Andrew Morgan

Andrew Morgan, an orchestral pop singer and songwriter, came into the world in Leawood, a suburb outside Kansas City, Kansas. The offspring of an amateur folk musician, he passed his youth fixated on the Beatles, yet in 1997 he enrolled at the University of Kansas and signed on with the alt-country act the Buick Sixes. Growing dissatisfied with his minimal say in the ensemble’s artistic choices and material, he soon left to learn piano independently, then asked friend Cully West to help launch Bound by Nothing, a chamber pop group that also featured Morgan’s younger sister Sarah on viola and Carolyn Anderson on cello.

After twelve months gigging at local Lawrence pubs and coffeehouses, Bound by Nothing cut a demo at the Bottleneck studio with engineer Matt LaPoint. Morgan and West next spent a year studying in England, where they assembled another edition of the band with cellist Shira Katz and violinist Lili Zhang. Besides the revised lineup’s performances overseas, the original demo drew notice from Oxford indie Shifty Disco, which floated the idea of a full-length release. Morgan started crafting fresh songs, but as the school term ended and money ran low, he and West had to head back to Lawrence.

A few weeks into his resumed semester, Morgan quit school and shifted to New York City, disbanding Bound by Nothing to start Punctured Bicycle. Working again with LaPoint, he tracked seven songs at a Los Angeles studio before settling in Chicago in 2001. Although Beulah frontman Miles Kurosky agreed to produce a complete album, discussions with the Velocette label collapsed, so Morgan ended Punctured Bicycle in mid-2002 to focus on solo work. LaPoint soon took a position at Elliott Smith’s new L.A. facility New Monkey. After learning of Morgan’s difficulties securing a deal, Smith supplied a couple days of gratis studio time. Those New Monkey sessions ultimately stretched across six weeks, enabling Morgan to record many of the songs he had begun writing years earlier in England. He later returned to Lawrence to finish the record, narrowly escaping harm when a tornado leveled West’s apartment. The completed album, Misadventures in Radiology, surfaced on British indie Broken Horse in summer 2005 and reached the U.S. via Sonic Boom in spring 2005. Morgan reappeared in 2009 with Please Kid, Remember.