Americana Music Magazine – Bluegrass, Roots, Folk, Blues, and Old-Time
“After previously enjoying listening to music and playing a little bit of drums and harmonica, I didn’t really start writing songs or learning to play guitar until my late twenties,” says Americana troubadour, Marques Morel. An itinerant logger and woodworker, he began carrying an acoustic guitar his father had given him, in his truck. However, two years went by before he started really learning how to play it. Once he got started, there was no going back. “I just wanted to holler in the streets, you know?” On his breaks from logging and fire suppression work in the mountains, he would spend his time busking in nearby towns. “That’s what really clicked it in for me…it was something. The ghost of Woody Guthrie was really strong.”
Marques counts among his influences; cowboy music, gospel, and early Delta blues, among others. “As I got a little bit more into songwriting and stuff,” he continues, “the Texas Troubadours lit me up…” He finds himself doing that songwriting, or at least the initial stages of it while driving. “A line with a melody to it will worm it’s way into my head and I’ll build it from there…The songs that stick, they just kind of come like they want to be here…”
Tales and Tellings is the fifth album Marques has released, with the first being a live record. “Some of these songs I’ve been performing for many years,” he says, “but I never found a home for them on a record.” He felt they were relatively unrelated at first, but then, when creating the album sequence, he saw how they could fit together and tell a loosely connected story. “It worked out, and I think I got lucky like that. But this next one I’m going to do, I going to try to…go into it really knowing what I’m trying to do.”
Now settled in the small town of Mount Carol, Illinois, for the time being, Marques shares his music live with Midwestern regional audience. Sometimes it’s with his band, Midnight Wind, and sometimes it’s “one-man-band” situation. “I kick a drum and blow a harp through a little contraption that goes through a tube amp so it kind of gives it some vibes that way, and guitar and singing.”