David John Morris - Wyld Love Songs (2022) Hi Res

David John Morris writes love songs, though they seldom deal directly with romance. The Red River Dialect frontman and solo artist has sung of his love for his friends, his family, the Buddhist tradition he follows, myriad geographical locations, and, perhaps most crucially, the communities where he’s found a sense of home. Last year’s Monastic Love Songs, Morris’ debut album under his own name, was an extended ode to Gampo Abbey, the monastery in Nova Scotia where he’d spent the better part of a year in meditative retreat. Its companion is Wyld Love Songs, named for the Ross Wyld Care Home in London and the World War I veteran who lent it his name.

“It also sounds like an album that I would have seen in the pages of Kerrang in 2001,” Morris jokes. “Which is fine! I mean, Monastic Love Songs was a ridiculous album title, so I thought I have to kind of keep that up.”

At first glance, Wyld Love Songs might seem like the mirror inverse of Monastic Love Songs. The community Morris sang about on the Monastic record was bonded together by a shared spiritual practice that came through in the album’s focused, meditative folk songs. The Ross Wyld community was far more disparate. Morris wrote the album while staying at the shuttered care home with 60 roommates, a living situation made possible through what’s known in the UK as a guardianship. Renters looking for a cheap flat can take up residence in an out-of-business pub, a decommissioned police station, or a closed primary school for a fraction of the market rate. The idea is to discourage squatters from doing the same for free. It’s an uneasy arrangement but a useful one for the broke and the adventurous.

“I got back from Canada, and I had no money left,” Morris explains. “I had a job to go back to, but I had nothing for a deposit or even rent. It was very difficult, so I did it out of necessity. It was like, ‘Well, I’ve got to live somewhere, and this will help me get back on my feet. I’ll save some money and just live really cheap for a few months, and I’ll get out of there because this is gonna be crazy.’ And then a few months in, I just realized I really liked it and made some really good friends in that place, and kind of relaxed into it.”

Having swapped one community for a very different one—Gampo had been sober and celibate; Ross Wyld considerably less so—Morris rediscovered the soothing rhythms of group cohabitation. There were movie nights, family dinners, and ping-pong tournaments. The atmosphere wasn’t monastic, but it certainly felt spiritual. “Everything is sacred, which means everything is mundane as well, and that dualism starts to break apart,” Morris says. “So it’s not like, ‘Oh, I was living in spiritual life, and then I went and had a worldly life,’ although the way I framed the albums absolutely plays that up.”

Six months into Morris’ stay at Ross Wyld, COVID-19 hit the UK. Suddenly, the prospect of living in close quarters with dozens of relative strangers held less romantic appeal. Some residents left for relatives’ homes or the countryside. Those who remained, including Morris, felt their bond strengthen in the crucible of the pandemic’s harrowing early days. A kind of household constitution was drawn up to outline the protocols they would follow to keep one another safe. With the stakes recalibrated, a new communal spirit flourished, not unlike the one that had so inspired Morris at Gampo. His creative floodgates reopened; seven of the nine songs on Wyld Love Songs were written during lockdown.

“I realized that the richness of the experience of living in community is just a really great resource for someone like me, who often writes about people,” Morris says. “Again, the same as the last record, when you can’t escape, and you’re just in the mix with these people, then you have to see them as a full human being, and not just the bits you like or don’t like. You see how they fit in with other people, how a whole group dynamic can ebb and flow.”

The carefully observed writing on Wyld Love Songs reveals Morris at the peak of his powers. Whether recalling a karaoke night dominated by Belinda Carlisle’s “Heaven Is a Place on Earth” or bidding farewell to a beloved friend after his unexpected death, he taps into a humanity so intimately felt, it’s almost uncomfortable. Unfailingly, the songs eventually wind up with Morris turning the camera back on himself. “I write about myself, to the extent that I even make the landscapes about me,” Morris confesses. “That’s something I’ve started to realize.”