Heather Morgan (continued)

As quick as she is to list off her key influences (including Kelly Willis, Patty Griffin, Kasey Chambers, the Dixie Chicks and Townes Van Zandt), Morgan has also looked time and again to her friends for songwriting inspiration. College life, she explains, has offered her a rich and varied palette of emotions and situations to draw on - be they her own, her friends', or a mix-and-match combination. "With a dorm full of 300 people, you get your fair share of upset girls and happy girls and people who're getting engaged, etc., so I kept my ears open," she says. "College supplies all these stories, and I started turning them into song after song. People would come into my room upset late at night, and I'd write them a song - that was my way to communicate, instead of just saying, 'You're going to be great.'" Consequently, even the most personal songs on Six Strings and Slow Backroads ("Take It From Me," "Mississippi," "Penny") come off as both confessional and universal. "The songs speak for these situations that a lot of people have gone through," says Morgan. Musically, the songs range from buoyant pop country ("Don't Built Up Walls," "Mississippi," "Romeo," "Penny") to beautiful, contemporary singer-songwriter balladry ("I Like You," "Night by the River") to grittier, bluesy roots fare like "Hard Working Man" (inspired by Morgan's grandfather) and the hands-down showstopper, "The Weight."

"My parents used to take me to blues clubs to sing when I was in high school, so I took that background and put it into the song," Morgan says of the Band cover. "I think it's the one song we do where people look at me and realize, 'Hmmm…she's not singing country anymore."

But singing country remains Morgan's number one ambition, and it's with that dream still in mind that she'll be making the move to Nashville next year, following her graduation in December. "Somebody asked me once, 'When you go to Nashville, are you going to be a singer or are you going to be a songwriter?'," Morgan recalls, laughing at the memory of how silly the question sounded to her. "I was like, 'Do I really have to choose?' Because I want to do both. And in Texas, that's what you're allowed to do. I don't know if Nashville is truly either-or, but I want to do both."

"I think when you're young, the sky's the limit - you dream as big as you can," she says when asked about her goals. But she returns again to the theme of "slow backroads," and makes it clear that meaning something and patiently building the kind of career that allows for longevity is her greatest ambition. "I just hope somebody understands where I come from as far as writing these songs and performing them and the passion that I have for them, and that they can maybe match that with the same passion in understanding. It's always going to be a tight squeeze, but I feel like I can offer something very unique to country music…even though it took me a while to realize that."

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