Andrew Morgan was ready to die. He was nearly finished with Misadventures in Radiology, the orchestral pop album that had consumed his life for nearly five years in four different cities, and he’d gone so far as to prepare a will with instructions about how the album should be completed after his death. In the early evening of May 8, 2003, that decision came to seem eerily prescient.
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“The second I close the door the place blows up,” he says. “I feel all these shards of glass against my head and hands.” The tornado rampaged through the building, destroying much of the surrounding apartment complex and tearing through a neighboring golf course. Shaken, Morgan looked to see a gaping hole in the living room where walls once were. “The couch where I was lying was covered with planks of wood, chunks of glass, and a TV set where my head was,” he says. “But all I could think of was, ‘OK, now I can get back to the record.’ That’s how crazy I’d become.”
Morgan, 26, grew up in Leawood, Kansas, a suburb of Kansas City. Both his parents worked in medicine–his mother as a therapist and his father as an internist–but they were also musically inclined: his father played in a British Invasion-style combo called the Fabulous Reflections and later a folk outfit modeled after the Kingston Trio. They enrolled him in guitar and piano lessons, but it wasn’t until he arrived at the University of Kansas in 1997 that he started a band, a chamber-pop group with West on guitar, Carolyn Anderson on cello, and Morgan’s younger sister Sarah playing viola.
“It was so incredible, ’cause I’d been a huge fan of Elliott’s since high school,” Morgan says. “We’d stay up all night talking and really hit it off. But he kinda took me under his wing and was really sweet. And he genuinely seemed to dig the music.” The elaborate tableau he envisioned finally began to take shape–“I did 90 percent of the vocals, some strings, brass, harmonium”–but he couldn’t afford to live in LA, even with free studio time. So he took the tapes to Lawrence, recording at the University of Kansas’s conservatory with a crew of college string players. He had just completed the last of his vocals and was ready to mix the album when the tornado hit. (The tapes were safely stowed in the studio.)
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