Greta Morgan (Guest interview by Brianna Bartelt)
Today we have our first guest interview, by
, an architect and musician based in NYC. Her newsletter, , explores the relationship between songwriting and the built environment.I spoke with Greta Morgan, a songwriter, musician, author, and teacher about her instrumental EP Desert Lullabies which she released in May of 2022. Desert Lullabies was Greta’s first solely instrumental project, but she has written other instrumental songs peppered into her previous records. Greta shared her experience creating this EP while dealing with a catastrophic loss, her singing voice, after an illness in March of 2020. Desert Lullabies was Greta’s attempt at translating the natural environment into song while grappling with her new identity in real time. Greta has written a memoir about this experience and the moments leading to her diagnosis with spasmodic dysphonia, titled The Lost Voice which comes out May 20, 2025 and is available for pre-order. She also picked the album Music for Saxofone & Bass Guitar by Sam Gendel and Sam Wilkes. This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Desert Lullabies - Greta Morgan (16m, no vocals)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube Music / Amazon Music / Bandcamp / Tidal
Music for Saxofone & Bass Guitar - Sam Gendel & Sam Wilkes (33m, no vocals)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube Music / Amazon Music / Bandcamp / Tidal
Brianna Bartelt: Thanks for joining me at Flow State. How are you this evening?
Greta Morgan: I'm doing great. It's been a beautiful day walking around town. I'm very happy tonight.
What was your relationship with music like growing up?
As a really little kid, Disney movies taught me that songs were like spells. When Snow White sang, she could bring a bird into the palm of her hand. When Ariel sang her dream of walking “up where the people are,” her dream became a reality. As a kid, I sensed that songs were a form of magic. Songs were spells. I could use them to transform your surroundings.
Music was also like a secret diary for me. The night that I learned how to ride my bike without training wheels, I just rode in circles endlessly around the cul-de-sac in my neighborhood, writing songs in a made up language. I was telling secrets to the world around me. So, yeah, my relationship with music was full of awe from a young age.
I also grew up in the Midwest, and the publicly shared expressions in the Midwest are about as bland as the pasta salads and jello molds also of the local pot lucks. There’s this kind of chin-up, cheery gloss that often covers up pain or difficult emotions. We smile over the truth of what's happening in the Midwest because there’s a cultural aversion to negativity. At least, that’s what I witnessed. A beautiful part of being from the Midwest is that people are very positive, but sometimes that positivity comes at the price of expressing the truth.
So, I would go down to the jukebox in my basement and hear these songs that had so much emotional truth in them, songs about passion and romance and anger and oppression. These songs expressed the emotional truths that I wasn't seeing expressed in my public sphere in any way.
So maybe songs were your first entry point into that kind of deeper, emotional truth.
Yes, yes. Songs were an introduction to a world of passion and emotional intensity that I didn't see modeled anywhere. I would listen on repeat to “Abraham, Martin and John,” the song about three assassinated leaders. I, of course, didn't know that as a kid, but that song just made me sob. But the song was so heartbreaking. And it was like receiving a message from another world, the adult, emotional world. [Songs] were like maps to places that I would go one day, but I knew I wouldn't go there for a really long time.
It's like an emotional shortcut. As a kid, you can immediately resonate with something that you've never experienced.
Totally, they were almost like clues. Boy, what might be out there in the world?
I find songs pretty similar to books as well. Songs are a more potent form of books, being able to live through stories.
Yes, totally. I started playing piano as a toddler. I learned how to write sheet music before I knew how to write the alphabet. So I went to preschool music classes, where I learned how to do that. I would write little melodies, and my mom would play them for me, but she would always elaborate, because she was a piano player, so she would elaborate and make them really beautiful and advanced. And I would say, “You mean, I wrote that?” She would say, “Yes, honey,” and she would put, “Greta’s Opus #1” on the title. So my creativity was really encouraged at home, and it made me feel like it was possible to write anything or say anything in music.
You released your instrumental record Desert Lullabies in May 2022, after “wandering the American Southwest while navigating a neurological voice disorder.” Can you share more about what you gleaned from nature during that time?
