Stealing Harvard

Andrew Morgan politely asks that you stop pirating music. “Go through iTunes and delete any music that you have not paid for,” Morgan writes in a note, titled “A Plea,” on his Web site.

“When you steal music, you break hearts.”

As a young musician on the cusp of success, the Leawood native has a personal investment in trying to prick the conscience of a generation that prefers free downloading to forking over $15 at a record store.

Morgan is not a crusader and doesn’t enjoy the pano­ramic view from the pulpit. (In fact, he says he turned from evangelical Christianity to secular humanism some time ago.) He simply wants to be able to make a career of his music, to move out of his parents’ house in Leawood or, better yet, to see his second album released in the United States.

Morgan’s debut effort, Misadventures in Radiology, came out in 2004 and got more critical attention around the world than, well, most records that came out of Kansas that year. The ambitious album drew comparisons to Elliot Smith and Built to Spill from critics in the United States and England. Uncut magazine called Misadventures one of the best albums of that year.

Put together amid detours and departures that took Morgan from England to New York City and, later, to New England for graduate school, Misadventures was a formidable debut. Laying his lulling vocals onto a jazzy hybrid of orchestral pop, Morgan announced himself without equivocation to the indie-rock scene.

Now, Morgan describes Misadventures, the first installment in what he terms “The Exile Trilogy,” as “a kind of Lazarus album, a hard-fought, back-to-life thing … a very brave record.”

Sometime between the release of Misadventures and his latest work, however, the music industry reached its tipping point. Digital music boomed, CD sales plummeted, record stores boarded their windows, and aspiring musicians like Morgan were left searching for a record deal in a recordless industry.

Some would have given up the dream, taken their moment of fleeting success and gone home. But the thought of knotting a Windsor and trudging to the office doesn’t appeal to Morgan.

“I can’t flip that switch,” Morgan says. “I don’t want to flip that switch. Even if I wanted to do something different, I couldn’t.”

If he decided to freshen up the résumé, employers would likely find the 30-year-old an attractive hire. Morgan recently graduated with a master’s degree from Harvard Divinity School. Before that, as an undergrad at the University of Kansas, he spent time studying abroad at Oxford. He still has tenuous plans to pursue another graduate degree in philosophy.

Such disciplined academic interests may seem at odds with a career in rock music, but Morgan’s interests inform his creative process.

Asked if there’s an ethic that drives his music, Morgan eagerly tosses out a quote from the Roman philosopher Lucretius: “All good philosophy is directed toward the therapeutic treatment of the suffering of the human soul,” he says.

He compares the experience of making his second album with a period in Nietzsche’s life. “I’ve always been inspired by something Nietzsche says in the preface to Human, All Too Human. He was so lonely when he was writing that book that he had to invent other so-called free spirits to be with him while he was writing.”

For Morgan, cultivating an audience has been a lonely task. Though Andrew Morgan eclipses Misadventures in the scope of its arrangement and the maturity of its concept, the album has yet to be released in the United States, forcing Morgan to promote the album overseas.

Last year, Morgan toured Japan. He says it’s a place where the cultural fondness for presentation — that is, an album’s cover and packaging — has staved off the onslaught of digital piracy. Playing in Tokyo, Sendai and Yamagata, Morgan introduced his music to an appreciative Eastern fanbase, making appearances at record stores where people were happy to hand over cash to buy his CDs.

There’s much to appreciate about Andrew Morgan beyond the cover.

As on Misadventures, Morgan’s whispering vocals embody the curiosities of adolescence. And the often large, symphonic arrangements that accompany those vocals spire toward an epic scale, melding seamlessly with the economy of Morgan’s lyrics. Through it all, Morgan produces a sound that brims with emotional complexity, at once melancholic and hopeful, tender and disenchanted.

“Please, Kid, Remember,” the album’s first song with lyrics (the first track is a short, deftly crafted instrumental called “Leaves”), begins with the verse, Canonize the people that we were/In days now gone when one could endure/Please, kid, remember. The line announces the sort of naked nostalgia — a Proustian search for lost time — that underlies the album.

Morgan confirms that in the record, he wanted to build a haven for those lost and dislocated, either spiritually or physically. “I wanted to create a place where you could live,” he says, voice trailing off, hesitating to proselytize. “A home kind of thing.”

He seems as uncomfortable describing his own art as he is adamant about preventing its theft. Unfortunately for Morgan, the two issues — theft and music — have become inextricably linked, a marriage that has become more ominously ubiquitous as wallets thin in the current economy.

But even if he has to put that Harvard degree to gainful use, it’s unlikely that Morgan will flip the switch on his music.

“Three Months In Cook County” by Andrew Morgan: