“White, the stars in the night/The sound guides your sight/Don’t fight the way you feel inside/It’s more than you need/You’re safe here with me/It all starts the moment you believe”—from “The Moment You Believe”
While he may not be a household name just yet, Eliot Morris has earned props from critics for his potent mix of pop, rock and soul reminiscent of John Mayer and Bebo Norman. And to support his debut, What’s Mine Is Yours, he was the opening act on the recent Goo Goo Dolls tour with Counting Crows, an experience that Morris describes as “unforgettable.”
But unlike popular singer/songwriters like Mayer or Gavin DeGraw, he’s not interested in writing more songs about guy/girl relationships. Instead, he longed to write about deeper things. “For me, the whole relationship subject is a little tiring,” he confesses. “I could never write a whole record about that. You can’t be alive and be an artist without being bombarded with what’s going on in the world. You don’t have to be an artist to recognize it’s sort of a strange moment in history.”
That “strange moment” is something he addresses in “Fault Line,” one of the album’s standout tracks. While the lyrics aren’t explicitly spiritual in nature, there seems to be an underlying tension with lines like “I hope you know that we’re all disappointed/I’d like to meet with this god you think anointed you/Please pencil in my appointment.”
“You’re right, there is a tension here,” Morris told us in a brief interview. “When I was making the record in L.A., I worked with a producer named Tony Berg. What was most apparent from our discussion was how differently we grew up. I grew up in the Southeast, surrounded by all things conservative; he grew up around Hollywood. So of course, he got his news from a more liberal standpoint. He challenged me personally and politically, and the song came because of that.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone so angry about what was going on in the world. The song started out with him in mind, speaking from his voice, but at some point it did morph to include some of the questions I was having. More than anything, it’s about how we feel vulnerable in all the uncertainties.”
That’s something he also touches on with the moody-sounding “Novocain.”
“It was written in a period where you couldn’t turn on the T.V. without seeing everything swinging in a direction of disorder,” he says. “It was an important song for me because it was resolved with regret. Most songs have years of struggle wrapped up in three minutes and a hook. Yet the way we learn things is because of regret. You can’t be completely separated from the painful things in life if you want to feel wonder. If you dull yourself to the pain and struggle in life, you’re going to dull yourself to the feeling of victory, love and joy. So writing this was an important reminder to me as a songwriter.”
In stark contrast to the more political nature of “Fault Line” or “Novocain,” Morris says the optimistic view of “This Colorful World” is closer to who he is. “The song was written when my wife and I were getting ready to have our third child,” Morris says. “I wrote about being born, the process our son was going through. It was inspired b y something I read by Henri Nouwen. He told a story about twins in utero, and the first twin said to the other ‘Is there life after birth?’ That got me thinking—what it must be like to come into this world, what it must feel like to open our eyes for the first time, how cold the air must feel when we’re in air conditioning after being in the womb for so long. Shortly after the birth of my son, my grandfather dies, and that whole experience put a new spin on the song.”
In the “The Moment You Believe,” Morris talks further about the need for vulnerability. “We can’t receive things unless we’re vulnerable or open enough to receive it,” he says. “You can take it as deep as you want. It could be about experiencing music. Experiencing God or even experiencing a show.”
Morris, who describes himself as Catholic, says he “grew up having a 25-minute ride to school. We’d listen to NPR and say the rosary; it was the Catholic thing to do. So I was always surrounded by church and faithful parents. My upbringing was a little different, though, because my father is Catholic. But being in the Southeast, you can’t help but have some Protestant teaching. So I grew up doing Young Life and was involved in youth group-type stuff. So it’s not exclusively Catholic. But church was always there, and prayer was always a part of my life.”
And while a song like “The Moment You Believe” can be open to more individual interpretation, one thing that Morris is positive about his hope to create authentic characters in his songs, citing the inspiration of Flannery O’Connor. “What she does with her characters is brilliant and brave, too,” Morris says. “She writes characters as they are. The politically correct movement makes it a little intimidating to have an opinion. Being a critic is the easiest thing in the world, so obviously there’s a little hesitancy there. But she’s brave enough to write things as they are—she’s a person of real faith and conviction. If a character was going to do something bad, she’d write it because that’s who the person is.
“As a Christian artist as well, you can be boxed in by people’s expectations—what you can say, what you can’t. But in reality, I don’t think God is about a bunch of fences. So there’s freedom there in that relationship, in knowing God. The box we draw around God is way too small. What I hope to do is to be brave and write things as I see them and not mold them into what is acceptable. And I’m not even really pushing the envelope. Yet.”
For more information on Morris, check out www.eliotmorris.com
Unless specified clearly, we are not implying whether this artist is or is not a Christian. The views expressed are simply the author’s. For a more complete description of our Glimpses of God articles, click here
