Morgan Wade at the Raccoon Motel -- August 18.
Thursday, August 18
Raccoon Motel, 315 East Second Street, Davenport IA
Touring in support of her most recent album Reckless, a recording that Slant magazine called "a remarkable accomplishment" that "features just the right level of polish and embellishment," rising country star Morgan Wade headlines an August 18 concert is Davenport's Raccoon Motel, the singer/songwriter also lauded by Red Guitar Music as "an artist who deserves to make some serious waves."
A native of Floyd, Virginia, Wade began writing songs as a freshman in college, and in 2018, she recruited musicians through Craigslist to record her first album Puppets with My Heart, which was credited to The Stepbrothers. Wade told Rolling Stone Country that she was inspired to do this after breaking up with her boyfriend, and later said that the stress of touring and recording with the Stepbrothers led to her developing an alcohol addiction. Later in 2018, Wade performed at Virginia's FloydFest along with artists including Jason Isbell, whose sound engineer gave her album to Sadler Vaden, the guitarist in Isbell's band The 400 Unit. Vaden and producer Paul Ebersold consequently helped Wade assemble another album – Reckless – over the next two years.
Released via the Thirty Tigers label in 2021, Reckless sold 3,000 copies in its first week and peaked at number 14 on the Billboard Top Heatseekers charts. Wade told Billboard's magazine version that the album was inspired by her struggles with her mental health, past relationships, and sobriety, and Rolling Stone Country went on to praise the album by saying that Wade has "the ragged edge of a singer/songwriter who’s been putting her nose to the grindstone for some time. In a voice like worn leather, Wade describes desperate, spontaneous relationships that feel the strongest when they’re at their breaking point." In conjunction with the album's release, "Wilder Days" was released to radio as the album's first single, a song that led Billy Dukes of Taste of Country to described Wade's vocal presence as a "hardened Sheryl Crow," with the tune itself labeled "complex, with chords and a melancholy shuffle that shouts heartbreak, even if her story is at worst hesitant and thoughtful." Wade subsequently re-released Reckless this past January with six bonus tracks, one of them a cover of Elvis Presley's 1969 hit "Suspicious Minds" that Off the Record called "stunning and surprising ... . It’s quite a feat to turn such an intimately known song into something utterly fresh and novel."
Morgan Wade performs her Davenport engagement on August 18, and the singer/songwriter's 8 p.m. set will be followed by an 11 p.m. concert featruing Zeta and La Armada. For more information and tickets, visit TheRaccoonMotel.com.
