They say home is where the heart is, so it comes as no surprise when it came time to get the creative juices flowing for his sophomore album, Morgan Evans returned to his Australian roots of Newcastle – often referred to as Steel Town – to regroup and begin writing. At the end of a three year time span, Morgan’s hard work and dedication resulted with his most acclaimed work yet, appropriately titled Steel Town, released on March 20 via Solrise Records (distributed by Virgin Records). Throughout the creative process, Morgan penned hundreds of tunes while tapping into his most inner feelings to express himself with profound and compelling lyrics.
“I wrote so many songs,” Morgan tells Country Beat with laughter. “It was just a matter of picking out the best songs of that batch, and not only what are the best songs, but what are the songs that tell a story the best. It’s funny … I had another listen through of those songs written during that time, and there are so many songs there that I love. Maybe they will see the light of day in another way at some point, but for now, I am really happy with the songs that are on this record and what they say.”
Rather than taking the longer album approach as many have been doing in recent years, Morgan decided to keep Steel Town a shorter-length album, originally consisting of 10 tracks. “Longer albums kind of intimidate me as a little bit as a listener, to press play not knowing how long it is going to take and all that,” he explains. “I wanted to make a concise record, and I wanted every song to do its thing. I didn’t want to have any sort of overlap. That’s kind of the guardrails, I guess, that drove the song choices.”
It wasn’t until the “eleventh hour” when one tune in particular – “Letting You Go” – resurfaced, changing Steel Town to an 11-track project, serving as the perfect closing masterpiece for the collection of songs. Morgan wrote “Letting You Go” with Lindsay Rimes, forgetting about it in the shuffle of all the songs penned during the timeframe, but immediately realized that the album would not be complete without it. “There wasn’t a song on the record that did that or said that part of the story or felt that way, and I think this album, in a lot of ways, is a release in that song.”
The Beatle-esque tune talks about letting go of the toxic relationships in your life and once again finding the light at the end of the tunnel while offering the listener a live-vibe, guaranteeing the song to be a huge success in his upcoming tour stops in the future. “I got into this whole [music] thing because I wanted to be in a band,” says Morgan. “I feel like when I go out on the road, I feel like I’m in that band again. I wanted to be in that band in this record as well. I think this record feels a lot more live and a lot more human, maybe, more than anything else that I’ve done. That was sort of the main decision or driving point in making it. I couldn’t be happier with it. I am so exited to share this album with the world.”
The 11-track album also features a duet with Laci Kaye Booth titled “Two Broken Hearts,” whom Morgan shares a real-life romance with outside the music going on two years now. Unlike his previous relationship while being married to fellow singer Kelsea Ballerini for nearly 5 years, Morgan prefers to keep details to a minimum out of respect for their privacy. His very public divorce in 2022 left Morgan laying low and taking the high road by avoiding the headlines and some of the things that were being said about him at the time. Morgan describes the tough time frame as a blur, but leaned on the experience to turn his pain into wisdom, which helped him create his most personal album yet with Steel Town.
“When you live a lot of life and write a lot of songs, it’s a very healing process,” Morgan says. “I think one the things I’ve learned — and maybe the way the music’s gone, too — is the more you felt the more specifically you can be yourself in a song and tell your story in a song the better. And maybe as a listener that’s what I’m gravitating to more personally as well. I feel like each time I’m writing, I’m just trying to do that more. You have to share the good parts and then you can share the bad parts, too. I think I learned that on songs like ‘Things That We Drink To,’ which I wrote for my first manager when we lost him. ‘Over You’ is a song that I still get messages to this day about, somebody saying hey, thanks for writing this. It helped me through something. It becomes more meaningful than I thought music could be, so I feel like I owe that to myself and the listeners to try to do that as much as possible whether it’s a good vibe or a tough thing to write about or a reflection or nostalgia. I think there’s all those things on this record. I tried to dig as deep as I could.”
Morgan had the opportunity to share some of the tracks from Steel Town with the city in which the project was named after in recent months, including the title track which was a full circle moment for the star. “Obviously writing that song about my hometown and then getting to play it for them was really, really special,” Morgan says, smiling. “It was really fun, and it was great to see people react to songs that weren’t out yet. It was a good vibe. There was a local flag flying in the crowd … it was just really cool and meaningful.
“As Australians, it’s sometimes hard for us to speak proudly about places, not that we don’t feel pride for where we’re from, but sometimes it feels inauthentic or cheesy,” he adds. “One of the things I love about Americans is their pride of place and their ability to say that. The song ‘She Talks About Texas’ [on Steel Town] is kind of about that. I feel like the Texans are the most proud people. So one of the things I love about the song ‘Steel Town’ is I feel like I found a way to say that. That song feels authentically me and Australian. To see it go over so well in my hometown … it was a bit emotional. It was great.”
To support the release of the new album, Morgan announced his highly-anticipated Steel Town Tour, kicking off in May with initial stops throughout Australia and New Zeeland, to then be followed by dates throughout the states. “I’d give you some of those dates, but chances are they will change and I’ll be wrong,” laughs Morgan. Stops along the way will be added to the singer’s website, morganevansmusic.com, as they are revealed. But for Morgan, nobody is more excited than him to take the new music to the stage.
“I will say there was definitely a focus on a live feeling on this album,” notes Morgan. “I wanted to feel like people playing music in a room. We made a live album in 2023. We played a massively long tour. I can’t even remember how long we were playing for [laughs], but we ended up finishing it at the Opera House in Sydney. We did two nights there, and we recorded the shows. I remember hearing them back, and musically, it just felt so alive, and that was very compelling to me. It was imperfect in a great way, and I feel like I wanted to lean more into that more than ever on this record. Certainly that was a very intentional thing. I think that really makes me want to go play it live now, too, so that’s kind if a nice thing to look forward to.”
