Today we’d like to introduce you to Cashavelly Morrison.
Hi Cashavelly, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
I left my home in Beckley, West Virginia when I was 15 so I could study ballet at the high school at the University of the North Carolina School of the Arts. After graduation, I danced professionally in Texas, Virginia, and New York, before suffering a broken vertebrae. For a year, I was mostly immobile in a back brace. I always had journaled and written poetry, and I found myself feeling so under-stimulated that I began to sing out what I was writing. I plucked chords on the guitar, not really knowing how to play, and sang timidly, wondering what my voice sounded like. I got the courage to sing some of my songs over the phone to two friends, who were very encouraging, but it would be another 10 years before I’d finally record my music. During those 10 years, I studied acting in New York City at the Neighborhood Playhouse and experimented with my voice more. I then received my BFA at Salem College and an MFA at Hollins University, where I worked on a novel set in a coal company town in West Virginia in 1917, what my hometown had been long before I was born. I found myself studying the music of the region and time period, which felt like coming home to something I’d never known was within me. After I graduated, I found myself telling the story of the novel, which was my disguised personal story, through songs. Finally, in 2013, when I was 32 years old, I couldn’t get out of bed one day and said to my partner Ryan MacLeod, “If I don’t record this music, I’m going to die.” So the next day, I booked time at Echo Mountain Recording Studio in Asheville. In two separate sessions, Ryan (a classically-trained guitarist) and I recorded the album. No one in my life but Ryan knew how much music I’d written, so it was a surprise to everyone when I announced my first album, The Kingdom Belongs to a Child, in 2015. We were given a lot of encouragement and slowly I gained more confidence to perform. I remember my first show singing my songs, I was so scared that I couldn’t move. I was like a statue standing there with my eyes closed and only my mouth moving. Over the last 11 years, I’ve released 3 more studio albums: Hunger (2016), Metamorphosis (2018), and Meditation through Gunfire (2024). My albums for me are a spiritual practice and experience. I feel they are about coming into one self and expansion. Following fear as the pathway forward. With my third album, I wrote, co-directed, and choreographed an accompanying feature film that did well in film festivals and won 3 awards for best experimental film. It was the first time my music life and my dancing life merged, which I hope to do more and more. With my most recent album, Meditation through Gunfire, I put on a theatrical release show in which I had costume changes and personas, returning to the sensibilities I was so passionate about in ballet and theater. I feel compelled to make things now that combine all my experience in the performing arts. I ask myself, how can I merge all of these passions into a one-of-a-kind transformative experience? That is my current challenge, which is bringing quite a bit of aliveness to my days.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
I’d never felt unsupported in my life until I was a mother who wanted to make art. There are very little resources and little to no social infrastructure for a mother to have the time, space, and finances to create. I’ve had to make my albums in the tiny windows of time I’ve grasped in-between constant responsibilities to take care of my children, home, and employment. My partner Ryan has made my creative work a priority so he has always stepped up to give me as much time as possible to tend my creativity. He, more than anyone, sees how pivotal it is to my well-being, mental health, and joy, which so clearly makes me a more present mother to my children, and happy. I think when I became a mother there was a lot of messaging around me that communicated I was only to be a mother now and nothing else – that dedicating myself to anything other than motherhood would harm my children. I’ve come to know motherhood as an amplifier to all the facets within me, within everyone. It is soil to the forest. I’ve gotten to witness now how my albums have made my kids believe in themselves, that because I did it, they too know they can create what they want. What care a parent can give to themselves, I believe gives permission to their children to also care for themselves. It’s a balancing act to tend to my children and my creative babies. Many things fall to the wayside, like all the broken things in my house that need fixing. I’d rather them stay broken so I can create something immortal. I know one day my grandchildren and their children and so on will hear my albums. What I wouldn’t give to have the songs and most vulnerable and intimate creations of my ancestors! I say, make the immortal thing. It’s a warm nest for your children and lineage.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I’ve realized that each album I’ve made is about 3 years of my most potent life lessons and experiences. I don’t sit down and write songs in one afternoon the way a lot of songwriters do. I’m journaling for months or years before I look back and read it to see what feelings, images, questions, obsessions keep coming up. I write little poems every day, playing with rhyme, and ideas or fragments of these end up in the final songs. Each album is about 300 pages distilled down into the concise collection of songs. It’s a process of gathering, puzzling together, discarding, and rewriting. It feels like I’m trying to decode something being channeled. That’s why it is a spiritual experience for me. The synchronicities that happen raise the hair on my arms and give me what feels like proof of something so much greater and bigger than we are. Tears fall, my heart burns, and electricity pumps in my veins in these moments – that out of chaos something unified, what felt impossible, forms. This is how I approach melody as well. I collect thousands of melodies over the 3 years I’m working on an album. I piece them together sometimes, or I riff on a melodic line over and over in a meditation until something happens organically. I play with the guitar often to help with this, but sometimes, it feels freer to sit outside and harmonize with nature. When I’m fully in the world of a new album, that’s when a song will magically appear easily, writing it as if I pulled it out of thin air. But I feel it can come like that because I’ve embodied the idea of it for so long. I don’t rush my process. If I have a version of a song that isn’t fully resonating in my heart, I rewrite it. I’m not satisfied with a song if it isn’t the most I can make it. I’m most proud that people have told me my songs have saved their lives. I don’t have millions, or even thousands, of fans. It’s hard in itself to get my music heard at all with the current state of the music industry. But the handful of people who have told me this, that my songs literally saved them from some dark place, helps me know I’ve done what I’m here to do. I go through my dark to find the light, and then share it, making a tether for someone else to find the light too.
Are there any important lessons you’ve learned that you can share with us?
The most important lesson for me is trusting that who I am, what I am experiencing, and telling the truth about it is how I love the world, that it is loving people the best I can, and that it is what others need from me. Our personal stories are medicine for others. They validate, inspire, and activate.
Another lesson for me, is that it’s easy to feel a bit corrupted each time I release an album and then need to market it so it is heard. When you spend so much time making something important to you, of course you want the whole world to exalt. You hope it is the thing that will change the world for the better. It’s a very vulnerable thing to promote what you’ve made. Before you’ve “made it,” it’s easy to feel that evil eye come down on you, where the people around you don’t really want you to succeed for fear of it being more than they’ve accomplished. I’ve felt the same thing – no one wants to be left behind. Most people don’t want to celebrate you doing something, not until some legitimized person, outlet, or level of success has deemed you “worthy”, which is a sad byproduct of capitalism and fame culture I believe. To me, there is no competition or scarcity when it comes to art. Anything we create is only what we could create and no one else. There is a human ecosystem in which it needs all of us to speak our voices, to do our thing, what our hearts and souls long to do. It’s why the world is so out of balance – so many voices suppressed, so many women slumped on their kitchen floors believing it would not make a difference. It is all the difference. It is the whole point. During this process of putting my music out in the world, there’s this dance of me coming back to myself, away from these distorted pressures, and centering in with my soul again and the wellspring from which the album emerged. I don’t need the external validation of being deemed “worthy.” I know I’m innately worthy, yet still, I must tend to my disappointment that my album couldn’t break into a collective resonance, that I didn’t market it quite right, or it wasn’t made for these snippet TikTok viral trends, even though I still feel what I’ve made could help a lot of people if they could only hear it.
Pricing:
- Vinyl available on website $25-$35
- CD, digital download $10
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.cashavelly.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cashavelly
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/cashavelly/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOK_S6Pz0Acy46k5n_XJqaA
- Other: https://lnk.to/rP0fzxdL
