In 2013, promising singer-songwriter Meagan Moseley released her first album, Long Nights and Neon Lights, then fell off the Earth.
I searched for Moseley intermittently for a couple of years, but turned up only crumbs. As an unknown country artist with one full-length album and only 14 songs in her catalog, she left a faint trail, at best. (Moseley’s songs aren’t on YouTube. What’s not on YouTube?) I’d never seen the like: gifted songsmith with an immaculately produced album choked with aural (and lyrical) gems and – poof! The search was maddening, delicious fun.
As it turns out, Moseley’s disappearance wasn’t so mysterious after all. The culprits were the usual suspects: Nashville suits.
Says the 34-year-old Marshall, Texas, native today, “I was offered a horribly one-sided publishing deal. I was told that I wrote great music but because I didn’t look like the artists the labels were putting out at the time (thin, blonde, etc.), I wouldn’t make it in Nashville as an artist. It wasn’t that comment that made me step back, though.
“I recall being in an executive’s conference room, just having played a song where he said it was one of the best songs he’d ever heard but couldn’t release it because Nashville wasn’t ready for it. It was the realization that I would have to water my music down to step fully into the Nashville industry that gave me pause. I don’t have regrets, but looking back, I wish I wouldn’t have let one music executive’s opinion hang over my head.”
Without flinching, the twentysomething Texas A&M grad swapped a potential future in the music business for a full-time gig in business administration. “I took a break, got a 9 to 5 job and threw myself into building a career,” says Moseley. Her career has kept her in Music City.
For me, Moseley’s musical story is one of irreplaceable, irreversible time. Ironically, her 14 released songs trend toward the timeless.
Moseley’s a whiz at melodic invention – her songs almost invariably skew in the opposite direction that convention demands – and she coaxes greatness out of tunes that might have slipped into schmaltz in lesser hands. Yet she’s not all singer-y/songwriter-y. Moseley brings a little kickass Texas rock to the table on “Front Lawn Song” and the blustery “Chase the Rain.”
www.reverbnation.com/meaganmoseley/song/17804871-chase-the-rain
(“Chase the Rain”)
Self-taught, Moseley sings with the ease and warmth of a musician born. I appreciate her flat, unadorned vocals – lightly salted with an east Texas drawl. They provide a nice, even surface on which to layer her lyrical tales of love, family and place, as in these lines from the marvelous tune “Small Town Southern Life”:
Got battle scars
Backyards
Catching fireflies in Mason jars
Making mistakes and learning my lessons right
We say yes sir and thank you ma’am and
Can I help you any way I can?
Taught how to shoot at the age of five
Learned about life from my grandma’s side
All around the world I swear there’s nothing like
Growing up in a small town Southern life
www.reverbnation.com/meaganmoseley/song/17804734-small-town-southern-life
(“Small Town Southern Life”)
Two other favorites from Long Nights and Neon Lights are “London,” with its ringing, stinging guitars and wistful denouement, and “Fall Into Me,” which includes this clever verse:
Well, you’ve got me plain and simple
Though I might have started superficial
I must confess
You’re my favorite kind of mess
In addition to her precociousness, I admire Moseley’s restlessness as an artist, perhaps an odd thing to note for someone with fewer than 15 songs, but true.
She says she’s working on a new EP, but not to expect Album One, Volume Two. “I have an unreleased EP that I recorded here in Nashville after Long Nights and Neon Lights. It’s a departure from my previously released music. By the time I had taken a break and was ready to revisit the unreleased EP, I came down with a bad case of the first round of Covid-19. It impacted my voice and it hasn’t been the same since. I can/should rehab it and will do in the future.”
Any general regrets about the vanishing time?“I do miss music being such an important part of my life and part of who I am as a person,” Moseley says. “When you’re not writing, even just for yourself, you always feel something missing. I feel like I’m out of my prime, but I would record again if the songs and the time were right.”
You can check out the rest of Meagan Moseley’s tunes at www.reverbnation.com/meaganmoseley/songs.