Photo by Jawzwa
When Lewis Morris writes poetry, he picks out a small moment and zooms out to how it relates to a weightier idea. But when he writes hip hop, he rarely begins with a specific concept in mind. Morris starts with a beat and follows wherever the song takes him without pushing it in a specific direction. “Underwater” is a single off his fifth album Eucatastrophe, named after the J.R.R. Tolkien method of storytelling, which Morris described as, “Things are shitty for a really long time, when suddenly there’s a favorable solution for our heroes.”
Eucatastrophe started coming together seriously last year when Morris decided to change his songwriting method and create a project that had a cohesive theme across the tracks. “I keep trying to exist in a positive moment, but my brain literally forces me to think I don’t deserve health and wellness,” Morris says. For these reasons, this album is a way for Morris to explore his past: what kind of person he was, the things that happened to him, and the actions he regrets. But Eucatastrophe also recognizes his emotional journey of how he arrived in a much more positive place today and how he learned to ignore the negativity from his brain.
Morris started writing when he was 11. He didn’t know it at the time, but he says it was a coping mechanism for depression. “Poetry and music help me make sense of the noise. When I work on a song, I start to see the connections with things in life that aren’t intentional, but it helps me figure out and discover things about myself.”
Photo by Kaleigh O’Keefe
In middle school he started participating in monthly poetry slams through the Providence Poetry Slam and began competing with them throughout high school. “They were raising the voices of people with the same interests as me, the [same] concerns as me, and who looked like me,” Morris says. ProvSlam gave him opportunities to perform at venues like the Apollo Theater and the Smithsonian. Later, he joined the supergroup Flatline Poetry with four other spoken word poets, including Oompa. “I loved it as long as it was going,” he says. After the slam team ended, Morris decided to shift focus to music. He had always wanted to make beats.
“Underwater” is the song that’s most closely linked to the theme of Eucatastrophe. The lyrics talk about the feeling of breaking out of one set of chains to see another set of chains. “Growth is not linear,” Morris says. “There are setbacks. It ain’t easy.” So even though he sings that sometimes it feels like, “I’m no closer to catharsis than I was when I originally started,” he’s “coming for the air that I’m owed. So, surprise motherfuckers, I’m alive.”
Listen to “Underwater” below. Eucatastrophe is forthcoming this summer.