I first met Morganway in 2017 at the Buckle and Boots festival, where I was enamoured by their mix of rock, country and blues. The following year, the lineup morphed into the definitive version, and in Spring 2025, the band went out on another UK tour to promote their third album, “Kill The Silence”.
The Eastern Daily Press profiled the band in 2022, noting the north Norfolk roots of the Morgan twins, Callum and Kieran, who gained their dad’s love of music and respectively play bass and guitar in the band. Initially hooked on the rock of Red Hot Chili Peppers, Callum said he was also influenced by “Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty and Fleetwood Mac. I used to want to be a writer, and I’ve always been fascinated by words, so Leonard Cohen is another big influence and more recently Craig Finn, who plays in The Hold Steady”.
The band’s name is a tribute to their late grandfather; indeed, there’s a road that is called Morgan’s Way. Callum told me that earlier on in the career of the band, “we were playing the Troubadour, and they’d just changed promoters. So the guy said, ‘I get a lot of emails and I saw one from Morganway. What a terrible name. I’ve got to check this out!’ He checked out our music because he thought our name was so bad, and we got the gig”.
In their first band, The Sharps, the Morgans were joined by school friend Matt Brocklehurst, a classically trained pianist. This mutated into Morganway, who toured the pub circuit of Norwich. They were fronted by original singer Yve Mary B, who now lives in Alabama. She wrote several songs which remain in their setlist, including ‘My Love Ain’t Gonna Save You’ (“love’s not real till it scares you”) and ‘Hurricane’, which has variously been a set opener and closer. “We knew we had something special going for it because every gig we did it, crowds seemed to respond to it”, Callum says of the song which they have since played at Cornbury, Cropredy and Cambridge folk festivals.
“Developing the fiddle into the band has been interesting”, Callum tells me. “We accidentally became a country band! We love it, but we never considered ourselves a country band until people started calling us that. It was a surprise and we’re flattered but it’s not like we got together to form a country band”. He highlights the album’s closing track ‘I Want No Other Love’ as sounding “like neon country, like you’re driving through a city late at night lit up by neon lights”.
In 2022, the band recorded their second album ‘Back To Zero’, which opens with ‘Wait For Me’. Written by Nicole and SJ, it builds on the sound of the debut, with an insistent beat, excellent lead vocals from SJ and the band chiming in around her. Callum wrote the chant-along ‘World Stopped Running’, some of whose lyrics are about the process of songwriting that “feels like salvation”. The best track on the album is ‘Come Over’, where the chorus explodes cathartically after the relative quiet of the verses.
Morganway are first and foremost a live band, with the studio versions of the material worked up during the shows; their support slots include tours alongside Elles Bailey, Belle and Sebastian, Skunk Anansie and, on a tour in October 2024, rock band Scarlet Rebels. They have slipped in covers of songs by Alanis Morissette and Red Hot Chili Peppers into their set, which bring in rock fans and broaden the listening experiences of their country audience, too. With such a wide swathe of influences, they are really their own genre.
For the album ‘Kill The Silence’, which was recorded back in 2023 but only released in January 2025, Callum says the band were keen “to take any thinking out of the room. We wanted to capture what it was like to discover a song for the first time, and the parts that naturally form in that setting”. As before, songs are written and sung by different members of the band: Callum and SJ each sing a verse of ‘Boy on the Train’, which has a two-bar drum solo from Ed, and SJ gives it some welly on ‘I Feel The Rain’ and ‘Don’t Turn The Lights On Yet’, which she wrote with Nicole. The title track, with its eye-catching video, is sure to be another mainstay of the live set.
The album finally showcases a studio version of ‘Devil’s Canyon’, a hypnotic tune originally showcased back in 2016 as a great live moment; anchored by a riff from Kieran’s guitar, it is a song on which all six band members sing. ‘Halfway Tonight’, meanwhile, has a brief organ solo from Matt, while ‘Edge of the Sun’ is another of the band’s softer songs, a piano ballad akin to their tender ‘Sweetest Goodbye’. The album ends with ‘We Sing’, a six-minute tune featuring vocals from Alyssa Bonagura that reminds listeners of the power of live music and the perils of going out on the road to perform it.
Far from the Fleetwood Mac comparisons the band still receive, drummer Ed has likened his band to both the Chili Peppers and Radiohead. The latter group “push themselves to try something new, not be afraid of stepping back from experimentation and take on board or be inspired by putting themselves further into the deep end of the pool, trying to do something different and not for the sake of it, to challenge yourself as a musician”.
“I remember when I was 14 and we played King’s Lynn with The Sharps”, Callum tells me, “standing on the side of the stage and the steps up to the stage and the lights, the smoke and everything. I was like, ‘Wow! This is what making it must feel like’, and walking out onto the stage was such a huge buzz. If I could see that trajectory and see what we’ve achieved, I would be impressed”.
