New York has been part of Alwyn Morrison’s writing from the beginning. His first EP, ‘Heartsplit’, included songs such as ‘The City’ and ‘Lenox Hill’, but his new record, ‘Trial’, finds him looking beyond the love and heartbreak that shaped that earlier collection.

The latest single, ‘Fireflies’, began with a strange night in Central Park during the pandemic. Morrison found himself alone and surrounded by hundreds of fireflies, creatures he remembered quite differently from childhood. What first felt slightly unnerving soon had him thinking about growing older and the fears we pick up along the way. Morrison co-wrote the song with Michael Kooman, with orchestration by August Eriksmoen. ‘Fireflies’ was recorded at Dubway Studios in New York and appears on ‘Trial’, Morrison’s second EP, out October 23.

We spoke with him about New York, childhood, collaboration and why he knew it was time to stop writing about heartbreak.

“I guess living in this city shapes how I go about the world.”

New York keeps turning up in your songs, from ‘Fireflies’ to the courtroom experiences behind ‘Trial’. Were you consciously writing about the city again, or did it just creep into the songs?

I’ve always found New York fascinating in so many different ways. I explored that a lot on my first EP, in songs like ‘The City’ and ‘Lenox Hill’, and in the visuals I recorded for that project, from filming real New Yorkers sharing their own struggles and stories about overcoming them for the music video for ‘The City’, to putting a piano in the middle of Central Park to shoot the video for ‘Lenox Hill’.

The idea to write ‘Fireflies’ came from being alone in the middle of Central Park one night during the pandemic. There were way too many fireflies around me. It was pretty surreal. But it really could have happened anywhere. I guess the magic of that moment, with the contrast of what was happening because of the lockdown and all the loneliness that so many of us went through, inspired me to look back at my life growing up in a fond way.

I wrote a lot about NYC for my first EP, ‘Heartsplit’. For ‘Trial’ it was less intentional. I guess living in this city shapes how I go about the world, and that comes across in several of my songs, even if the emotion behind them is universal and could apply to any other place where people also battle with loneliness and all types of struggles.

You brought ‘Fireflies’ to Michael Kooman with the lyrics already written, and August Eriksmoen later orchestrated it. What did each of them bring to the song?

I had written the lyrics for ‘Fireflies’ before taking the song to a songwriting session with Michael. We took them to a whiteboard and just started writing down everything that came to mind about our own childhoods. All the things we wrote down about our own childhoods actually stayed on the whiteboard. We ended up not changing the verses to make the song more personal to our own stories, but the song kept that nostalgic feeling.

Michael is a fantastic composer, and working with him gave me the freedom to let the song become something different from what I initially had in my head. And August is a world-class talent. There’s something really nice about bringing people into a song who understand the emotion you’re trying to get across, and then letting them interpret it in their own way.

‘Heartsplit’ was very much about love and heartbreak. ‘Trial’ looks elsewhere. Did you already know you wanted to move on from that subject, or did the new EP reveal itself that way?

‘Heartsplit’ was almost a book, with all the chapters of a love story: falling in love, struggling with the dynamics of a relationship, the breakup, and looking back at those memories with some perspective. I really wanted to bring that to life, and I needed to close the chapter on that part of my life. Otherwise it felt like I’d be writing about heartbreak forever.

I actually wrote all of the songs on both EPs around the same time, but initially my focus was still pretty much on the love and heartbreak stuff, so I decided to release ‘Heartsplit’ last year. That gave me time, this time around, to be much more involved with the production of my second EP, ‘Trial’. There are songs about growth, survival, childhood, loneliness, and the things we go through that don’t necessarily have a neat ending.

Photo Credit: Denice Flores Almendares

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