I got COVID in March of 2020. Vampire Weekend had played a festival during the weekend when almost every other festival had been canceled. [Greta joined Vampire Weekend’s touring line-up starting in 2018.] I think it was March 8th of 2020—it was a couple days before the NBA canceled the season. After I came home, I had a 103° fever for multiple days, but I was too afraid to go to the emergency room. I thought, if what I have isn't COVID, I don't want to risk getting COVID.
So, I rode out this virus at home with liquids and rest, and when I went to my next voice lesson, which then was online, the top half of my voice was totally inaccessible. I had no control, and I couldn't sing in my top register. When I tried to make a sound, it sounded like the Raptor screech in Jurassic Park. [That] was all there was—no tone in it. It took a long time to be properly diagnosed with spasmodic dysphonia.
When I found out I had spasmodic dysphonia, I found a graveyard of stories of singers forced into early retirement. There's only one treatment – it's Botox injections into your vocal cords. The doctors told me that when you get the injection, sometimes you'll be able to sing in your high range. Sometimes you might be able to sing in your low range. He suggested I could sing Glen Campbell songs when I had my low voice and Dolly Parton songs in my high range. At that point, I was like, my doctor must have gone to medical school in Tennessee.
All this to say, as I was being diagnosed, and starting to think about treatments, I took a mental inventory of all of my songs, and also all the songs I sang in Vampire Weekend. It just became clear that this is not going to work. All my songs go through multiple ranges of my voice, so there would be no way to sing them. This was just an absolute devastation. I realized that I was not going to be able to sing the songs that I have spent 16 years writing and performing. And I didn’t know if I’d be able to sing at all. And I didn’t know if I’d ever be able to write songs without my voice.
All this to say, it was the biggest heartbreak of my life, and I've had a fair amount of devastating losses. Even though I have an amazing support system, a family who loves me so much, the loss was so devastating that no one I loved could reach me. I felt so completely in my own world of pain that I couldn't be reached and I couldn't reach other people.
That’s why I went to the desert. Being in the desert environment, I felt that I was being mirrored in this way that I couldn't experience in human relationships at that time. These places were so blistered and desolate. They’re places where life doesn't look like it should be able to survive, and it does. It thrives.
Like in Zion National Park, you look at the sandstone, and it looks like it's solid rock, but there's, like, these gorgeous, lush plants that are blooming out of it. There's orchids and ferns and columbines, because they're sucking moisture from so deep inside the rock. When I would look at something like that, I thought, I need to root down and find [that] kind of resilience. I need to figure out how to do what they're doing. So, all this to say, the desert was the only thing that could mirror me in a way that made me feel connected to life again.
Nature has a beautiful way of grounding us in a way that people sometimes can't and like meeting us where we are and not expecting much of us, right?
It's so unbelievably generous. I mean, it even feels funny to call it “nature” because we’re just one part of nature. Our bodies are just little pinched off pieces of earth. Those canyons have been here for millions and millions of years, and I came along and I'm naming them as if they care to have a name.
Spending a lot of time alone in the natural world made me rethink the standards of what is beautiful or what is attractive. What we think is a beautiful voice is a manmade preference.
Whereas, there are so many sounds that are so wild. The way certain birds sound, the way coyotes cry, the way a rabbit, when a rabbit is being killed, has a cry so shrill that it’s like a train whistle.
There were so many sounds that I would hear in the natural world and find shockingly beautiful. Whereas in the human world, I've been taught that a beautiful human voice has to hold pitches in this particular way, it has to have this kind of texture, it has to have this kind of tone. When I was out there, it's like the canyon doesn't give a shit whether or not I can sing in tune. I could sing anyway I wanted and fit in with the soundscape. That was comforting as well.
Because you were doing this all solo, right, you were traveling and exploring? But you were finding your identity, re-finding your identity.
I wish there was a way that I could have done it in a community. I don't like this hyper-independent American idea that we have to go it alone, but I just couldn't find another way to do it. Many of my best friends are musicians with gorgeous voices. They were singing and playing and making records and going on with their lives exactly as planned. I felt like I had been kind of kicked out of the life that I had loved for so long. Also, though I did venture out alone, I wound up making friends in unexpected places and those friendships completely reshaped my experience of loss and eventually helped me reshape my sense of identity.
