Love Wounds & Mars // Album Press
Included on “Best Albums of 2012” lists in No Depression & Atlanta Journal Constitution
[love wounds & mars] is an invite to let yer wig loose for a bit, bite into a side order of cynicism, and yank that bottle of rye out'n your coat pocket.... When it's all over, you'll realize you knew all this stuff all along………but never looked at it that way. That should wake ya up.
--Mark S. Tucker // Folk & Music Exchange)
Keith Morris pours the grizzled wisdom of life's journey into a project that tells a story from beginning to end. From the opening lyric, "I know it's late..." of “Nowhere Road,” through the closing plea as it bleeds through the pedal steel of “Diamond Mask”: "I need to hear a railroad song, I need to hear...,” Morris crafts songs that inspire and cut through the din. Anyone that can pull off a lyric that includes "...from Carlos Castaneda to William Blake..." is my new hero.
--Aer Stephen // DJ, “Folk and Beyond,” WTJU
From the Southern Rock of "Nowhere Road" to the Tex-Mex simplicity of "Border Town" to the last dance of "Peaceful When You Sleep" to the semi-psych of "Like a Haze" to the Chris Cullhane-penned sleeper "Diamond Mask," Keith Morris and crew hit on all sonic and emotional cylinders. “Love Wounds & Mars” is a personal statement from a very private individual. It only takes a few listens to understand that.
--Frank Gutch, Jr // Folk and Acoustic Music Exchange
Finely conceived and fully realized...a sonic landscape...a bordertown of the mind...slash lines smart like Dylan...the core at the center is this Keith Morris character: every song, he defines himself, how he deals with his world, views it, beats it, and
is beaten by it.
--Tom House // Singer-songwriter
[Morris’s first cd] ‘Songs From Candyapolis’ recognized a dark side, but wanted to believe in the possibility of a different kind of world. This record stays more on the dark side. These songs rock, and I mean that metaphorically and actually.
--David Kleiner
The first impression of a sonically sturdy jam session — sometimes a bash, sometimes a collective bashing — is completely satisfying. But Love Wounds unfolds to reveal a woven gut of lonely characters, angry towns, toll roads leading to highways that stretch out. It’s an album you listen to by yourself, a soundtrack for making your big plans to break the fuck free.
--Paul Curreri // Singer/Songwriter
Love Wounds & Mars brings us striking new American designs. The characters feel unique and authentic. They’re fresh inhabitants of a world we know—not old, but definitely not foreign to our ears. Still better, Morris’s lyrics here (as on Songs from Candyapolis) love the incidental poetry of language uttered before it quite coalesces into literal meaning: “high-water booty from Knoxville,” “watch the hickory as it seeps,” “the third ring of coincidence,” “I come from many sins in the west.” The result is a fetching, benign vertigo—we find ourselves on just the other side of clear. The right side.
--Brady Earnhart // Professor of American Literature, and singer-songwriter