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Tracy Morrow performs "Olcott Beach"

The story behind Morning Is the End of the Day is one of those perfect Buffalo tales. It goes like this: You’re sitting in a divey rock club, enjoying the music, the crowd and the constant replenishment of cold bottles of Canadian in your hand. The friendly bartender with the bushy beard that’s been on-the-spot with those cold drinks all night? Turns out he’s a fucking brilliant songwriter. With his late band Barrel Harbor, singer/songwriter Bill Nehill used to stalk and stomp the stage in a frothy, quaking fit of rock’n’roll brilliance. Putting that particular idiom aside for a moment, Bill has been playing legendary solo acoustic shows at the area’s better music venues (and frequently contributing to Artvoice) as Tracy Morrow for the past couple of years. The music of Tracy Morrow cuts deep—handsaw-against-your-forearm-bone-deep. It’s music for bleary-eyed, dissatisfied, sad-sack, dancing-with-alcoholism grumblers. Take “New Jerusalem Road,” a song about a man watching his ex-girlfriend with her new boyfriend at Christmas with her family and chew on these sample lyrics: “In this lonely apartment/You can smell desperation/Well, it comes from the food in the sink/That’s long-since decayed.” The first reaction to hearing this is, “Jee-ZUS.” After sinking in a moment, the reaction becomes, “Shit, I been there.” Moments later, your reaction consists of looking at the track listing, seeing a song called “It’s Your Birthday” coming up, and thinking, “This ain’t gonna to be good.” The whole record is filled with more self-critical honesty than you can probably handle, but is told so gently and truthfully that peering into this particular, harshly lit mirror is worth the experience. The music is somewhat minimal, too many syllables are sometimes crammed together in one line and there’s the habit of starting too many lines with, “Well, I…”—however, these are minor quibbles. The emotional content of Morning Is the End of the Day is unquestionable, and Tracy Morrow has created a completely new way to describe our particular corner of time and space.