Morgan Grace a rising star on the Portland music scene

By Jake TenPas
The Entertainer

Portland — Morgan Grace plays a mean guitar and she writes songs that range from angry rock to smoky jazz to beguiling pop. She also happens to be a woman, but that’s beside the point.

All you really need to know is that she kicks ass. Everything else is just details and lazy writing.

“I wish that not so much attention would be placed on gender,” she says. “We’re not all trying to be Joan Jett, P.J. Harvey or Liz Phair.”

Grace is referring to the tendency of music critics to attempt to squeeze every woman performer they see into Jett’s leather pants, while at the same time making very explicit that they’ll never quite fill them.

Maybe it’s because women rock stars are a somewhat rare breed compared to their male counterparts, and the unimaginative are forced to draw on the handful of comparisons they can summon to summarize new female artists. Grace doesn’t really care. She just wants it to stop.

“I think as a songwriter, I take a lot of liberties with genre,” she says. “I can write whatever the hell I want to.”

Evidently her commitment to defying the stifling categories that many modern rock acts wear like bling of honor has paid off. In August, she took first place in American Idol Underground, an online competition where more than 600 songs vied for $10,000 in cash and a comprehensive CD pressing package.

Grace’s winning song “The Rules of Dating,” a cynical slice of rock, serves up lyrics such as:

“Rule number three, take it from me, it only leads to saying all those stupid things that make you cringe the next day/Rule number four, try not to stalk him anymore, it only leads to desperation just like saying/ Please don’t go away, I would never be the same if you went away.”

Many of her songs take conventional pop and rock song topics — love, loss, sex, drinking, death — and give them a subversive twist that renders the original subject matter, if not a moot point, at least one that only begins to explain the complexity of human interaction. Just as no two relationships are exactly alike, in a perfect world, no two songs about relationships would portray love, or the fallout from it, in the same way.

“I don’t use the same rocker girl approach,” Grace says of the sexploitive tactics she might have initially tapped into to help make a name for herself on the Portland music circuit. “Now I just try to sell my music.”

It’s been a long journey to this point for Grace, who spent her early years living in Sweet Home listening to Motley Crue and Def Lepard before moving to Corvallis when she was in middle school. While attending Highland View and Corvallis High School — and listening to The Cure, The Misfits and Bikini Kill — she studied guitar and began to perform at local venues such as the Jackson Street Juicebar and Lakepark Rollerskating Rink.

Playing with her brother, Peter, and a rotating group of other area musicians in bands such as Chaotic Order and Dead Like Elvis, she still recalls the simple joy of printing up her own flyers advertising 50-cent covers.

“Living in Corvallis was great,” she says. “That was before that huge wave of neo-punk really hit.”

In those days, letting your freak flag fly was both fun and easy, she recalls. MTV and other media outlets hadn’t saturated communities across America with faux-punk rock styles mass-marketed at a Hot Topic in a mall near you.

“In those days, everything was word of mouth. You’d literally knock on people’s doors on your way to the show.”

In 1995, she moved to Portland with an acoustic guitar and a bag of songs with the idea of performing solo shows in coffee shops. Eventually she traded in her acoustic for an electric and formed the band The Suicide Race with her brother. A few years back, that band gave way to her most recent group, which features Sam Henry, former drummer for legendary Seattle proto-grunge group The Wipers.

Before recording her most recent album, “The Sound of Something Breaking,” in late 2004 and early 2005, Grace came to the realization that she was drinking entirely too much, and quit in August 2004. Transforming herself from a self-described “wretched drunk” to a responsible student and purveyor of the great musical tradition was no easy task, but by immersing herself in the recording of the album, she simultaneously got clean and created an indelible work of confessional rock therapy.

“Right now, I’m finding the places life takes you when you’re leaving your 20s and partying behind,” she says of her new direction, which includes studying classical guitar at Portland State University. These days, she’s listening to everything from jazz to classic punk rock, and it shows in the array of songs on “The Sound of Something Breaking.”

She also continues to kick out blistering live sets at such venues as The Laurelthirst, the Doug Fir Lounge and ACME with both her regular band and Gimme An X: A Tribute to X.

She recently learned that her band will open up for Exene Cervenka, John Doe’s powerful partner in X, and her band the Original Sinners at Dante’s Inferno.

“I think it’s going to be like being on another planet,” she says of sharing the stage with one of her heroes.

Right now, Grace is in the midst of writing songs for her next album, which will be produced with the funds she won in the American Idol Underground competition. Even though she’s been creating music for roughly 15 years, the process remains a mystery to her.

“Sometimes I wonder where a song came from,” she says. “You get into a weird, meditative blackout.” Still, she doesn't seem any more eager to unravel this mystery than that of the relationships she explores in her songs. “I try to acknowledge the rhythm of creativity.”

Along with that, she tries to keep alive the simple, joyous grass-roots spirit of playing music even in an age where the Internet connects us and isolates us from one another all at the same time. While she appreciates the opportunity afforded her by her recent title, she also thinks music is best experienced live.

“Some of the best things about music are only going to be present face to face,” she says.

And if you’re lucky enough to catch one of her concerts, just remember one thing. Don’t call her Joan.

If you rock

Morgan Grace plays the following upcoming shows in the Portland area. For more information, go to http://morgangracemusic.com.

Friday, Oct 27 — 10 p.m., Doug Fir Lounge, 830 E. Burnside, with the Heartless Bastards and Moonshine Hangover opening at 9 p.m.

Saturday, Oct. 28 — 9 p.m., ACME, 714 S.W. 20th Place, with Drunken Prayer

Tuesday, Nov, 7 — 9 p.m., Dante's Inferno, 1 S.W. Third Ave., with Exene Cervenka and the Original Sinner, and Knuckle Dragger.