Morgxn is home.
Since moving back to his native Tennessee after stints in L.A. and New York City, the singer-songwriter has returned with his most personal collection of songs to date.
Morgxn (né Morgan Karr) released his Heartland: Part 1 EP in July, he dropped the new single “Heartland” on Friday, Aug. 1, and more music is on the way. The record is inspired by his Nashville-area homecoming, since settling down on a fruit farm with his husband following the COVID-19 pandemic.
“When you look at somebody like me, with my painted nails and whatever color my hair has been at different times, the heartland is not normally a word reserved for people like me,” Morgxn, 38, tells PEOPLE over a Zoom call from his home recording studio outside of Nashville. “But the truth is I’m from the heartland. I want to reclaim the heartland for myself; I want to reclaim what it’s like to be a sensitive feeling human in the heartland. There’s people like me all over the heartland, and I’m not just talking about queer people — I’m literally just talking about the rainbow cornucopia of humanity.”
Gabriel Starner
After finding success with his 2018 Walk the Moon collab “Home,” Morgxn eventually parted ways with his major label. After releasing his 2020 hit “Wonder,” he and Sara Bareilles recorded a duet version of the same track remotely, amid the pandemic, with Bareilles recording her vocals on GarageBand. The DIY nature of that collaboration inspired Morgxn — and he realized he didn’t have to live on one of the coasts to create.
“I asked myself, ‘What do I want in life? What does my heart want?'” Morgxn says. “I’ve been singing about home for years, but the idea to move back home was the last thing on my mind — but I ended up moving back home, and in the process, I ended up meeting a man here.”
Gabriel Starner
Morgxn met his future husband, Gabe Starner, a therapist, while he was on tour.
“I’ll never forget that the day that we met, he baked me a loaf of sourdough bread. And I’m thinking to myself, tell me a guy in LA who, 1) eats bread, and 2) bakes it and you eat it together and no one runs away crying because you just ate bread,” Morgxn says with a laugh.
They began dating after his tour wrapped, and they eventually bought land outside of Nashville, where they launched Fruity Farm. The move — and his relationship with Starner, 37 — informed the Heartland EP and songs like “Holy.” For the “Holy” music video, Morgxn wanted to showcase multiple generations of gay love stories, so he recruited a real-life couple, Carl and Leo, to star with him and Starner in the video, which they shot on their farm and at the older couple’s home, where they’d lived for 37 years.
“It was this double generation of love existing boldly in the South where both my husband and Leo and Carl growing up in these religious environments where they were told that their love is not holy, but there’s nothing more sweet than seeing Leo and Carl dance, and you can’t tell me that that’s not holy,” Morgxn says. “When I finally showed it to them recently, right before releasing it publicly, one of them said, ‘I would like that shown at either one or both of our funerals,’ which is the highest honor to make something that they feel like their love is captured in a way that I hope it inspires generations of people.”
Morgxn’s music career started when he bartended at a honky-tonk in Nashville, where he’d also perform.
“I had a manager tell me in 2011, I would never make it in music as an openly gay person in Nashville, so that is why I went to L.A. first to do what I was going to do, which was not hide,” says Morgxn, whose homecoming has been a full-circle moment. Now, “I’m not willing to hide or tone down or do something to please somebody else, and that’s going to be the journey that I take with my music.”
Morgxn has also seen “progress” in Music City, which he credits to “more diverse voices [that have] helped to move Nashville forward,” he says.
Courtesy of MORGXN
And with his new record, Morgxn hopes to reclaim not just his roots, but also typically conservative, heteronormative tropes like big trucks.
“The heartland is so much more than just straight white guys in a truck. Spoiler alert, on the lead single from my album, I am a white guy in a truck because I’m going to reclaim the f—ing truck for everybody,” says Morgxn, who — with nearly 300,000 monthly Spotify listeners and more than 450,000 YouTube views of the “Holy” video — is now finding success on his own terms
Since moving back and opening Fruity Farm, Morgxn and his husband have focused on building community.
“Every day, I have the ability to try and be a good person, especially as our world and our country feels like it’s constantly heading in this scary direction for sensitive people; every day, I have the chance to try to make the world around me a little bit better, even if that’s starting very local for me,” he says. “I never realized just how much impact I could make locally, forgetting the national circus, but just trying to make this place a better place.”
So, in June, Fruity Farm hosted a Pride celebration for Sumner County because “hey were not going to have a Pride festival, and we’re just 40 minutes outside of Nashville. There were 500 RSVPs, and that was with a secret location that we didn’t announce until the day before.”
Adds Morgxn, “So we’re only going to keep being radiant and bright in the face of all of this darkness. I’m trying to bring a light to the kind of heartland that I think that I want to see.”
