Morgan Evans’ journey from Silverchair to rap, before finding his groove in country

It’s 9.30am and Morgan Evans is wearing sleeves. Not uncommon for most people, but for the country music star from Newcastle via Nashville, it’s an unusual occurrence.

“Shoulder prisons,” he says, laughing. “Whenever I wear sleeves at rehearsal or something, [the band] says, ‘Oh, he’s dressed up today!’”

Evans is sitting on a stool at Sydney’s Vic on the Park hotel, having come from a breakfast TV appearance on Sunrise. He’s tall, handsome and very personable, a marketer’s dream, really, with a bucketload of talent.

The 38-year-old flew in from Nashville a couple of weeks ago, played at the Gympie Music Muster in Queensland, where he broke the attendance record, and this week he kicks off an Australian and New Zealand tour, including two nights each at the Sydney Opera House and Melbourne’s Palais Theatre, as well as three big shows in his hometown of Newcastle. Then it’s back to the US for another string of dates.

Morgan Evans, pictured at the Vic on the Park Hotel, is one of Australia’s biggest country music stars. Credit: Dominic Lorrimer

If you’ve been following his career, none of this is surprising, as Evans has been a big deal in country music circles for some time, ever since winning the Road to Tamworth competition in 2007. That sent him to Nashville, where he recorded his first single, Big Skies. He was then picked by Taylor Swift to support her 2009 Australian tour.

“I reckon that’s as close as I’ll ever feel to like the Beatles,” he says. “Because we were playing 1500-capacity rooms with Taylor Swift. It was a wild, wild experience and I definitely wasn’t ready for it. And I don’t think she was ready for it either.”

He’s since picked up an ARIA for best country album in 2019 and been named male artist of the year at the Golden Guitar awards in Tamworth in 2020. He also won contemporary country album of the year, among a clutch of other awards. His sound and look – no big hat, no boots and, yes, no sleeves – sits just as comfortably alongside rock and pop as it does traditional country. You’re just as likely to be dancing to his very catchy and poppy 2018 single Day Drunk as you are to be swaying along to last year’s melancholic Over For You.

“I think for a long time in this country, country music has been such a niche,” says Evans. “So if you knew about it, you knew about it. And it was kind of like an almost underground thing and that makes you feel like you’re part of something. Now, I think, it’s becoming pretty mainstream down here, from what I can see just coming in and out.”

Having such broad appeal is a win-win – Evans scoops up everyone from my Alan Jackson-loving mother-in-law to those blokes in hats and then younger female fans, who probably have tickets for Swift’s next tour – but for him, it’s all just music.

“I grew up listening to country music, my folks are from Armidale and that’s what we had playing in the house,” he says. “But it wasn’t specifically country. We would go from Led Zeppelin to Glen Campbell, and there’d be no conversation about it in between, it was just music.

“And it’s [not] until you start playing that it’s, ‘Oh, that music doesn’t happen here, that music happens over there.’ ”

It wasn’t until he won the trip to Nashville that Evans says he started playing his own country music out of the house. Before that, he was having a crack at everything, performing with his brother and best mate in a high school rock band, covering Metallica, Garth Brooks and a bit of Newcastle’s other hometown heroes, Silverchair. “They got progressively more difficult to play,” he says, laughing. “We played the earlier stuff.”

He tried rapping – once, at 13 (“It was all bad”) – but spent most of his teenage years listening to the Foo Fighters. He discovered he couldn’t do Dave Grohl’s scream, so that kind of rock was ruled out. Then his mum dragged him to a Keith Urban show.

“It sounds so cheesy now, but it really happened,” says Evans. “It was just like a lightbulb moment. It was all the old rock and roll and all the country music put together. Sonically, it was guitar-based and the words really made sense to me, lyrically.

“There is poetry to them, but it’s more storytelling and that just resonates with me. And I feel like as a writer, it makes sense to emote in that way, like a more candid way. Silverchair are one of my favourite bands, but I don’t know what half their songs are about, but I know how they make me feel. Whereas country songs, I know what they’re about and I know how they make me feel. And as a writer, that makes more sense to me.”

The great irony of Evans’ booming popularity is that part of it comes off the back of his high-profile split from US country starlet Kelsea Ballerini. They divorced last year after nearly five years of marriage and both released duelling divorce songs: Over For You by Evans and Rolling Up the Welcome Mat by Ballerini. It was messy, but if you know anything about country music, you know it loves a divorce (just ask Tammy Wynette).

