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“Stoney” sprung from an email that my grandmother sent me right before she passed away at the age of 95. Yes, she sent me an email. In it she described feeling like she was sinking into her bed and was going to drift away. I have no idea why I was the only recipient or why she didn’t say anything else.”
“Stoney” starts out rolling along the surface, twinkles of light on the water. Then it drops to a lower depth to careen down and then rises back up to take a breath. The song might be more like a whale than a stone, but it deals with death and the question of a life’s meaning. Was it worth all the suffering? The dark dream is that there is no meaning to our existence. But there’s a resolve at the end where the being or soul returns like sediment to some sort of continuum. But don’t take my word for it, sign up for my grandma’s chain letter!
Durham, North Carolina-based cellist, vocalist, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Jacob Morris spent years establishing himself in Athens, Georgia’s music biome, supporting some of its finest musicians and songwriters, including Ham 1, Vic Chesnutt, Liz Durrett, Madeline Adams, and Patterson Hood of the Drive-By Truckers. His new EP, Slow Funeral, is out on June 23; it’s an amalgam of psych-folk-rock, to be released on New West imprint Strolling Bones Records.
The EP’s second single, “Stoney,” was inspired by a mysterious email from Morris’s grandmother before she passed away. It starts out rolling along the surface with twinkles of light on the water, drops to a lower depth and rises back up to take a breath; ultimately, it might be more like a whale than a stone, but it deals with death and the question of a life’s meaning.
“‘Stoney’ sprung from an email that my grandmother sent me right before she passed away at the age of 95,” Morris says. “She described feeling like she was sinking into her bed and was going to drift away. I have no idea why I was the only recipient or why she didn’t say anything else.”
“The dark dream is that there is no meaning to our existence,” he continues. “But there’s a resolve at the end where the being or soul returns like sediment to some sort of continuum. But don’t take my word for it, sign up for my grandma’s chain letter!”
Slow Funeral leans into existential questioning but in the form of sometimes spacey, sometimes surreal, pastorally-tinged thoughts. Previously released single, “Lister,” is an anti-war musing that uses the last name of Spanish general Enrique Lister for its title and asks who owns history and what happens to the pieces that have been mostly erased.
Morris is often compared musically to such artists as Nick Drake, John Cale and Elliott Smith. On Slow Funeral, he is ably backed up by Elephant Six veteran John Fernandes, as well as Thomas Valadez, Cullen Toole and Al Daglis (who co-produced the album with Morris).
