Tied to a Feeling

Most stories about PJ Morton begin with his stint in heavyweight pop-rock outfit Maroon 5. But before Morton joined Adam Levine and co. in 2010 for an unbroken string of attention-grabbing, arena-filling tours, the New Orleans-born multi-hyphenate had already accumulated a lifetime’s worth of accolades.

Part of that came from growing up with gospel legend Paul S. Morton III as his father. But PJ knew how to blaze his own path, too. As a junior at Morehouse College, PJ Morton was part of the songwriting team that won two Grammy awards for India.Arie’s 2002 album Voyage to India. Two years later, he joined Jermaine Dupri’s hit-making So So Def songwriting squad. And in 2008, he won gospel’s highest honor, a Stellar Award, for the monumental single “Let Go, Let God.”

“A lot happened before Maroon 5,” Morton laughs during a phone call with Folio Weekly. “My parents are pastors, so music started at church and at home. My father was an amazing singer, and his father had a church in Detroit, which was the center of gospel music at that time. My uncle played keyboards for C.L. Franklin, Aretha’s dad, and also played on a bunch of Motown Records. So the music was always there, ever since I came out of the womb.”

Morton helped to co-produce albums by Monica and Jagged Edge, then toured with Erykah Badu. He kick-started his own solo career at the same time. Combined with his roots in the gospel world, the experience provided Morton with an excellent education.

“I learned how to write hits from Jermaine,” Morton says, “but the biggest thing I learned was how to connect. You want to write songs about things people can feel. From India, I learned about freedom. She wasn’t trying to have a hit. Badu was the same way. She knew that, to have longevity, you had to be an individual. You have to be original.”

Even with those lessons under his belt, there’s no doubt that joining Maroon 5 launched PJ Morton into a new orbit.

“Maroon 5 gave me a second wind,” he says. “Creatively, it gave me the recharge that I needed.”

Even after joining the band full-time in 2012 (he started as a touring member two years earlier), Morton still found time to write and record New Orleans, his 2013 major-label debut. Released on Lil Wayne’s Young Money Records, lead single “Only One” featured vocals from Stevie Wonder and garnered a Best R&B Song Grammy nominationproof that Morton had the potential to be his own star.

Still, he faced struggles—not least from record label executives and marketing professionals who wanted to place Morton into a Maroon 5-defined box. Instead of following a preordained path, he decided to move back home, start his own Morton Records label, and let his roots shine through. He unleashed two releases in 2016. Bounce & Soul Vol. 1 reimagined past hits in New Orleans’ predominant bounce style, while the title of Sticking to My Guns said it all about Morton’s path forward.

“I learned a few things during that time,” Morton says. “First, to trust my instincta lot of times we look at the executives of record labels as experts, and they should be, but they’re not. I started doing this at 15 years old. Maybe I’m an expert too. Maybe I should trust that. Maybe they don’t know more than me.”

“Second,” he continues, “as far as New Orleans was concerned, I wanted to create in a space where there was no judgmentwhere I had freedom creatively. New Orleans is where that was instilled in me. That’s where I learned to love music. When I lived there, I was playing music for the fun of it. All the other stuff was secondary. New Orleans brought that back and made me remember to appreciate it all again. I really just got back to myself.”

The result was 2017’s Gumbo, which updated Morton’s sound to incorporate a little bit of everything: hip-hop, soul, funk, jazz, blues and, yes, pop. But it’s pop music with heartor, if you’re under the age of 30 and dismissive of old-school genre boundaries, it’s modern music that means something. It’s connecting, too; Morton has played The Tonight Show; toured Asia, Australia, and Europe; collaborated with Tyler Perry, Tiffany Haddish and Oprah Winfrey; and released music at a breakneck pace (Gumbo Unplugged, a stripped-down version of the album, came out earlier this year, followed last week by Christmas with PJ Morton).

“I was inspired by so many things growing up,” Morton says. “The Beatles, gospel, jazz, soul, James Taylor. I didn’t care about the genre, so when I started to create music, it just came out that way—whatever I’m feeling at the moment.”

Explaining the way that the success of streaming has exploded the music industry’s long-established stylistic norms, Morton says it all comes down to that specific kind of feeling.

“People don’t know what they like until they hear it,” he says. “If you’re just forcing it to them, they’ll never be introduced to other styles of music. The streaming numbers don’t lie; I don’t think any of us are tied to a genre. We’re more tied to a feeling. And it it feels good, I’m down with creating it. I’ve always felt that way.”