“Morpho Season” is the debut album from Morpho, the new musical project of Kristyn Chapman.
Based in Chicago since 2021, Chapman played in a succession of Wichita bands over the last decade, eventually leading her own trio, Cartwheel, which released “Best Days” in 2019.
Speaking from her Chicago-area home earlier this week, Chapman discussed the origins of the new EP as well as how she recruited her longtime friend Will Erickson to add some unique touches to the recording.
Morpho will perform an in-store set at The Record Ship on Friday, Nov. 22, at 2 p.m., where Chapman will also sign copies of “Morpho Season.”
The group will then perform Friday evening at Wave on a bill that will also include Monnie and Breeding Brainbrow. It will be that act’s final live performance.
The following interview has been edited for clarity and for length.
There are a number of things that I hear on this record that I know you’ve been capable of in the past, but now they seem more fully realized. Do you have a sense of that?
Yeah, I do. With Cartwheel, when I put that record [“Best Days” in 2019], I was recording my own stuff and my own songs, and I was really focused on lead guitar at that point, I was more focused on songwriting. After that record came out, I didn’t really feel like I wanted to continue with that project. I felt like I wanted to do something new and start fresh.
I was slowly planting the seeds for this record. The oldest song is from 2017 and that’s before Cartwheel even came out. My playing was expanding over the years. I sat with some of the songs so long that, but it was like I needed that time to become the musician that I am. I learned a lot in the recording process. I’m really, really proud of how it turned out.
It seems that on the lyrical front there are themes of new beginnings, and I can’t help but think about how you relocated to Chicago and started a new band.
A lot of the songs I was actually writing in Wichita, but I was really wanting a new beginning. I love Wichita. It’s been a really supportive scene for me for a long time, but I got to a point where I just wanted to see what else was out there. Lyrically, I think there’s a lot of themes about change and freedom and evolving. I do think I needed to move to Chicago and record part of [this record] in Chicago for it to turn out the way that it turned out.
For all that change, there are, as you mentioned, still some ties to Wichita with this record.
The record was partly done and kind of at a standstill here. The engineer I was working with got busy with other projects, and I was just ready to get it done. … I called Will [Erickson], and he was so stoked. He said, “Me and Joey [Lemon] would love to work on this.” That was at the end of last year, in November. I came down, and I think I was in Wichita for a week, and we tracked most of “Blue Light” besides drums and bass and all of “The End.”
There are also some things here and there on “Prism.” Will played percussion. We added some extra finishing touches. It felt good to finish in Wichita especially “The End,” which I wrote [when I lived] in Riverside. It felt right to come back and finish it with people I’ve known for a really long time. Will has also become such an amazing recording engineer. It was cool to see him in that way, too. We’ve been playing together in projects for 10 years or more. I’ve watched him grow as an audio engineer since the Team Tremolo record [“Intruder” in 2017].
I also wanted to ask about what I see as the emotional arc of the record. I feel like there’s a narrative thread here. I assume that that was intentional.
“Prism,” which opens the album, is the oldest song. “The End” is the second-oldest song. They were actually written around the same time. It’s kind of funny that “Prism” is first and “The End” is last. I had this relationship and when it ended, I was like, “What the heck?” [Laughs.] It took me a really long time to get over it. I wrote “Half of Two” in 2021 and that was me [saying], “All right. I need to move on from this.” I was doing a lot of visual writing, and I really liked the way that that song turned out. It’s a breakup song for sure, but I feel like there’s a lot of poetic themes. So, I don’t know that [what you’re hearing] is intentional.
“Blue Light” is a departure from that narrative of the relationship and the breakup. It’s kind of its own song, talking about technology. I’m a graphic designer. I’m so precise in my designs and sometimes that can feel creatively limiting. With music, I feel like I take the opposite approach where I just have to be completely free and open. So, there’s the dichotomy of really rigid and precise versus the more free flowing.
“Morpho Friend” is also a departure from that. I wrote that about friends of mine who were kind of killing it and doing music, and I was proud of them and proud to be in their orbit but also not feeling like I was anywhere close to that.
You mentioned that you feel like your guitar playing has improved. What do you attribute that to?
I haven’t played a show in Wichita since 2019, and I moved to Chicago in 2021, so I was playing at home a lot. Especially, I think the pandemic [impacted some of that]. I got laid off twice in 2020. I got laid off from one job not related to COVID, and then I started another job and within two weeks COVID happened and I got laid off, which was a great artist residency for me to be honest. [Laughs.] I had tons of time to play guitar, and I felt that I could fully commit to being an artist. I was just playing guitar all the time.
In the bands that I had played in before, we had never really experimented much with different time signatures, so I [found myself] writing things in different time signatures and thinking, “What is this?” I would sit there with a metronome and think, “Does this make sense?” Eventually, I’d say, “This does make sense.” I think I was also listening to more of the music that I’d listened to in high school when I was just genuinely such a fan of, like Blink-182, their self-titled album. I listened to it and realized how much I love power chords. They sound so good! [Laughs.]