“I feel a lot better than I did a year ago,” he says. “I mean, it’s been a bizarre year in a lot of ways, and nothing I ever would have wished for, or hoped for myself. But I’ve learnt a lot through it. And I’m just trying to come out better the other side.”

Did he think straight away, “There’s a song in this”?

“No. There was four months where I just didn’t write any songs,” he says. “And then I wrote that song [Over For You] and it was more of a therapeutic and cathartic experience than anything.”

Evans didn’t plan on releasing it, and it wasn’t until he played it at the CMC Rocks festival in Queensland last year and a video of it became a viral hit, that this most personal of experiences suddenly became something he’d have to play over and over again. And then get asked about it over and over again.

“I mean, I’m a pretty happy-go-lucky kind of Australian dude,” says Evans. “That is my persona, generally, right? So that song is fairly out of character musically for me. But my communication with people went from, ‘Great show, we had fun,’ or, ‘Come back to Chicago,’ to, ‘Thank you for writing that song. That helped me through this night or this week,’ or ‘I’ve been listening to it every day.’

Evans’ divorce track Over For You has been embraced by fans, with many relating their own stories to him.Credit: Dominic Lorrimer

“And that was really profound as a songwriter. And the perfect example of that whole thing that you hear – the more personal you make it, more people will be able to relate to it. And it was great to be able to just be clear with myself about how I was feeling at that time and if that’s a help to anyone else, that’s a pretty amazing outcome.”

And while Evans has ticked off one country music staple, he has also avoided the other – politics. Country music in Australia is politically benign compared to the US, where recent controversies have included US superstar Jason Aldean being accused of racism after the original video for his hit Try That in a Small Town was said to have contained threats against black people. Meanwhile, Oliver Anthony’s viral hit Rich Men of North Richmond has been embraced by the alt-right as an “anthem of the forgotten Americans” and has been steadily climbing the Spotify charts here.

“Politics in America? Are we going to talk about that?”

Well, yes, I just thought I’d throw it in. Does he see much of that stuff around Nashville?

“That’s not the kind of environment I would ever put myself in or want to be in,” he says. “The people that I hang around with and get to make music with and play music with are great people with pretty reasonable perspectives.”

So, different flavours of country for different types of people?

“Yeah. I think it’s interesting. Country music and hip-hop have this thing where it’s, ‘Oh, yeah, country music,’ and it’s this general term. Like, ‘Oh, yeah, hip-hop.’ It’s just this general term, where it’s like anything, there are so many different parts of it and so many different kinds of [music] – you’ve got all the way to Jason Isbell and then all the way to Jason Aldean and there’s a whole lot in between. So, I think generalising country music is a dangerous way to talk about it.”

Life in Nashville is pretty quiet for Evans. He’s lived there for nearly eight years and does not – disappointingly – run into Keith Urban while he’s out getting coffee (which, he confirms, is “pretty rough” in Nashville). He’s a keen surfer and there are definitely no waves in Tennessee. “Part of the reason why country music is so big in music cities like Austin and Memphis and Nashville is because there’s not heaps of stuff to do,” says Evans. “So you find yourself making your own fun or your own music.”

He estimates he has spent only 30 days in Nashville this year, as he has been touring through Europe and played some festival shows in the US before flying to Australia. Which brings me to my great musical fascination – blame the film Almost Famous – the tour bus. What goes on there?

“It’s like a big, grown-up cubby house that you use to do serious things with,” says Evans, who tours with his all-male band in the bus.

Does it stink? “It might to an outsider’s nose,” he says, laughing.

Does he really sleep in bunks or is there a bedroom out the back?

“Our bus has a lot of bunks,” he confirms. “Some have three bunks stacked and if there’s three bunks stacked, I like the middle one. If there are two bunks stacked, I like the top one. The bottom one you get a lot of road noise, but the top bunk is less noisy, but you get a little bit more sway.”

Before I let Evans go – we’ve ticked off the big themes of country music (love, heartbreak, drinking, politics and, at a stretch, buses) – but there is one more staple he hasn’t touched: dogs.

“I haven’t written about a dog yet, but I’ll get there,” he says, laughing. “I hadn’t written about a break-up like that before until it happened.”

Well, you don’t really want those to come along too often.

“Exactly.”

Morgan Evans plays the Sydney Opera House on September 12-13; and the Palais Theatre, St Kilda, on September 14-15. For full tour dates, go to morganevansmusic.com