William Michael Morgan Evolves With New Music

New music is coming from William Michael Morgan! The singer will share a new song every couple of weeks for the next several weeks, working toward what he hopes will be his next record.

"I grew up not just on George Jones, and Merle Haggard, and Willie," Morgan shared with PopCulture.com at a recent media event. "That's where my heart is and will always lie, but we wanted to try to take some of that r&b and blues influence that I grew up with, that's just all around Mississippi, all around my little town."

Morgan's freshman Vinyl album included the No. 1 hit, "I Met a Girl." Morgan says this music will focus more on his roots than the current country sound.

"A lot of those casinos down there, they still get booked all the time and fill them up almost every night with blues music," explained Morgan. "So it's always been around me. It's always been what I've listened to. So I'll try to fill a little bit of that, and try to stay as traditional with it, still as possible. So this acoustic version doesn't give it much chance."

"But we tried a lot of stuff differently, in some of this new music, musically mostly," he continued. "[It's] very, very fiddle heavy. The last record was very steel heavy. Still a lot of steel guitar in it, but we tried to experiment more with a little, I guess what you would call a mini-orchestra, I suppose, is what the people are calling. It includes a three violins, two violas, and a cello. And so this old redneck guy, I don't know nothing much about a cello, other than it sounds good, and it's a big violin, big fiddle."

Morgan has five songs already ready to go, and is working on a few more.

"Our big plan is to put out a huge compilation of music, like Vinyl was," Morgan maintained. "We're still working on it. All we've got done in the studio at the moment is these five songs. So our plan is to go back in as soon as possible, whether we write them, whether we find them ... We always want to pick the best songs whether we write them or not. So we're always looking, we're always writing. We're always trying to find them."

Morgan was just 22 years old when he hit the airwaves with "I Met a Girl." Since then, Morgan had a daughter, ended his engagement with Runaway June's Jennifer Wayne, and quit drinking — all of which comes out in his new music.

"We've had a lot learning," reflected Morgan. "We've had a lot of time to learn. And what I've always said is, I come from a family that if you do something good, bad, you own up to it. You say you did it man, and you move on. You learn from what you've done, and you don't let that define you. You let what you do define you, from there on out. That's my personal opinion."

"[I've learned] what not to do," he added. "A lot of it is how to treat people, how to take into consideration how other people are feeling when you talk about something when you present something to them. Being a leader out there on the road to my boys, my band, management, everybody that worked with me ... I get in there with them, and that's something that I've learned, I guess, is the difference between those two things. The difference between a man and a boy. I'm still making that transition, but I feel like I'm getting closer and closer every day."

Morgan's latest song, "Tonight Girl," is available for download on iTunes.

Photo Credit: Getty images/Tim Mosenfelder