That's awesome, especially because I feel like with our friends we've had for a long time, they have all of these associations with us, and they know us for one thing or our old identity. But if you're experiencing something catastrophic, like you've experienced, meeting new people who have no idea who you are, can give you a new opportunity, right?
That's why road trips are so intoxicating. Because nothing is reflecting back your identity as you've been. You're leaving your home, you're leaving your wardrobe, you're leaving your regular neighborhood, you're leaving all those things that reinforce who you are, and you're just seeing an open view.
Also, deserts are like nature's equivalent of a blank slate because there’s so much emptiness in them. It was very easy to dream there.
You can almost become lost yourself, like so small and insignificant compared to the vastness of nature. I find it very humbling and also grounding, because what are my worries compared to the geological time scale?
The geological time scale is so comforting. I kept thinking to the canyon: I am a blink. Right? If I live for 100 years, I will be the equivalent of a human’s single blink to a 50 million year old canyon.
It really helps you reframe. You titled the record Desert Lullabies, which gives us a soothing connotation. The songs therein are also meditative and soothing. Was the process of writing them restorative?
Making music is like making our own medicine. Eddie Vedder from Pearl Jam once described songwriting as wanting a color of paint that doesn't exist yet, and so he has to mix up that color of paint. That's the closest to how I feel about it: So often, I want something to comfort me emotionally or to uplift me emotionally, and that exact thing doesn't exist yet, which is why I have to write the song.
So, I think about it like an herbalist making tinctures. [Take] that plant, then make this tincture, then that will heal me. I've always kind of thought about that with music. I'm trying to write the thing that is going to change my emotional feedback loop.
Did you see these as lullabies to yourself?
I did, yeah. And I released them because creativity is like making a loaf of bread for myself. I'll always give half to my neighbor.
I know this wasn't your first time writing instrumental music. What made you want to write a purely instrumental record?
Well, I was working within the limitation of not having access to a singing voice. So I just wanted to see if I could sing music like if I could write melodies on instruments that felt like they were a new incarnation of my voice that was really just working with the constraints, which constraints can be very liberating, definitely.
Like you said, these songs carry your signature melodies. I can hear your vocal melodies in them when I listen to the Desert Lullabies songs, and I also hear your signature sound in them. Can you share the experience of writing these songs? What was your process of translating vocal melodies into instrumental music?
I started to think less about melody and more about visual contours. When I'm singing, I naturally have certain musculature that makes me reach for particular intervals, or makes me want to sing a certain way, or shape words a certain way. But when I was writing without my voice, it was more like I was imagining melodies were like scarves floating on the wind, or that melodies were a little bit more like peaks of a mountain or something. Naturally, my melodic sensibility will shape whatever I'm doing no matter what.
Everyone has their own melodic voice, but I was working more with a kind of direct translation. I was working more like, if that peach electric sherbert sunset could be a sound. What sound would it be or like? If those beautiful stars, shining in winter in Escalante could be a melody. What would those be?
That's really interesting. I didn't know that but [it] totally makes sense now, thinking back about the music, I can totally visualize the landscape that you were writing to. So the titles of the songs are associated with the landscapes you were trying to evoke or translate?
I guess they do. Yeah.
You’ve shared that you have a book with Harper Collins coming out this year titled The Lost Voice. What was it like transitioning from writing music to writing a book? Are there lessons you've learned from songwriting that you've applied to writing prose?
I love this question so much. This was really, really fun to think about. Yeah, the lessons from songwriting: a song is an emotionally concentrated entity, and the purpose in songwriting is to fit as much emotion into every word and every phrase and every melody as possible. And if you think about it, it's quite a short amount of attention. Most songs in Western culture are three minutes and 30 seconds. So in that sense, as a songwriter, you want to make something very interesting for at least three minutes and 30 seconds. So there's this concentration of meaning and concentration of emotion, and this sense of rhythm. You need expectation and you need surprise, you need just enough of a recurring theme to keep the listener there.
And all of those principles of songwriting, I think, helped me on the page, because I could tell the moment I was becoming boring. The moment I was like, this song has gone on too long. It is time to start a new subject or a new paragraph, because I think my attention span is quite short when it comes to thematic and poetic writing. Or on every page, there had to be one sentence that was like, this is the emotional gut punch thesis statement of this section.
