said she found herself in situations where she had a beer in her hand, and people would accuse her of being drunk when she wasn’t.
“I finally had a talk with my mom one day,” Wade remembered. “She was like, you know what, don’t ever give people a reason to believe this could be you. I was like, well you’re damn right, so not long after that, I got sober.”
These days, she lives in Damascus with her partner of eight years, Joe Link. It’s easier to stay sober there, and easy to be active without being in a crowd. She said she’ll need to move to Nashville soon, where she and Vaden will put a band together to back her up. Meanwhile, she is plotting the best way to promote the record in the time of COVID-18. Her agents are working on gigs, which might include some socially distanced shows.
“I haven’t done anything like that… but it’s kind of crazy, with the times right now,” said Wade, who graduated from the Jefferson College of Health Sciences, in Roanoke. “You want to be safe and make sure everybody else is safe, too.”
She’s confident in the strength of her record, and so is Thirty Tigers’ co-founder David Macias, she said. His company works with Isbell, Elizabeth Cook and Charley Crockett, among many others.
“They think it can be really big,” she said. “They pushed me to be way more confident. I think it’s hard sometimes to really believe in yourself, but I do stand behind this project, and they see big things for it. So that’s encouraging to me, for sure.”