You can’t tell the story of Sojourn, particularly our music ministry, without telling the story of Eddy Morris. It’s that simple. Eddy came to Sojourn near the beginning of our existence, bringing the life-experience that a group of mostly 20-somethings needed, but with the exuberance and energy more often seen in a teenager. A teen hopped up on chocolate-covered espresso beans.
Eddy has been the recording engineer for nearly every CD we’ve put out, has run live sound during Sunday worship gatherings, played guitar and bass, mentored many young musicians and singer-songwriters, in addition to being a Sojourn community group leader, father, friend and brother-in-Christ (visit the website for his recording studio, Ear Candy, from our Helpful Links section. All of our CDs except Advent Songs were recorded at Ear Candy Studios).
Now, Will Kotheimer interviews Eddy for sojournmusic.com. Sit back and learn all about Eddy’s musical journey and the evolution of “the Sojourn sound” from someone who has been a pillar of this community since nearly the beginning.
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Eddy invites me into the backdoor of his house in St. Matthews and immediately asks if I’d like something to eat (meatloaf and potatoes are on the stove). I decline his offering because I’ve already eaten, not because I don’t like meatloaf. He offers me tea instead. I ask him what kind he has, and he pulls out an assortment. I settle on plain old green tea, and after some nice conversation, the interview gets under way. . .
Will Kotheimer: Who did you listen to growing up? Tell me about your formative years in music, Eddy.
Eddy Morris: The cliche music has been my life, ever since my dad gave me a stack of 45s. When I was little — 4 or 5 — I sat with my cardboard turntable in the closet and listened to records for hours at a time. Couldn’t read, so I memorized my favorite songs by remembering what the labels looked like. I listened to anything from popular artists like the Beatles “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” to Willie and the Handjive. Music was a source of great fascination and a source of escape — a joy, a solace.
I listened to AM radio; this was the late sixties, early seventies, when I was nine or ten, and I got into classic rock even before that. I had a lot of hippie, drug-using aunts and uncles who introduced me to all kinds of stuff — Lynyrd Skynyrd, Pink Floyd, stuff like that. I got into Kiss when I was ten, Ted Nugent, Boston, and when I was in tenth grade Van Halen came out and blew me away. So I got into everything from heavy metal to punk rock (I leaned more toward the punk rock side by the time I was a senior in college). I had started playing guitar when I was ten.
WK: You play the piano don’t you?
EM: Not much. I didn’t pick that up until my late 30s.
WK: How long have you played bass?
EM: I’ve played bass only about ten years. It was really hard to find a bass player for a while. I was in a Christian rock band and there were two guitar players and we just took turns playing bass — but I always had a love for bass. So I took to it more like a bass player than most guitar players would.
WK: What was the Christian rock band like?
EM: “The Shales”. It was really fun. We just played whatever we could imagine. We mimicked our favorite songs and styles and threw it all together. We would go from some rap thing to a heavy metal riff to a country song, and we had some songs with all those in them at one time. We played tons of really bad gigs — youth group gigs with people doing the bunny hop. That kind of stuff.
WK: You’re not in a band right now are you? Just the Sojourn band?
EM: Yes, that’s right.
WK: Talk about your musical experience, being in bands and how that has shaped your ability to create music, and when you started to think of yourself as a recording engineer?
EM: Well, I got a four-track recorder in college, just to start up the process of recording, before I went to the studio. I wanted to figure out the song before I got there. So when I went to a studio I could work very quickly, just laying tracks down.
My ability to record other artists was honed in trying to get those sounds myself and in playing in bands, listening to hundred of thousands of records. My love of listening grew to figuring out how they got that sound. Always as you’re playing in cover bands, you’re trying to figure out how they played their part. You’re keying in whether it’s a bass or guitar so you have to figure out how their parts fit together.
And if you have to record, you’re trying to figure out how they did that — which is something similar to taking that recorded song and figuring how to make your instrument sound like that. So you’ll take those same things you learned while trying to mimic songs and say, “Well I want this kind of sound; who else has done something like that or how can I modify something to be similar to that?” So you gotta pick your favorite sounds but it helps you in recording other bands because as they describe a sound they usually say, “You know, like that band did it.”
I still listen to tons of records. This week, inspired by Across the Universe I got out my old Beatles records again, just listening to all the songs, how the sound evolved and it really clicked to me: their last record, Abbey Road, was really the only modern record. All the recordings were awesome — if you listen to it — the drum sounds and the vocal sounds had a really polished modern recorded sound, whereas the previous ones were awesome, but they were a little bit more raw and the vocals were raw and the drums were very raw. Abbey Road was different.
WK: So you enter into it from a technical point of view?
EM: Yeah I listened to it for a lot of reasons, one reason just because I wanted to hear it. Beyond that, sometimes I’ll study it. And I’ll get on the internet and find out how records were made — under what circumstances, who recorded them, and where they were recorded, all because its somewhat of a passion.
WK: Maybe you could talk a little about what it was like to engineer on the early Sojourn albums. Did you produce and engineer those, both?
EM: Both those terms are blurred as to who did what. The producing, if you call it, pushing the buttons and giving somebody advice on how to get a tone — sometimes there wasn’t a whole lot of production. You just pushed record and did the best you could to make it sound good. So engineering, yeah, I set the mics and I set the levels and I got it to tape. Producing was just kind of a group effort, mostly Mike Cosper and myself and whoever else was recording at the time.
WK: A trial and error process?
EM: Yeah, you do the best with what you’ve got. You always try to pick the songs you like the best and get people to play them the best way you’ve got them in your mind — whatever that means. Chase down the vison of what you like and what you want to sound like.
WK: Let’s talk about Ear Candy Studios. Was it difficult to set up your own studio?
EM: The actual physical building of it took a year. Me and my dad did most of the work and I wired it all. It was fun. It was a labor of love — a lot of labor. And I tried to get it sound-proofed. I did some research on the shape of rooms that were best for acoustic recording and tried to get the ceilings as high as I could. I did the best that I could for what I could afford. There was a lot of work involved in it but it was a joy.
WK: Could you talk a little about the various projects you’ve worked on at Sojourn? Alex O’Nan had mentioned a live album after Sojourn’s first year, and then their efforts went into producing the studio albums. Could you just talk about the evolution of the sound and how you played into that?
EM: Well, they had asked me to record the one year anniversary of Sojourn so I brought out my tape machines and hooked them up to their P.A. It was a low-budget affair — $300 — but it was a great worship experience for everyone there. You mentioned Alex O’Nan — he stepped up to the drums and I was thinking, who is this big red-hairy guy in overalls? Here was just a country bumkin or something and from the first whack of his snare it about blew me away. I was like, “This guy’s a drumming monster,” but that person evolved into the Alex O’Nan we all know — maybe he was the same man but I just didn’t know him. [laughs]
WK: How has the sound of Sojourn music evolved from that time?
come back tomorrow for the conclusion of this interview, including Eddy’s detailed descriptions about the recording of subsequent Sojourn CDs, through last year’s Before The Throne, and thoughts on Eddy’s future.