So I thought about the book very musically, but it's almost like I took poems, or song lyrics, and I spread them out and sprinkled them in through narrative. So the book feels a little bit more lyrical than just a straight memoir. That's just a story. I do think it feels infused with a kind of lyrical element.
But I'm realizing how I'm talking in so many loops. Whereas when I'm writing on the page, I'm like, thought period, thought, right? No, whereas the way we talk in conversation, I'm finding it's like a riffing. So how are they similar? Concentrated meaning, poetry, rhythm, knowing when to move on to another theme that kind of thing. What was the first half of the question was, how were they different?
What was it like transitioning from writing music to writing a book?
I had never written anything longer than a journal entry. I probably average about 1000 words a day in my journal, which is significant. That's many novels a year, but it's not like it's dazzling writing. So I would say the most I had ever written at once was 1000 words of sort of unfocused writing.
When writing became my only option for reliable expression of my voice, I just became obsessed with writing and with listening to books and with reading books and with reading poetry. It became a miraculous love story out of the ashes of this terrible loss.. A friend and I were hypothesizing the other day about how two people can experience the same kind of loss and one of them will self-destruct, and the other one will, you know, discover a way out of it. I feel so lucky that I found writing because this book was the only way out of it for me.
And it's serving dual purposes, right? It's a creative expression. It's your creative voice coming out, but it's also a healing experience, and I guess, a way to process trauma.
When I was diagnosed with this voice disorder, I kept saying to the doctors, it must be psychosomatic. I wanted them to tell me it was all in my head. Which is funny, because most people go to the doctor and the doctor's like, “It's all in your head,” and the patient is like, “No, it's not. It’s real!” I was doing the opposite. I wanted the doctors to be like “this is all in your head,” and I wanted so badly for there to be an emotional root, and that was part of why I started writing. I was like, am I subconsciously silencing myself? Is this fear trapped in my throat, is this grief that's unmetabolized, that's caught in my body? I was sort of trying to find all of these different answers because I thought that might be easier to solve than a lifelong neurological voice disorder.
With spasmodic dysphonia, I literally had words caught in my throat. But there were so many times in my life where, metaphorically, I could not speak my truth. The feeling of having words caught in my throat was not new. One of the desires for me in writing this book was just being able to articulate my truth as clearly and precisely as possible, to finally free that expression.
And too, to be there for your past selves when you couldn't speak your truth, right?
Oh I love that. Yeah, you should be writing the book. Brianna, where were you when I was editing? Ha.
Are there shared themes between Desert Lullabies and The Lost Voice?
I think that the Desert Lullabies are the musical expressions of the feelings that are written in the book. So it's like two ways of seeing the same thing. They're thematically close to me, like those were the feelings, those were the songs I was writing on the days that are described in the book.
It's like in real time experiencing this lost voice versus thinking about it in the years following.
Yeah, expressing it in different ways. Music is much more primal. Music exists in the realm of meaning and myth and story. Music touches a part of our bodies and spirits and beings that language sometimes can't. So the music touches the subconscious more. I think the music from that EP, those are expressions that can't really be explained. They're more nuanced.
I hope people can just receive the messages as they listen. It's like a kind of transmission. I don't know how they're receiving it, but I hope that they're just feeling the emotion. Whereas, in the book, I'm trying my absolute best to articulate, as well as I possibly can, the exact feeling I'm imagining.
Instrumental music, it's like spraying a spritz of perfume and saying, “What does that smell remind you of? What does it make you feel?” Whereas writing a book is more like spraying a perfume and telling them that it contains lilac and cedar and explaining exactly how it was made.
Yeah, music has a more open interpretation than prose, because you have to be as direct as possible. You have to articulate and illustrate with words, versus music is more open ended. Sure, you can write clearly, but people can interpret it in however many ways they want.
Yeah, totally.
Your book synopsis poses the question, “Beyond the physical ramifications, what does it mean to cultivate a true voice?” So was Desert Lullabies a true voice discovery period for you?
Desert Lullabies was true in the sense that it was the pure expression that came through my heart when my heart was very open.
