Billboard
Morgan Wade expands on breakthrough album ‘Reckless’: ‘If I’m honest, people will connect with that’
Most artists don’t experience sophomore slump until their second album. For newcomer Morgan Wade, the fear of matching her previous success came early.
Last year, Wade independently released her 10-song debut, Reckless, via Thirty Tigers. The project, with its visceral blend of country, Americana, pop and arena rock, landed on numerous year-end “Best Of” lists, including Billboard’s best country albums list. Her single “Wilder Days” also landed on Billboard’s Best Country Songs of 2021 list, and currently sits at No. 49 on Billboard’s Country Airplay chart.
When it came time to make a deluxe version of the acclaimed set, she found herself feeling the pressure to surpass her previous effort.
“I mean, Reckless has done so well,” Wade says, calling from her home in Virginia. “A comment that I always get from people is, ‘There’s no skips on this record. We love every song.’ So going and adding more songs is definitely a lot of pressure. I want there to still be no skips when people play the deluxe.”
On Reckless, Wade worked with producer Sadler Vaden (guitarist for Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit) and engineer Paul Ebersold. They worked together again to craft the six new tracks on Reckless (Deluxe Edition), which comes out today via Arista Nashville/Sony Music Nashville.
Wade and Vaden met through Floydfest, a music festival in Wade’s hometown of Floyd, Va. In 2018, both Wade and Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit performed at the event. Wade met a crew member for the band, who gave one of her CDs to Vaden.
“A day or two later, I got an Instagram message from Sadler and a month later I went out to Nashville and we started writing. That was three years ago and he saw what my vision was. After Sadler and I started working together, and word kind of got around, then I had a lot of people reaching out. But Sadler’s my go-to guy. He was the first one to really believe in me, and so I’ll always be loyal and appreciative of that.”
Wade’s naturally gravelly voice and adherence to unflinching honesty have been essential in helping to create the wide-ranging assortment of songs found on Reckless and the six added to the deluxe version — songs that address addiction, mental health, love, loss, and escape with a depth of emotional nuance.
Growing up, Wade didn’t do all the talent shows typical of so many extroverted childhood performers. Instead, she preferred writing, and began penning songs around age 7. As a child, she auditioned to join a music club, but was told her singing voice was “too weird,” so she kept writing songs and poems in private.
“My grandma says she would find random notes of mine stuffed in a cookbook or somewhere that I would hide when I was a kid. She still finds that to this day. I was just writing for myself and that’s about the only way I knew how to write. Sometimes I get a little nervous, like, ‘Did I say too much? How is that going to relay?’ But I’ve just found that if I’m honest there are people who will connect with that.”
Wade didn’t make her first public performance until age 19, in the wake of a breakup during her freshman year of college. Through an ad on Craigslist, she put a band together. During those early days as part of the group Morgan Wade and the Stepbrothers, Wade obtained a fake ID and began drinking to help take the edge off before performances. When she turned 21, the drinking increased until, after a particularly acute bender following a show in New York, Wade began taking stock of her struggles with anxiety, depression and alcohol.
On “The Night,” the first song Wade and Vaden recorded together, she’s devastatingly honest about her hard-fought battle with the bottle on lines such as “And Johnnie called me late last night/ Well, I told Mr. Walker just go home.”
Now, Wade is almost five years sober, and has formed healthier coping strategies to combat anxiety and the stresses of traveling and performing. “I make sure that the people around me, my band and crew, they’re not getting crazy every night,” she says. “Especially when I’m on the bus, I’m pretty low-key and quiet. As soon as my show’s over, I head to the bus. I lay down, read and I go to sleep. I try to eat healthy and I make sure every day I go to the gym, even when I didn’t want to. But also, I feel like it’s been like long enough for me to kind of forget why I quit drinking. So I have to continually remind myself of why I quit drinking.”
“Run” a song on the deluxe edition that is drawing attention, was inspired by a lyric Wade couldn’t get out of her head. “I kept thinking about this line, ‘Can we fly somewhere foreign/ Get me high/ Mess me up until the morning?’ for about two weeks. Sadler and I got on Skype and he had this guitar riff that fit perfectly.
“Once the song came together, I’ve had people interpret it in different ways: ‘Is it a girl getting out of a toxic situation? Does someone come and rescue her?’ I think there’s a lot of different variations of ways you could take that song,” she says. “I think that’s how it is with a lot of songs. You look back to ‘Ode to Billie Joe.’ There’s a million different interpretations of that song, and you don’t know which one’s right. I think it’s good to let people kind of be able to add in their own story to that.”
“Through Your Eyes” was inspired by Wade’s four younger siblings, who range in age from three to 10. “I specifically remember one of the two older ones looking at me at one point and realizing they want to be like me,” Wade says. “They will sit there, drawing tattoos on themselves with pens. Anytime you say something, they will repeat it. So it’s me watching them and wanting to be better for them. And it was me reflecting on the crazy times in the world and trying to look at things like kids look at things. They have so much joy, and it sucks that we lose that as we get older.”
She gives a nod to her life-long obsession with Elvis Presley in her rendition of “Suspicious Minds,” the Billboard Hot 100-topping Presley classic from 1969. “Growing up, all I wanted to listen to was Elvis,” she raves. “There was just something about ‘Suspicious Minds’ that I felt we could change it up a little bit and make it our own. I felt like it kind of fits with what I’m doing. We toured for three months and played that song live every night. People kept asking if I was going to record it and [Sony Music Nashville CEO] Randy Goodman said we needed to record it. A lot of people wanted it, and that is really what this deluxe is — giving people that supported the original Reckless what they want.”
Wade kicks off 2022 not only with the deluxe edition of Reckless, but as a member of the latest class of CMT’s Next Women of Country. She’s touring, and she and Vaden are already in the early stages of crafting her next full-length project.
“Sadler and I have ideas for it, we’re definitely writing and brainstorming,” she says. “We want record number two to be better than Reckless, so we got a lot of work cut out for us.”