Travis Morrison is my hero
I don't know why, but I guess about the third or fourth time I met Travis Morrison I realized I was being rude to him, and it was too late to stop.
After that I just kind of wrote it off, because, well... I don't know. I guess it's that sometimes in life there are some people you know you will only talk to very briefly, and you are pretty sure they are very different from you in terms of life experiences, and you just sort of don't click.. and then you are kind of frustrated about that, and then you try to figure out what the hell that's about and you just step all over yourself. So now you're embarrassed and if you mentioned to the other person, you know they'd think you were crazy, cause all of this happened in your head. You wind up pissed at yourself and you just want to forget the whole thing.
So after I went through all of that, I took the easy way out and wrote it off. At that point I started thinking back about what all this internal psychosis produced in terms of what this other person actually got to experience when they talked to me. That was about when I realized I'd pretty much been bit of a jerk to Travis Morrison for our very brief meetings over the 4 or 5 years I would meet him on tour.
If you don't know who Travis Morrison is, you probably don't follow "indie" rock, specifically "indie" rock in Washington DC. He's the former lead singer of a band called The Dismemberment Plan. My little brother Steve was the drummer on their first album, !. That's not a typo, the name of the album is the punctuation symbol: !. After their first album they were touring in a van and basically doing the "no sleep till brooklyn" death march that gets a unique and impossible to classify band to their second record. My little brother was for whatever reason not going to continue playing drums for them after their first album and tour. I never really worried about why, as I know how hard it is to be a member of a band that's starting up.
I do know that their first album is absolutely spastic. It's just unbridled youthful energy and noise and rhythm and whatever. I liked a couple tracks, but mostly I couldn't get past the sound of Travis' voice and how much it needed work.
Well he worked his ass off. The whole band did. Their last two albums "Emergency & I" and "Change" are without a doubt two of the most inventive and interesting albums of those years. That's not my opinion alone.
Toward the last five years they started touring nationally and would play Phoenix, where I now live. Still in a van. But to more appreciative and energetic audiences. They sounded better every time and their last show in Phoenix was really a great celebration of how far they'd come.
I would go see them because their bass player Eric Axelson was, at first, a close family friend, and now family to me. I'd call him up and he'd put me on the list and I'd go see them. That's usually when Travis and I would chat for a few minutes and then I'd be a prick. News of my feeling of behaving like a prick will, I'm sure, come as news to Travis, as our meetings were very brief. Likely he would, at best, only vaguely remember our meetings.
Probably the most interesting show I saw was when they played at my brother Steve's wedding. That was really wild cause I got to hear them doing their best stuff in a very intimate setting and it was just, well it was very special. My brother played a couple songs with them which was fun, even though he was clearly out of practice. Their music, especially their rhythm parts were/are very, very demanding musically.
So then the band broke up and everyone went on to whatever was next. They had a fantastic run, in terms of critical acclaim, a dedicated indie cred fan base and just really great collaborations with bands and artists that turned out to be important. In fact if you look back on it, they pretty much attracted the best similar talent to their efforts right out of the gate.
Travis released a solo album. I never bought it or heard it. I just found out today that it was given a 0.0 rating from pitchfork media. That incredibly scathing review killed any chance of success that album might have had, and very surely was a huge professional setback for Travis. I guess I can't really argue about whether or not that the album deserved such a review or not, but I can say that I find it sort painful to read negative reviews of most any record and this one was a flat out, all the way, without a doubt a he sucks and you should never buy his stuff review.
Travis continues to sing because that's what singers do. He's now, in addition to his indie music work, singing in a Choir. I started singing in a choir myself about 3 years ago. It's really kind of amazing singing in a choir. I started doing it because I've always been good at reading music and I can carry a tune ok. I'm not nearly the singer Travis has become.
My wife found an interview with Travis that runs through his road to singing in a choir, and it's an interesting read. Singing in a choir is hard. It's also very, very fun. The fact is I'm singing in the choir because I can't really go to church without doing something to help with the service and the choir is the easiest thing for me to help with. It really is fun.
What I always admired about Travis was his work ethic. He's totally into singing and he doesn't really care if how he's singing is not understood at the time. This is a guy that wouldn't really consider if it was "uncool" to sing in a choir. I suppose it is very "uncool" to the self appointed indie cred score keeping kind of people. All I have to say to them is, can you sing? Have you recorded critically acclaimed albums? Do you like singing so much you want to find new and different ways to do it so you can figure out how to do it better for your own enjoyment of it? But really people that think singing in a choir is uncool are not creative people. They don't really do anything but describe how they think creative talent should be expressed without ever putting themselves out there to create themselves. It's sort of sad and far too easy to pick on them. Even if they pick on Travis. That doesn't make him my hero though. That's just part of the baggage of being a "celebrity" and still doing what you want with your life.
What makes him my hero is the article he posted on his website. I highly recommend you read it. It's really stunning how he got yelled at for being a force that is destroying this country, because he was reading a hymnal on a train. It's absolutely stunning. I don't know Travis very well but I'm blown away with the way he described the whole situation with such candor and humor.
I often feel like, when I tell people I sing in my church choir, that they just don't really get it. I sing in my church choir cause I like to sing. I go to my church cause I like my church. I can do both of these things and continue to believe that:
1) A woman has the right to choose what happens to her own body
2) The separation of church and state, implicit in our constitution, protects and nurtures strong religious institutions in our country (and that the erosion of that separation is very bad for our religious institutions because government involvement in religion is beyond any doubt, a great way to muck up a religion with politics. Politics I think we can all agree is not an activity that has demonstrated a great deal of success in consistent moral leadership throughout human history).
3) Our country's evangelical media machine has done more damage to Christianity, especially among the "unchurched", than anything any of us will witness for a long while.
No one that I know, with the exception of my wife, and a probably most of the members of my choir, assume this to be my perspective on religion when I tell them I sing in my church choir. Happily it doesn't affect my livelihood, my peers don't write about my 'unexpected' interest in religious music, and I don't have to explain that I'm in the choir because I like to sing.
Travis has to live through all of that extra bullshit cause he's a more than notable musician and from what I've read he enjoys singing in a choir too. Given the extra hit of it being uncool and how he's just taking such a huge critical hit for his last release, that's just plain heroic. Who knows, maybe he'll end up being a pioneer. Isn't being an "independent" musician all about not paying much attention to the music industry, and just making music for yourself first?
Either way I'll be buying his next release.
