We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Cashavelly Morrison a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Cashavelly, thanks for joining us today. How did you learn to do what you do? Knowing what you know now, what could you have done to speed up your learning process? What skills do you think were most essential? What obstacles stood in the way of learning more?
When I was about 12 years old, I went to my friend’s house for a sleepover. She had a whole shelf of journals that she had filled with her own writing and lots of books of poetry scattered about, I remember seeing her pages and pages of handwriting and feeling provoked. I wanted so badly to have accomplished what she had done. After the sleepover, I went home and started my first journal. I took such pride in that first journal. I pasted in photos, wrote in different patterns on the page, and tied it with a ribbon everyday. Maybe at first I was writing because I wanted to make a shelf full of journals, but very quickly it became a relationship between me and what seemed like some other entity…with my higher self, I believe. I wrote in my journal every day, and still do to this day. I have an attic full of journals now. Writing every day is how I’ve learned the craft of songwriting, but also how I’ve learned what’s important to me and what I want to say. I often read my previous journals over and over, finding clues to some big mystery, pieces that begin to connect and become my songs. I love how this journey of writing began with a trigger. I think our triggers reveal what we are most passionate about that for whatever reason we’ve disallowed ourselves. When I get triggered, I always see it as a window into understanding myself better, something I’ve unconsciously buried that I can unearth and be enriched by.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
I grew up in West Virginia and studied ballet from the age of 3 until I left home at 15 to study with legendary ballerina Melissa Hayden at the North Carolina School of the Arts (now UNCSA). I danced in Texas, Massachusetts, and Virginia before suffering a broken vertebra that left me confined to a bed in a back brace for a year. During that year of isolation, I journaled nonstop and sang to myself, making up melodies as a means for comfort. I wrote dozens of songs that I kept secret, not confident enough to share them.
In the summer of 2001, craving stimulation and my back mostly healed, I moved to New York City to study acting at Stella Adler Studio and the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre. There, I was given my first formal training in singing. During my studies, I had the fortune to befriend Kurt Vonnegut’s daughter, who introduced me to her father. He first spoke to me about following my passion for writing, giving me confidence that my journal-writing might transform into writing books. Inspired by his encouragement, I immersed myself in writing stories, screenplays, and more songs, which eventually led me to move back to North Carolina to study at Salem College. After graduating, I moved to Virginia to study with writer Richard Dillard at Hollins University, where I received a Master’s in Creative Writing.
While I was there, I wrote 250 pages of a novel that was a special kind of torment. I wasn’t sure what I was writing and felt pressured to succeed or be some “great” writer. I turned to songwriting as a release from the pressures of the novel. These songs would become my first album, The Kingdom Belongs to a Child. Focusing on the roots music of my native West Virginia, I recorded the album with my collaborator and guitarist husband Ryan MacLeod. It released in 2015 and won an Independent Music Award for Best Alt. Country Album. No Depression gave rave reviews; Huffington Post called it “honest, evocative, and intoxicating”; and The Boot described it as “haunting and timely”. This gave me some confidence, but it still felt like there was a whole world ahead of me…so much more to unearth.
The next year, I wrote and recorded my second album, Hunger. After its release in 2018, Rolling Stone named me an “Artist to Watch”, calling the album “the atmospheric soundtrack to late-night fever dreams.” Glide said Hunger “paints an ominous portrait of the dark underbelly of American privilege”. I returned to West Virginia to perform in front of my family for the first time on NPR’s Mountain Stage.
That same year, I had a spiritual crisis. I suddenly realized nearly all my decisions in life had been based on fear. What was my life if fear had always defined my choices? I began to follow my fears as the path forward—I camped alone, ran at night, and showed the most vulnerable parts of myself in my relationships. Covid was raging. My children were stuck at home. I failed over and over, as most parents probably felt. It was too much. I felt like I was pushed to some soul level way of being, out of sheer necessity. I joined a wilderness immersion program that. met 4 days a month in the woods and learned friction fire, hide tanning, basket-weaving, flint knapping, and plant medicine, satisfying a longing to be connected to the wilderness.
What emerged was a new record, METAMORPHOSIS, created amidst this transformation. The music had morphed into a stirring indie Americana. I began to dance for the first time in many years, listening to my body in a new way. I wrote a screenplay and co-produced, co-directed, choreographed, starred and danced in a feature film to accompany the album. All the artistic skills I had studied over the course of my life came to fruition. My feature film Metamorphosis won awards in the LA Independent Women Film Awards, the Montreal Independent Film Festival, the Women’s International Film Festival, and was an Official Selection of RiverRun International Film Festival, the Boston Independent Film Awards, the Berlin International Art Film Festival, and the Toronto International Women Film Festival.
I’m now in the midst of recording my 4th album. It is quite different from my previous work, yet I know it is the most authentic to myself. It’s such a journey to unearth all the facets of ourselves that we unconsciously buried or were forced to bury to survive. It’s like, as we move forward, we gain the insight and capacity to face the pain to bring them back out into the light, that transmutes into the purest joy – a child at play.
What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?
Last year, I started a performance series called Songbird Supper Club in Winston-Salem. It is a free event and meets once a month on the last Tuesday at West Salem Public House. This event is about featuring women who create…anything, not just what we usually call art. We feature women from seasoned professionals to novices. I especially welcome women who have never performed or shared their work before. Each woman shares her work and then I do an interview with them, asking questions that evoke a conversation that women don’t typically have in a public sphere. We speak about the private things we are facing as women. This event series is unique and has often been described to me as “magical”. After my husband, who is a therapist, came to one of the events, he said, “I know why this is so magical. You are creating a safe and vulnerable space for women to be their authentic selves, which is a corrective experience to trauma. It is collective healing.” We just had our one-year anniversary and it was really emotional for me seeing how this event has impacted our community. Witnessing women step into their power on that stage and share their gifts and truth has been the most rewarding of my life as an artist. I truly believe we are each needed by the world, and when one woman silences her gifts, we all hurt from it. We all need one another’s medicine. Perhaps too many of us silencing ourselves is why the world is so out of balance. Please join us for event or contact me about being featured at www.femalesovereignty.org
How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?
I’m especially passionate about society supporting mothers as artists. I am a mother of 2. I wish people could see the impossible feats artists who are mothers accomplish in order to create work. I believe that the most loving thing a mother can do for her children is to follow her soul’s work. The more a mother is fulfilled, her children will be too. My children see so deeply who I am and I’ve already seen how my work gives them the confidence and license to do the same for themselves. Artist who are mothers need resources – time, childcare, and artistic tools. What I hope to build in due time with The Center for Female Sovereignty is to create a space where women are funded to create their artwork and are provided childcare. www.femalesovereignty.org
Contact Info:
- Website: www.cashavellymorrison.com
- Instagram: @cashavellymorrison
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/cashavelly/
- Twitter: @cashavelly
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOK_S6Pz0Acy46k5n_XJqaA
Image Credits
Photo in green dress – Alison Shermeta Other photos – Allison Lee Isley