Andrew Morgan came out of the college rock music scene in Lawrence, KS, a town where there have always been more good bands than good restaurants even at the local music scene's darkest hours. He should not be confused with several other performers with this same name, although like both the New Orleans jazzman and a similar indie rock artist from Muskegon, MI, the Morgan of Lawrence played in a band with a sibling, in this case Sarah Morganwith a viola.
In 2005 her brother finally released his creative opus, cleverly entitled Misadventures in Radiology, the end of a long and winding production road but still well less than a decade since he had first entered the University of Kansas as an undergraduate. Morgan's influences in this period were bands such as Radiohead and Wilco. The Lawrence scene was enhanced in the late '90s by an alternative country band called the Buick Sixes, but Morgan's participation as a bassist was short-lived, truncated by his own desire for control.
He began playing piano and writing his own material, fruit for a collaboration with high-school friend Cully West and leading to a band literally Bound By Nothing. The presence of his sister on viola, not exactly a common instrument in the rocking-out realm, was not by any means the end of Morgan's interaction with the classical world, eventually resulting in the orchestral magnificence of the 2005 release. Cellist Carolyn Anderson also became part of the combo, which despite such chamber music instruments could find work only in bars. The amount of painful sound system feedback created by the string section during a 1999 Bound By Nothing gig at Lawrence's infamous Bottleneck bar was set for inclusion in the 1999 Guinness Book of World Records until it was decided that the creation of feedback was not an actual event, whatever that means.
By the end of the 20th century, the Morgan and West songwriting team was on the move, including stints in England, New York City, and Los Angeles. On the West Coast, Morgan finished much work at the studio of the late Elliott Smith on what would become his debut album. Morgan finished the opus back in Lawrence, making superb use of student players for orchestral overdubs. He likes to compare the finished product to Brian Wilson's Pet Sounds. ~ Eugene Chadbourne, Rovi
