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One morning after a punishing tour cycle, singer-songwriter John Moreland awoke to find the left half of his face paralyzed. He would later learn the cause was a sudden onset neurological condition known as Bell’s Palsy, but the lauded Americana musician didn’t need a doctor to tell him it was a sign to take a breather and spend a season out of the spotlight.
“That was scary as hell,” Moreland tells Boulder Weekly over the phone from his home outside Tulsa, Oklahoma. “People don’t really know for sure exactly why it happens, but it seems to be a stress response. I was just kind of losing my mind and in the worst mental shape I’ve ever been in. I knew I couldn’t do anything else ’til I was ready.”
It was a heady mix of anxiety and exhaustion that brought Moreland, 39, to the breaking point. Since launching onto the national scene with his 2015 LP, High on Tulsa Heat, his star rose steadily to become one of the most celebrated artists in contemporary roots music. Crowned “the new face of folk rock” by GQ, glowing accolades in outlets like The New York Times and Pitchfork catapulted Moreland to a level of success that took the tattooed former metalcore guitarist by surprise.
On top of the challenges that come with relentless touring and promotion amid a fever pitch of critical praise, he soon found himself dealing with a more distressing layer of public scrutiny: body shaming and harassment by strangers on the internet.
“I have my guard up from being attacked online, and I don’t want to go play music in front of 300 people — I’m afraid they’re going to attack me,” Moreland says of the recent tour that brought him to the edge. “But they didn’t. Every night, the crowds always proved to be really nice. Maybe in a way it ended up being sort of uplifting, because I got to see that people love me and they’re glad I’m here.”
‘New territory’
To find his way to a healthier headspace, Moreland had to unplug. He stashed his smartphone in a sock drawer for six months and fell in love with guitar again, the halls of his prairie home in the Ozark foothills blooming back to life with the warmth of his delicate, finger-picked arrangements.
“I had some anxiety to get over, some ego shit to get over. I needed to reassess my worldview. I needed to figure out how to do my job without it killing me,” he says. “Throughout the course of the year, I started to gain some ground on those things. That’s when the songs started to come.”
Those songs would eventually arrange themselves in the shape of Moreland’s seventh full-length collection, Visitor. Released with no advance promotion on April 5, the surprise album via Thirty Tigers trades the drum machines and electronic bloops-and-bleeps of its lushly produced predecessor, 2022’s Birds in the Ceiling, in favor of a simpler formula.
“My approach to songwriting is the same as it has been, but I’m always trying to write about what I’m going through, so it’s new territory in that sense,” he says. “I was experiencing a lot of personal growth during the year I took off from touring. Mentally and emotionally, it felt like I was in some new place I had never been able to reach before.”
Just visiting
In the art deco heart of downtown Tulsa, Moreland’s hometown since age 10, visitors are greeted by a mural of Oklahoma native Woody Guthrie playing a guitar emblazoned with the motto: THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS.
Critics and listeners have ventured that Moreland wields his own machine against autocrat-coded former president Donald Trump, whose father was once Guthrie’s despised New York City landlord, on Visitor standout “One Man Holds the World Hostage.” The rollicking folk-rock number skewers a “fraud” who is “bulletproof and big as Jesus,” bending the world to “satisfy a sickness / while the rest of us bear witness.”
“People seem a little confused by this, but that song is about me,” Moreland says. “Rather than writing some finger-pointy song about someone I think is bullshit, I wanted to talk about how we all have the capacity to do fucked-up things and be monsters.
“That happens when we don’t take care of our shit — when we don’t deal with our feelings honestly, and when we’re not honest with ourselves,” he continues. “Maybe there’s not much difference between myself, or yourself, and whatever asshole you thought the song was about before.”
Moreland’s ability to see himself in a wounded tyrant speaks to the radical empathy that has drawn so many under the spell of his songwriting over the past decade. But despite feeling tethered to the human messiness that connects us all, he says part of him will always feel like an outsider. As the gravel-voiced Okie sings on his new album’s sparse and soulful title track: “Everywhere I go, I am a visitor.”
Now, after getting burned by the spotlight, Moreland is stepping back to his rightful place beneath it. Visitor or resident, for someone whose sense of belonging has been this hard won, that’s no small victory.
“I didn’t leave my house for years, because it felt like I wasn’t welcome anywhere. I know now that’s not true, but it was just like a headfuck I was experiencing from tour trauma and [bad] relationships,” he says. “People here think I moved away and came back home. They’re like, ‘How’s it feel being back?’ But I’ve been here the whole time.”
ON THE BILL: John Moreland with Justin Bloss. 8 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 17, Fox Theatre, 1135 13th St., Boulder. $28