Singer-songwriter Jerid Morris is a restless creative with an uncommonly nuanced touch and a San Antonio music lifer with years of songs and stages under his belt. He’s also a family man with flaws, regrets and memories — like all the rest of us.
Morris has been active in the local music scene for more than 20 years, most notably as the lead creative force in emo-indie rock bands Muldoon (2002-2006) and Stegosaur (2008-present). More recently, he’s led country-folk project El Campo, and he also plays in the popular country covers outfit The Texases along with other estimable songwriters and musicians.
His latest work, released under the moniker Very Old Morris — he’s only 43 — is a doozy of a double album titled Last of the Rodeo Clowns. With this lyrically rich collection dominated by gently ambling country-folk songs, he delivers a sprawling yet splintered narrative. Like a million hard-ridden roads to rural nowhere/everywhere, the release embraces the impressionistic quality of self-conception.
Recorded with a host of local musicians and producer Lucas Oswald, Last of the Rodeo Clowns is an ambitious and impressive effort that rewards thoughtful listening.
Released June 1, the 24-song set finds Morris looking beyond the horizon of death — and plenty of it — into the eternity of the collective unconscious, right at that dark shore where it laps up against the individual unconscious.
Morris told the Current the concept behind the album — he always thinks in terms of albums and larger narratives when writing — centers on his being raised by “people who had been farmers and ranchers” but the reality that he’s personally “a world removed from that.”
Morris’ most recent full-length, El Campo’s 2019 record Goldun Stair, Meet You There, found him sorting through an early fractured family life in the face of a winning bout with cancer. However, The Last of the Rodeo Clowns is more concerned with exploring a way of life — or the notion of a way of life — harvested from a thoughtful brand of nostalgia.
The title track along with “Gold Buick” and several others address rodeo life and serve as the backbone of the album.
Morris cites the abundance of country songs he grew up hearing, some of which he now plays with The Texases, as spiritual influences of sorts. Those old tunes “postulate the rodeo as this thing that is so consuming that people sacrifice everything, and, of course, it’s romantic in the sense that it can destroy you, but you can’t resist it.”
To be sure, there’s a common thread between The Texases and Morris’ original music.
“The nostalgia is wrapped up in this idea of wanting where I came from to be important, wanting the sacred parts of the existence of the people who came before me to have been meaningful to my life in some respect,” he said.
Songs such as “At the Don’s and Ben’s” and “In Which the Morris Boys All Die Young” plumb autobiography in search of a possible absolution but at least the truth. Meanwhile “The Missionary King” and “‘93 Oilers” poetically explore what Morris calls “these fraught male relationships and family dynamics.”
The album is replete with impressionistic renderings, tone poems, character studies, road songs, grain elevators, booze, bulls, blood, dust and mud.
“There’s a lot of planning and then there’s this certain amount of subconscious accretion that occurs, that you’re not in control of at all,” Morris said of his artistic process.
In embracing this subconscious material and consciously molding it into song without taking logic’s chisel to the fuzzy edges, he strikes a satisfying balance between personal and universal. Anyone who has lived, and thought about the joy and pain of living, can feel these songs if they sit with them.
While Morris isn’t planning a physical album release or any Very Old Morris shows — “I get my jollies with The Texases now,” he joked — he did create a chapbook of the lyrics, presenting them in a form that represents how important they are to his music and life.
As if 24 songs wasn’t enough, Morris also made a four-song companion EP, Rhoda of the Rodeo, in part as a tribute to a beloved family dog that recently died. Rhoda the dog joined the family when his three kids were little, and his youngest is now 16. It’s a touching tribute to a family’s best friend.
One of the EP’s standout tracks, “Crabtrees,” is a lyrically hard-hitting song that looks bleakly at generational cycles of rural poverty. The chapbook’s footnotes for the song quote Vladmir Lenin’s State and Revolution: “The state in any given society pursues the interests of the ruling class … [and is] an instrument for the exploitation of the oppressed class.”
The inclusion of this quote might seem odd, but it underscores the empathetic intelligence at the heart of Morris’ nostalgic vision — the refusal of passivity, the earnest documentation of struggle and joy and the imaginative excavation of a downtrodden rural perspective as far more than an aesthetic posture.
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This article appears in Jun 12-25, 2025.