Heather Morgan
Six Strings and Slow Backroads

You can tell a lot about Heather Morgan by the straight-forward, ultra-confident quote she originally wanted to have under her name in her high school senior yearbook: "Grand Ole Opry Bound." But you can tell so much more about her by the more cryptic quote she opted for instead. Six little words that spelled out not the young woman's ultimate dream so much as her wise-beyond-her-years understanding of what it would take to achieve it - and left no room for doubt that she had the determination to follow it through: "Six Strings and Slow Backroads."

"Six strings and backroads is my philosophy on how this whole thing works," says Morgan today at age 22. "This whole thing," of course, being her single-minded passion for writing and performing her own music, using her gift for songwriting and love of singing to reach out to as many people as possible. To that end, you better believe she still sees the Grand Ole Opry in her future, but she's going to get there her way, with integrity. "'Six strings' is playing my guitar, writing my own music and just developing this art form," she says. "And the 'slow backroads' is being patient - playing coffee houses and little clubs that are slowly getting bigger, with bigger audiences.

"It's just taken on a whole new meaning since I was 18," she laughs. "But I still sign 'S3B' under my name whenever I sign anything. It could apply to anything, but it's so apropos to my music."

Which brings us to Morgan's full-length debut, titled, of course, Six Strings and Slow Backroads. Produced by Scott Melott (formerly of the Groobees), the album introduces Morgan as one of the brightest new talents in the booming Texas country music scene, destined for an even larger playing field but not about to rush things at the expense of craft. Morgan wrote or co-wrote ten of the eleven songs on the album (and takes a commanding hold on the lone exception, a powerful rendition of the Band classic, "The Weight"). Subsequently, the songs reveal as much about Morgan as the album's title. "Pretty much every one of them is a personal story or has a part of me in it," says Morgan. "Obviously I didn't write 'The Weight,' but I researched that song enough to know the inspiration behind it. I wanted to own it, because it's a powerful song, and I feel real powerful when I sing it."

But Morgan is first and foremost a songwriter, not an interpreter. "When I was younger, I used to sing at all the regional oprys, and I would sing whatever my favorite song on the radio was at the time," she says. "Somebody finally said to me, 'As long as you sing somebody else's stuff, you're always going to be second best. You're always going to have that comparison, unless you make something truly your own."

Born and raised in the Dallas suburb of Richardson, Morgan can't remember ever wanting to be anything other than a singer and songwriter. Weaned on her mother's homemade mix tapes of 50s and 60s music, she wrote her first song, a sassy little Supremes-inspired number called "Walk Away," at all of six years old. And she was singing long before that. She laughs when she recalls her embarrassment when people told her she sounded like Dolly Parton. "It was like, 'Gosh, I sound country - what am I going to do?'" She soon grew out of that - the embarrassment that is - and embraced her innate Texas twang as a teenager, when she began performing her own songs and favorite Pam Tillis and Lee Ann Womack covers at talent shows, school choir auditions and open mic nights at bars (accompanied by her amused but fully supportive parents every step of the way, of course).

"Prior to my senior year of high school, we took a family trip to Nashville - I think my parents wanted me to get it out of my system," she laughs. "I was a little bit naïve, thinking I could see Alan Jackson walking down the street as soon as we hit the city limits, but I did get to sing at an open mic at this little Italian restaurant. The manager was very encouraging of the song I'd written, and he let me cover that Martina McBride song, 'Cheap Whisky'." Naturally, Morgan also insisted on visiting Nashville's music-business-friendly Belmont University, but her parents insisted she stay closer to home - specifically, Texas Christian University in Forth Worth.

"I thought if I went to TCU for a year, surely I could talk my parents into a transfer," says Morgan. "But I got to school and decided that I like my parents. And staying in Texas totally benefited me." Indeed, she wasted little time in finding her way into the central Texas singer-songwriter scene, attending her first home-state open mic her second semester. "I played a couple of songs, and that's when the snowball started," she says, cataloging the venues in D-FW and beyond she's played in since (including an opening gig at the world-famous Gruene Hall in New Braunfels). She wrote and recorded a self-titled, five-song EP in 2001, an effort that garnered her encouraging words from some of her favorite Texas artists (the Groobees, Terri Hendrix and producer Lloyd Maines) and helped land her more gigs, but only hinted at the charm, maturity and full-band sound captured on Six Strings and Slow Backroads. Morgan's band, on stage and on the new album, includes Groobees veterans Melott (guitar) and Craig Bagby (drums) and Troy Wilson (bass).

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."