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MP3 Morgan McPherson - Stranger in the Mirror
13 MP3 Songs in this album (60:23) !
Related styles: POP: Pop/Rock, POP: Piano
People who are interested in Alanis Morissette Tori Amos Evanescence should consider this download.
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Biography
Morgan McPherson was born on January 27th, 1985 in Greensboro, North Carolina. Born 229 years later to the day, she shares a birthday with the famous classical pianist and composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Since before she could read, she wanted to be a writer and describes crying at five years old after flipping through a book and realizing she did not have the means yet to escape into this fantasy world. “Although I started playing piano at 3 or 4, my first dream was to be a writer, and I think this is why my lyrics carry such a high emphasis in my songs,” she says. Her mother was a church pianist for many years and as a young girl Morgan would attend many times a week to accompany her mother to choir practices, praise band rehearsal, and Sunday and Wednesday services. “I crawled under the pews and listened to the music from a place where no one could get to me. That’s one thing I like about music; it takes you away to search inside yourself.”
Morgan began studying classical piano with a teacher at the age of five and went on to study at the Music Academy of North Carolina (then called the Greensboro Music Academy). She studied there for many years until the age of 16, and competed in annual competitions. “After that, for about 2 years, I took a break and rarely touched a piano. I got distracted, and although I can’t regret that period because it brought me some of my songs, it was a very lonely and soulless time. In 2005, my then boyfriend burned me a CD with a Tori Amos song on it called “Mother” and that was the beginning of me coming back to the piano. That was the best thing anybody could have ever done for me.”
An English major for the first two years of her college education at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Morgan auditioned for the music school at the beginning of her third year and after being accepted, switched her major to music. “It was scary. I knew that if I wanted piano to be my life that I’d have to make this step and face my fears, but I knew that I was stepping into a world that I was not made for. I respected and loved the classics, but felt a strong urge to express myself outside of this realm.”
Although Morgan didn’t continue on the classical path, her writing still echoes the classical style. You can hear hints of Beethoven and Mozart like whispers behind the scenes. It is alternative meets classical meets rock meets pop meets experimental. A graduate from the University of North Carolina’s School of Music in December 2007, Morgan intends to continue living a life devoted to music by teaching piano, composing and producing new music, and touring. With her first E.P. entitled “Fragile Little Me” that she produced herself, she certainly has a good start. Morgan writes predominately pianistically centered lyrical ballads with words of sharp honesty that bare the soul and tell a story. “Each song tells a story. Maybe it’s real, maybe it’s not, or maybe only part of it is real. If I was going through a really tough time, I’d go to the piano and work it out there, because that was really one of the only places I felt comfortable revealing emotions.”
About “Stranger in the Mirror”
I’ve been writing some of these songs for a long time. Well…not writing….channeling. Songs like “Reflection” and “Fragile Little Me” were passed down in a stream all at one time with little or no post-writing. This is where it’s at its best, when something somewhere just decides to give it to you. “Reflection” was written when I was 17, “Fragile Little Me” when I was 20. I consider songs like these as gifts because they helped pull me out of really hard times. When I wrote them, I wasn’t thinking that I’d ever make a CD. Initially they were just diary entries of a kind. Then, when I started to see a pattern in the songs and my passion for performing and sharing with others grew, I thought “these would make a really good themed album.”
So…the theme is personal growth of a sort. Although men can listen to (and I hope they will), it’s specifically the story of a woman’s personal growth in our modern society. There are water and grave symbols dispersed throughout because there is a baptism involved….a resurrection. Although I grew up in the church and I am familiar with the Bible’s symbolism, I don’t mean it in this way. What I mean is traveling down a path in life only to find that to go any farther and to be happy, you must kill the part of yourself that’s sabotaging you. “Requiem” is not a suicide song, it’s a salvation song. It’s about the death of the part of myself that allowed me to let others in that shouldn’t be let in. The last words are, “and as I wave goodbye to all that I must leave behind, I begin to breathe new life.” My message to everyone is that they can release whatever force is imprisoning them (maybe it’s their own) and start again. At the end of this journey of change, you can look in the mirror and find that you are a new creature. You won’t even recognize yourself. That is where the title of the album comes from.
~Morgan McPherson
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