New album on the way from R.B. Morris
After going more than a decade between albums — from 1999’s “Zeke and the Wheel” to last year’s “Spies Lies and Burning Eyes” — local singer-songwriter/poet/playwright/institution R.B. Morris is already preparing to put out his next record, tentatively titled “Rich Mountain Bound,” after his own publishing company.
“It’s crazy — totally different, completely different,” Morris told me this week. “For one thing, it’s absolutely all solo – just me with a guitar. I don’t mean exactly like ‘Nebraska,’ where I play all the instruments; it’s just all guitar. There’s not an overdub on the whole record.”
The album came about via some front-porch sessions with his people “way up in the hills,” Morris said, particularly “Iron” John Webb, who after one session told R.B. that all of his favorite Morris songs were the ones Morris had never recorded — songs like “Once in a Blue Moon,” “Going Down to Hot Springs” and the like. That spurred Morris to action, and in one session at Nathan Milner’s Asheville, N.C., studios.
You can read more about the new album, his Friday (July 15) concert at the Clayton Center for the Arts on the Maryville College campus and what Morris has been up to of late in Thursday’s edition of The Daily Times Weekend entertainment section.