Satellite frontman finds a new side of himself with "Calling Birds"
Steven McMorran had lyrics swirling around his head for a while; they just needed to be put down on paper. He also needed to figure out just how he was going to perform the songs them -- both of which turned into a learning process for the Satellite frontman -- one, though, that he's glad to have gone through because the result was Satellite's debut, "Calling Birds."
"More or less, what it's become [is] a new side of myself I didn't know I had in me," McMorran told CBSNews.com. "I found out a lot about who I am being able to perform these songs."
Released in March, the set features a batch of personal tunes that McMorran describes as "mile markers" -- "because I know where each one of them was written from and the timeline that they were written out of...I remember what I was trying to convey without even having the words to say it."
For McMorran, writing music is almost like therapy: "That's the beauty of a song -- you can say so much that you don't really have words for just by adding the melody to it. They've kept my sanity and all over the last five years or so -- getting on the stage. Makes you feel a little bit calmer whenever you're done."
One of those personal tracks on Satellite's debut is "Say the Words."
"That song is about looking at myself in the mirror and realizing that I had finally arrived at this life I've been working at for so long. The idea is that I kind of made this life up for myself when I was 16 or 17," said the Nashville, Tenn.-based artist.
Satellite's sound has been described as anything from alternative to folk and textured pop. When asked how he would describe it, McMorran said, "I hope the honest answer is, 'Well, they sound like sound like Satellite.'"
Honesty was part of McMorran's initial goal -- sound and themes aside, McMorran said he just wanted to write honest lyrics.
There may be more of those honest lyrics in the days to come. Satellite ended up recording the second half of the album twice. McMorran liked the first series of songs, but disliked the productions -- so he tossed them aside and replaced them with what we hear on the album today.
"Those songs are probably sitting somewhere in a vault," said McMorran, who revealed he's in the process of "10 things at the moment."
"I'm always writing. I work at it and I let what melodies that keep coming back around turn into the melodies I end up writing lyrics for," he said. It's unclear where those tracks will end up as McMorran says in his mind, some of them aren't Satellite songs.
