Live and Local - Voices3 with Mat Morriss

One of my favorite lines from a Smiths song is from “The Queen is Dead”, in which Morrissey is talking about a fictitious meeting with the Queen of England…

…so I broke into the palace/with a spike and a rusty spanner

She said “I know you and you cannot sing”/ I said that’s nothing

You should hear me play piano.

To paraphrase the Mozz, people who know me know I can’t play guitar, but that’s nothing, you should hear me try to sing…

I mention this to clarify my point of view as I talk about Voices3…three ladies who most decidedly CAN sing, and in fact, they do it in harmony, which is basically magic to me.

Voices 3 is some wonderful and incredibly talented ladies who came to play Ploughmans in the beginning of November. When I noticed an odd disturbance behind them, it turned out to be Mat Morriss, sitting in.

More on that later. Believe that…

I can’t sing, and I don’t know how to. This is slightly different than playing guitar. I can’t do that either, but I DO know how…so go figure. So, when I try to talk about this performance, I have to compare it to other harmonizing groups, like Crosby, Stills, and Nash, and the Eagles, Simon & Garfunkel, etc.

Voices 3 reminded me more of the Eagles than they did CSN… there’s something about the kind of harmonizing they were doing that evoked things like “seven Bridges road” rather than, say, “Southern cross”, though I struggle to articulate the difference, and I listened to a bunch of recordings after to try to explain it, but I’ve got nothing “musical” to assess it with to make it seem like I’m smart.

I can almost feel all three of them reading this and rolling their eyes, Donate mumbling “see what I mean? He’s a dope”.  So it goes. But I can say their harmonies are gorgeous and incredibly tight. Even songs they are only just starting to get their collective arms around, so a little bumpy, it’s still undergirded but a VERY high floor. They do that Ozzy cover another time or two, it will seem like it’s one of their originals.

This is because these are not simply three ladies who can sing… each of them are skilled and talented musicians in their own right, and could blow you away even when they aren’t standing together and vocally spinning and turning around each other as they do so magically.

Jodie Morris stands in the middle, she’s the short one whos voice is like a bell. In my view she’s the point where the tributary rivers of voice come together and become a cohesive thing. Again, this is pure intuition on my part because I know very little about what I’m talking about. Just appreciating when I’m hearing. She modulates her voice incredibly accurately and makes incredible use of volume to accent and embellish notes without necessarily changing tone, similar to things I’ve heard jazz sax players do with chromatic melodies.

There, see? That made me sound smart while still not knowing anything about singing.

Rebecca Shreyer Price stands to the left (as I’m facing them). She has a tremendously evocative and gentle voice with an underlying power…she does the melodic Judie Collins thing very well, but I have a feeling she could belt out some Bessie Smith if you asked her to, and I wish she would! What’s also apparent in the way she sings is that she’s an incredibly accomplished musician overall, as evidenced in the times I’ve seen her perform with her husband, Dempsey (a formidable guitarist and performer himself, and one of the coolest people you will ever meet! One of the benefits of coming out to see Voices 3 is you get a chance to hang with Dempsey!).

Another example of that is Donate, on the right. Her voice adds color and strength to the flow, and her musical sense is acute and adept. She plays (and owns) many, many instruments, and her mastery of song structure is apparent; She’s also a wonderful composer.

The three of them fit with each other incredibly well, and as a group they do covers and amazing originals, its not surprising they already have a substantial and impressive discography, but they’re not ready to just settle into their niche…they reach and explore in all kinds of areas and I look forward to seeing where they might no next.

Which brings me to the guy sitting behind them with Donate’s Mandocello in his hands…Mat Morriss. As I live and breathe…behind three woman playing americana and folk songs in magical harmonies and beautiful and complex arrangements. Mat’s contribution and the use of the mandocello was actually quite amazing. He has the ability to delicately enhance and embellish and his comfort level with a genre of music that I know is not his normal diet was very impressive. Being a very accomplished songwriter himself, I only hope he might do more collaboration, I’d love to see what he and V3 could come up with in originals, or even have him re-orchestrate some of his originals to work with the Three Muses of Adams County.

This moves him in the right direction in terms of what I call the “Tremonti Ratio” (TR). I will elaborate on this formula in another article, but to summarize here, Mat working with the incredible V3 seems to put his TR count low, which means he takes the energy and musical skill to work effectively with other artists and come out with some amazing in-the-moment musical creation (which he did with V3)… when he’s TR is high, however, he might put his foot up on the stage monitor in a douche-like fashion while ripping out a violently distorted solo, singing as if his mouth is full of half-cooked rice and he had just stubbed his toe (i.e. the Tremonti Element).  

We will explore this further, along with Evan Crider, when we cover off on Glass Grin and their related musical attachments in a future article. For now, Voices 3 is an incredible group of ladies who sing far better than I’m capable of explaining, and they collaborate and expand already formidable musical range. See them whenever you can, or catch Rebecca and Dempsey…can’t recommend hard enough!