Old-Fashioned With a Twist
By Deborah Evans Price, Senior Music Editor, GospelMusicChannel.com
Wearing a feminine summer dress and a big smile, Cindy Morgan is casually chatting with the waitress as she orders breakfast at Noshville, a popular eatery among Nashville’s music biz crowd. Amazingly Cindy hardly looks any different than our first interview in 1992 just as her debut album, Real Life, was about to make her one of Christian music’s most celebrated new artists.
A lot has happened since then. She’s released seven studio albums and a best of compilation. She married author Sigmund Brouwer and became the mother of two beautiful daughters. In addition to penning her own hits, she’s written songs for a variety of artists including India Arie, BeBe Winans, Michael W. Smith, Sandi Patty, Natalie Grant, Mandisa and Avalon. These days the bubbly brunette has a lot to smile about. During the recent Gospel Music Association Dove Awards, she was awarded the Songwriter of the Year honor. She’s enjoying her first hit on the country charts as Point of Grace is taking the Morgan-penned hit “How You Live” to country audiences.
This particular morning she’s most excited about her latest project, Beautiful Bird, a labor of love that she’s releasing digitally through her website (cindymorganmusic.com), iTunes and other select online retailers.
“We just thought this would be a good thing to take that step into the future,” she says of releasing her new project digitally. “How often do people want to go to a store? Who doesn’t have an iPod or mp3 player?”
She’s not ruling out the possibility of issuing the project as a physical CD at some point. “I’m kind of old-fashioned,” she admits. “I want the CD. I want the visible product, but we wanted to start just by doing it digitally. We’re just in a different day. It seemed like the right thing to do and it seemed like a good business move, and it’s fun.”
Though she says she’s a little old-fashioned, Cindy admits to embracing the online world, especially the opportunity to interact with her audience. “We’ve been working on building my website,” she says. “I really want the website to be a community. We’ll have a monthly devotional and I want to make it more than just a music site. Hopefully it will be some place where people can talk and chat. I think it’s a way for the consumer to really know the artist more. I’ve shared much more of myself on this record than I have on any other record.”
Cindy says she’s recently embraced twittering. “You text throughout the day,” she explains of the frequent messages. “Sometimes it’s just random stuff. It’s fun. The other day, I was working on a song for a hymns record, so I twittered, ‘What’s everyone’s favorite hymn?’ and I got all this response immediately about what they liked. So it’s also a great way to get immediate feedback from the people.”
Beautiful Bird is a brilliant artistic statement that finds Cindy fusing the varied creative influences she’s soaked up over the years. A native of East Tennessee, Cindy signed to Word Records in the early '90s and released a string of successful albums. As her first daughter, Olivia turned a year old, Cindy decided to spend less time touring and opted to move her family to Los Angeles to further develop her songwriting chops by working with LA tunesmiths. Though she enjoyed co-writing and developing friendships with West Coast writers, she decided to move. These days she and her family divide their time between homes in Red Deer, Alberta, Canada and a little town south of Tennessee.
What prompted the decision to leave LA? “The traffic! I was stressed out by the driving and how much time I spent driving. We were looking at building or buying a house and it was so much for so little with no yard, and I’m from the holler. We need to have a yard,” she says with a laugh, referencing her East Tennessee roots.
“I think as I’ve gotten older, the music that really moves me and I really feel connected to more and more is bluegrass and Appalachian, but I can’t leave behind pop,” says Cindy, who describes Beautiful Bird as a mix of “pop, Appalachia, country, and symphonic.”
Beautiful Bird marks the first time Cindy has produced a record herself and she credits her co-producer Stephen Leiweke with aiding the process. “I felt like in order for me to really try mixing all these things together in a way that makes sense, I just had to do it myself, with a lot of help from Stephen, who was engineering and my co-producer. He is awesome!”
The first single, “Most of All,” is a song that is special to Cindy. “I wrote it on behalf of my family and the reason it took eight years to write was because my dad was so dear to me," she says of her father. “I wanted to make sure the song did him justice. So that song is really special. It’s just about a lot of memories that I have of my family and my dad, but hopefully it’s universal to anyone who’s lost somebody.”
Beautiful Bird also finds Cindy promoting her new music in tandem with her husband’s new book, “Broken Angel,” although she says that wasn’t her original intent. A bird that had gotten trapped in their house initially inspired the song. Sigmund caught it and set it free. “A few months later, Olivia said, ‘I wish we still had that bird’ and I asked if she thought that bird was meant to live in a cage. We had that talk and I began thinking about people in my life – one person in particular that I think lived in a cage. She has all the ability to completely soar and be this happy, remarkable human being, but she lives in a cage. I think all of us get broken by something along the way and we either let God heal us and move on or we live in a cage.”
When Cindy played the song for Sigmund, he was surprised. “He said, ‘What’s the deal? Is it about my book?’ but I didn’t know what his book was about. We don’t mix those things. We kind of keep our work life separate,” she says of her husband of 11 years. “He sent the song to his publishers and they just freaked because ironically the song fit the book. So we’re doing a video for that song and [daughters] Savannah and Olivia are in the video. We’re basically cross-promoting Beautiful Bird and Broken Angel, his new release, which is on Random House and Waterbrook. In the back of his book, there’s a little picture of me and it says, to complete Caitlyn’s, story, visit brokenangelsong.com and then we give away the video for free and we’re giving away the song “Beautiful Bird” free on his website [www.coolreading.com].”
It’s been well over two hours now at Noshville and we start preparing to say our goodbyes. “I’m just thankful to be doing this still,” Cindy says of the opportunity to create music. “God is good! Everything is going so well right now. I just want to keep my feet on the ground and my head on straight because I don’t want to miss the opportunity to do what I feel that I’m here to do, which is to use what I’ve been given to encourage people and to lift people up. Everyone’s got their spiritual gift and I think mine is encouragement.”
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About the Writer
Deborah Evans Price has covered Christian/Gospel music for Billboard magazine since 1994. She also contributes regularly to Country Weekly, CMA Close Up, Devo’Zine, Christian Single, HomeLife, BMI Music World, and other publications.
A Nashville resident since 1983, Deborah has held editorial posts at Radio & Records, Country News, American Songwriter and Billboard. Amy Grant, Trace Adkins, Brad Paisley, Charlie Daniels, 3 Doors Down, Third Day, Don Henley, Bon Jovi, Chris Rice, Sandra Bullock, Mercy Me, Alan Jackson, Smokey Robinson, Carrie Underwood and Steven Curtis Chapman are among her many interviews. Additionally, she's a sought-after music industry analyst who has been interviewed on CNN, MSNBC, TNN, The Today Show, and ABC PrimeTime Live, among other outlets.
Deborah is a member of the Gospel Music Association's board of directors and a graduate of Leadership Music. She resides south of Nashville with her husband, Gary, and 17-year-old son Trey.
