Joshua Morrison: Press

In a MySpace bulletin memorializing the Crocodile Cafe, area native Josh Morrison sites some of his most striking moments at the venue, one of which was a Pedro the Lion/Damien Jurado show: "Over seven years later I can still remember waiting in the cold before the show, my friend crying when Damien played her favorite song, "Ohio"." Tonight, Morrison sees a dream realized as Jurado's opener, a musician he's been a fan of since high school. It also marks only his first Seattle show with a full band, as the type of tours Morrison goes out on aren't in a van along an interstate lined with Taco Bells. Rather, they're over in Iraq as a member of the U.S. Army. His time away from the Northwest is reflected in his music, which is delivered in hushed whispers in the manner of Elliot Smith, Sam Beam and Nick Drake, while evoking a wistful longing for home (aptly the title of his first record) through references to west coast anchors like the Cascade mountain range. Josh Ottum, another Seattle-based singer/songwriter rounds out the bill beautifully.

4 1/2 stars (out of 5)
The military took Joshua Morrison away from Seattle,
and then helped him create one of the greatest albums of 2007.

Fremont with a borrowed guitar, plucking out melancholy songs accompanied by a whispered croon. A dozen or so music industry types were huddled around to listen as the 24-year-old played a handful of songs from Home, an album that will be released later this month. Halfway through a song called “Buck Island,” his fingering slipped and a false start on a lyric left him hanging, his rolling guitar line repeating until he returned to the song’s brief, beautiful chorus. “Erin Go Bragh. Let the Irish in your blood always lead you back to the country that you love,” he sang, his girlfriend sitting at his side. “And all the people that you love, love, love.”

Home, Morrison’s debut album, is filled with such sentiment, its songs brimming as much with longing as with delicate, hypnotic musicianship. It’s an aesthetic that is best compared to musicians like Elliott Smith and Nick Drake for both its sound and its message, but there is something very different about the Seattle native. These are not songs of loneliness sung by a boy in a bedroom for a girl across town. Morrison’s muse is much more tangible, his sense of separation from his friends, family and loved ones very much a reality. The songs found on Home, after all, were written while Morrison was serving in the military, the first five while he was stationed at nearby Fort Lewis and the rest at Fort Bragg in North Carolina where he has served since early 2006.

His living room performance came during a brief visit to Fort Lewis for medical training. The guitar he played belonged to a friend of his girlfriend. And the flubbed line (as well as the immense amount of sweat on his brow) was the product of the fact that he hadn’t performed in front of people for six months. The next day he boarded an eastbound plane, leaving his home and his girlfriend behind again until later this month when he will return and play an album release show at the Crocodile Cafe.

Aside from two brief lines on “Buck Island,” Morrison never directly mentions the military or the 9 months be spent in Iraq, but the effect of his service reverberates throughout Home. “Words now hang in the air like the cigarette smoke, fills the bar as we sit and we joke about the finer size of this city, and how one day you’ll leave this town and no one will notice you are gone,” he sings on “Commerce Street.” And then on “Home”: “Oh. My. God. I. Nearly. Died. When I saw you in that dress, I felt alive for the first time, since I left home.”

On paper those lines read so simply, so devoid of artfulness, that they might seem dull. But that simplicity is what makes Home such a beautiful album. Morrison fails to dress his portraits of solitude and alienation in overt emotion. He works with his words the way a craftsman works with oak, building songs constructed with emotional honesty that are, ultimately, awe-inspiring in their simple beauty and strength.

Joshua Morrison will play an album release party with Damien Jurado, Dec. 27 at the Tractor Tavern, 5213 Ballard Ave. NW, 206.789.3599.

The slow, whispery, and intensely crestfallen bedroom-pop of Joshua (not Jim, not Van, not Sterling) Morrison once might've been labeled "sadcore". Now stationed in North Carolina and soon to be relocated to Kentucky, Morrison recorded his debut full-length, Home, between tours of duty in Iraq. I'd be stretching it if I said you could hear the violence of the front lurking in the background on the album's wistful "Alabaster", but Morrison's short respite from the war does seem to have helped him focus on the kinds of fears and agonies known even to non-soldiers. Acoustic strums and basic electronic beats make a measured, melancholy backdrop for Morrison's hushed, lo-fi vocals, which combine the careful phrasing of Pedro the Lion or Death Cab for Cutie with the gentle charisma of Iron & Wine. "You're like a dream upon waking/ And you fade away before I get a chance to say what I'm thinking," Morrison sings, his voice hissing a bit from distortion. While lacking the extreme pathos of leading sadcore sadsack Mark Kozelek's Red House Painters, they're thoughts Morrison has been lucky enough to get the chance to say again, notably at SXSW this month and at Sasquatch in May.