(John Moreland. Image by byAngelina Castillo.)
By Jim Morrison
For a decade, John Moreland pursued his dream. He’d evolved from playing in a hardcore band to a singer/songwriter who brought audiences to tears. He made a stunning appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Critics at The New York Times, The New Yorker and elsewhere lauded one album after another.
Over time, though, it became a nightmare. Going on stage and performing night after night proved to be a challenge he no longer cared to summit.
“It’s weird because it’s this thing you’ve been dreaming of. But then at the same time, nobody can really tell you what it’s gonna be like. You just have to experience it,” he said during a phone interview. “And then, it’s like, ‘Oh, this is like, nothing like what I thought.’ “
Moreland finished a tour in late 2022 and that was it. He told his agent and his manager not to schedule anything. He turned off his smartphone for six months though he eventually got a flip phone so his wife, Pearl, could reach him. He stayed home for a year.
“I was just kind of at my threshold for doing life,” he said. “It kind of felt like everyone was deciding for me, and I had no say, and I was just carried along and made to get up and perform…It was a toxic tour situation there for a few years.”
Piling on top of what he was feeling, Moreland woke up one morning shortly after the hiatus had begun to find half his face paralyzed. He had Bell’s Palsy. Stress is one of the possible causes. “I was like, all right? I guess taking a break was the right call,” he added.
Moreland went to therapy. He began some medication, beta blockers to help with his anxiety. He knew he was in deep. “It was way more serious than my career,” Moreland recalled. “Honestly, I don’t know if I’d be alive if I hadn’t taken the time off. I know for sure I wouldn’t be doing a music career if I hadn’t taken the time off.”
“It’s interesting beginning to figure that out also just kind of led to an album happening,” he added. “That’s where it started. It was more about okay, how do I move on and keep living and how do I enjoy my career again. It turned out doing the things that I needed to do to try to address that stuff also opened the door for the songs to bubble up.”
He took long nighttime rides. And he started writing again, alone in the middle of the night. “That tends to be a good time for me to do it,” he said. “It helps me just feeling that stillness. The world’s kind of asleep or still, and I’m the only one up doing my thing.”
His latest is a return to the sound of “High on Tulsa Heat,” which included perhaps the saddest song ever, “You Don’t Care Enough for Me to Cry” (find the video and watch the audience), “Big Bad Luv,” and “LP5,” acoustic-based discs, after he ventured into new territory with “Birds in the Ceiling,” an album with a fuller sound, including drum machine beats and electronic blips interrupting the quiet.
But then Moreland has a history of taking musical switchbacks. He started in punk and hardcore, including a metalcore band, Thirty Called Arson. While it doesn’t sound intuitive, his transition from hardcore to folk confessor Is natural to him.
“When I was kind of first getting known a little bit, I remember the frequent reaction that I would get was just like, Oh my God. Your songs are so sad, your lyrics are so fucking sad,” he said. “I always found that weird…In the genre that I was used to lyrics like that are normal, lyrics are really heavy and really kind of gut-wrenching. It’s normal not pulling any punches and just being as brutal as you can. So that’s what trained me. I think that’s the world I come from, and I never really thought about it being weird or making people uncomfortable.”
The album that would emerge from those night sessions, the brilliant “Visitor,” is brutally personal. With a few instrumental flourishes, it is his “Nebraska,” Springsteen’s spare masterpiece.
“Being in the place that I was and just taking a break from everything, I didn’t really feel like going to a studio and hiring musicians and doing all that,” he said. “I felt this urge to make the record and get it done, but at the same time, it was like, I don’t have it in me to go do it in the kind of traditional way right now. So, I knew that what I wanted to do was just record with me and Pearl in the living room.”
“Blue Dream Carolina” was written before the rest. “Tell me what the truth is, don’t tell me who to be/ I don’t have to tell you this life is plenty painful,” he sings.
“It was another situation where it felt like, man, I really would love to just be able to write a song to just sort of comfort myself right now,” he explained. “That’s really what it is.”
Listening to “Visitor” in the context of Moreland’s journey brings a different insight into the songs. “But I will not be your puppet or your payment,” he sings on the title cut. “Your easy entertainment, for I’ve made amends to me.”
“My mind is storming. Three in the morning. We are two warring nations. And we don’t remember why,” he notes in “Gentle Violence.”
Another cut, “One Man Holds the World Hostage” on the surface sounds like it chronicles the septuagenarian elected last November. But Moreland said it’s about himself.
“That’s a song I was kind of having trouble finishing until I realized that (it’s about me),” he explained. “That’s what allowed me to finish it because I don’t want to just be pointing my finger at others. It’s more just a song about the capacity for darkness that we all have if we don’t know how to be honest with ourselves.”
Moreland travels to Norfolk for the first time since his sold-out show at North Shore Point House Concerts in 2019 to play The Perry Pavilion on May 4 as part of The Virginia Arts Festival. He remembered that show before 200 people as a much-needed lift after a night in West Virginia before an indifferent audience where assault rifles were auctioned. In Norfolk, fans lined up stage side during intermission to tell him how much his music meant to them.
He returned to performing live at Thelma’s Peach, a Tulsa hole-in-the wall, for an impromptu show in October 2023, then made a short run through Texas.
“I was really excited and also just really scared.” he said. “I knew I wanted to, and I knew it was time. But playing shows had been so full of anxiety in the past. I’m grateful to really come a long way. I don’t struggle with it like I used to…That was kind of the beginning of just getting back to a place where I can do it without so much anxiety, and just, actually, function in my career.”
WANT TO GO?
John Moreland
Presented by Virginia Arts Festival
May 4
Perry Pavilion
vafest.org