I've just started thinking about this too. How a true voice is an active action instead of an identity. I know it can be an identity, but it's how you express yourself through the things that you do is your voice.
I love that you use the word active. I think voice is also about the truth in the moment. Another part about having a true voice that I've been thinking about is knowing when to not speak. Sometimes being silent is the voice that I most need to have, especially in an era of extreme hyper-reactivity, where there's this pressure to respond to every single thing and every single moment. Sometimes the true voice is just listening.
How has your new sense of self impacted your relationship with music? What is on the horizon for you?
One new aspect of my identity is that I replaced touring with teaching. I'm physically not able to tour. Another huge loss was that I had to quit Vampire Weekend because of other long COVID symptoms beyond my voice. Thankfully, I love teaching. It gives me the nourishment of the creative community, and it's inspiring to shine the light on other people's work. Not only do I genuinely love watching these writers blossom, but focusing on the work of other people helps undercut the self-focused gaze that was required to write my own memoir.
There are so many amazing songs that are written in the workshops I teach that make me feel like, “Oh my God, I need to go write a record.” By the time the workshops are happening, I spend so much time and energy creating the classes, and I'm so passionate about them. I want to give so much to the writers in the group, and it's such a beautiful part of my life.
Teaching actually makes me, more than ever, want to write beautiful music. I'm having to get comfortable singing with a “broken voice.” I had been getting these Botox injections, and I did some recording while they were working, but because I've had some other issues, I haven't had a shot in a while, so my voice sounds very weird and wobbly. I can really hear the dysphonia. Sometimes it shakes a lot and almost sounds like a goat's bleat. Sometimes it's super wobbly when I'm trying to sing and I just sound tone-deaf.
I am learning to make sense of how to use a voice that sounds really different from my old, formerly “perfect” voice. I think the next record I make will probably be much more lyric focused. The vocal range will be a lot more limited, and the words will have to carry the songs more than these sky high, belted vocals.
I also think too, after writing this book, that has impacted how you see music. How you found a new voice, a true voice. Maybe that also is another tool to write differently too. Translating music into prose, and then turning prose back into music, just that translation is really interesting to me.
Yeah, one thing I know from the process of writing the book is I'm done writing heartbreak songs. I've reached my quota, at least hopefully for my 30s. I've been reading about the history of love songs and I learned about the concept of sympathetic magic. Sympathetic magic is like when people sing about what they want to create. [When] people sing a harvest song to create a beautiful harvest, or they sing a rain song so that it will rain, or they sing songs to bless people at their wedding.
They are like spells!
Yes, exactly. We're going back to childhood. I am writing spells. For example, after my last breakup, I decided to write love songs about the relationship that ended, and I just went in and I completely turned the feeling inside out. Something about the process of writing this book has made me want to write that way. To create more beauty.
Right? Because you were looking back, right? You're looking at your past. Now you're ready to move forward. You fully explored that world.
I will say the number one reason for anyone to write a memoir is to make sense of the story of their life, so that they can create the kind of future that they want. One of the biggest, most glaring things was noticing how many times I learned a lesson, forgot it, and then relearned it. When I looked back through all my journals, and I looked back through all my text messages, I looked back through all my history, I saw myself hitting my head on the same wall over and over every two or three years. The process of writing the book snapped me out of that.
I don't know if you've had this experience too, but you have these same themes that you write about. You end up writing the same song over and over again. I feel like we've had this conversation in the songwriting workshop at some point. I love the idea of inverting an experience and writing love songs about a breakup. Completely switching your perspective, so that you're not continuing the cycle.
Right. That I’m not bathing in pain. I'm using a song as a transformative act. That's more how I am approaching music now.
Yeah, it's also a processing tool and more of a relationship. It is spells again right? It's something that you want to transform your world somehow, instead of ruminating and obsessing over the past.
Exactly, yeah.
I think I just have one more and then we can wrap up. Is there anything else you would like to share?
There is a pre order for the book available on Amazon, and the book will be out on May 20, 2025.
Greta’s Writing Your Record workshop is currently in progress. In 12 weeks, participants write an entire record. You can find more information and future workshops here. Otherwise, find Greta on Instagram for music and poetry and all other updates.
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