Andrew Morgan

Orchestral pop singer/songwriter Andrew Morgan was born in the Kansas City suburb of Leawood, Kansas — the son of an amateur folk musician, he spent his childhood obsessed with the Beatles but upon entering the University of Kansas in 1997 joined an alt-country band, the Buick Sixes. Frustrated by his lack of input in the group's direction and songwriting, Morgan soon quit to teach himself piano — he then enlisted friend Cully West to form Bound by Nothing, a chamber pop combo additionally featuring Morgan's younger sister Sarah on viola and Carolyn Anderson on cello. After a year of playing local pubs and coffeehouses, Bound by Nothing entered the Lawrence, Kansas studio the Bottleneck to record a demo with engineer Matt LaPoint — Morgan and West then spent the next year studying in England, forming a new version of the group with cellist Shira Katz and violinist Lili Zhang. In addition to the new lineup's overseas live appearances, Bound by Nothing's original demo attracted the attention of the Oxford-based indie Shifty Disco, which expressed interest in a full-length LP — Morgan began writing a batch of new songs, but as the school year drew to a close and their funds dwindled, he and West were forced to return to Lawrence.

Weeks into his next semester home, Morgan dropped out of school and moved to New York City, dissolving Bound by Nothing and forming a new project, Punctured Bicycle — with LaPoint, he recorded seven songs in a Los Angeles studio before relocating to Chicago in 2001. Although Beulah frontman Miles Kurosky agreed to produce a full-length album, talks with the Velocette label ultimately ground to a halt and Morgan disbanded Punctured Bicycle in favor of a solo career in mid-2002. Soon after, LaPoint landed a job at singer/songwriter Elliott Smith's fledgling L.A. studio New Monkey; after learning of Morgan's problems landing a record deal, Smith offered him a couple days of free studio time — the New Monkey sessions ended up stretching across six weeks, and Morgan finally laid to tape many of the songs he began writing in England years before. He then returned to Lawrence to put on the finishing touches, narrowly escaping death when a tornado destroyed West's apartment — the finished LP, Misadventures in Radiology, finally appeared on the British indie Broken Horse in the summer of 2005, appearing in the U.S. on Sonic Boom in the spring of 2005. Morgan returned in 2009 with Please Kid, Remember.