Work With The Devil Inside: A Conversation with Henry Morris

Photography by Maytal Star

A rainy Monday night in Soho, a glass of white in a crowded winebar, and a freewheeling first introduction. 

“I've always wanted to be fucking cool, like desperately. Can’t you smell it from a mile away when someone’s trying to be cool? And when I'm an artist, I can finally fucking give it up.” Henry Morris. A walking, singing contradiction. A realist, but a dreamer. A freethinker who yearns for nothing but the validation of those around him. 

In an industry where identity is packaged, distributed, and measured in real time, authenticity can feel like another performance to perfect. Every post becomes an opportunity to prove that you are somebody worth paying attention to, every song a potential breakthrough. The temptation to become a publicly palatable version of yourself is difficult to resist, and Henry understands this better than most. He is straightforward about the contradictions that define his relationship with ambition, and the uncomfortable knowledge that he has bought into a system he understands to be, in his own words, bullshit. 

For Henry Morris, the realization that he might never be cool enough was precisely what set him loose. It is an elusive thing – forever just out of reach – the harder you chase it, the more ridiculous and out of touch you risk becoming. After years of trying to figure out what to say, how to act, and what people might want to hear, he finally found the answer in the one place he had spent so long avoiding: himself.

“Everything you hear in the songs is about me,” he says. “Sometimes the song will be about a girl, but the girl is me.”

It is a surprisingly tender admission from someone who has little interest in making himself sound particularly virtuous. He describes himself as bitter, angry, occasionally a “piece of shit prick,” and someone who is becoming increasingly comfortable with those less flattering parts of his personality. Rather than treating them as flaws to correct before presenting himself to the world, he has learned to use them as material. The result is art that does not require him to be a better person. It only requires him to tell the truth.

Although he felt pulled towards music for most of his life, Henry found it difficult to fully commit to anything without the reassurance of knowing the outcome. He spent years looking for some indication that choosing an unconventional path would be okay, all the while placing focus on the more conventional alternative: doing what was expected, and waiting for someone to tell him otherwise.

Then he met and lived with Saint Levant, a Palestinian artist whom he describes as an older brother and the first person his own age to genuinely believe in him, and everything changed. Watching Levant made the idea of a life in music feel less like a fantasy and more like a decision he could actually make.

“I saw somebody go from just having an extreme passion about something to actually doing it,” he says. “And I know people say that all the time, but watching somebody do that is fucking incredible. As if the rules in this world are what you decide they are to some degree.”

That belief has since become less about the fanfare of choosing an artistic life and more about the unglamorous work of sustaining one. He credits another close collaborator and friend, Artemas, who he’s currently on tour with, with helping him abandon the romantic mythology of songwriting he once held: the idea that a great song must arrive in the middle of the night, delivered by some mysterious force to the person lucky or talented enough to receive it. Inspiration, he learned, is not necessarily something to wait for.

“He showed me how to write a real fucking song every day,” he says. “You don't need to wait on the weather. You can do it every day.”

When writer's block hits, he doesn’t try to avoid it. He works through it, even when that means sitting with feelings he would rather ignore. Burnout, bitterness, and a lack of inspiration can all become subjects in their own right. If a feeling is real enough to be experienced by one person, he reasons, there is a good chance someone else has experienced it, too.

Still, self-awareness does not necessarily make the pursuit of success any less consuming. He speaks about competition with the kind of honesty that can be difficult to maintain in an industry built around the appearance of effortless confidence. He has found himself comparing his work to artists operating in a similar lane, wondering why their audiences seem to be growing faster when he believes his own listeners feel just as strongly about his music. 

“Competition is a good thing if you can use it to uplift yourself instead of putting yourself down,” he says. “Which I'm not good at.” 

The question of how that honesty translates into commercial success is harder to answer. He knows that writing a good song is only one part of the equation; marketing, visibility, and the mechanics of attention matter, too. And while he can control what he puts into a song, he cannot control how quickly the world decides to care about it. 

Success, in his telling, can become an exhausting cycle. A song performs well, and he chases that feeling with everything he has. The chase eventually takes him so far from the original reason he started making music that he retreats, isolates himself, and tries to rediscover what it was all about. Eventually, he reconnects, writes another song, releases it, watches it do well, and begins the process again.

It is perhaps the closest he comes to resolving the tension between ambition and authenticity. He wants to succeed, and he wants to succeed badly. He also wants to believe that the thing he is making has a value that exists independently of its ranking, its reach, or its reception. 

“The height of the high makes the lows of the lows worth it every time,” he says. “So you'll put yourself through the fucking ringer just for a second of it.”

He recognizes the pattern, even as he continues to participate in it. There is something addictive about the prospect of being exceptional, particularly when the possibility of being ordinary has become a feeling of personal failure.

“I feel so much pressure from social media to be special that it breaks my heart,” he says.

The thing is, he understands the absurdity of that pressure. He knows there is nothing wrong with a normal life, and that so many people are happy living for themselves and the people who love them rather than spending every waking moment trying to build something remarkable. He knows that online validation is not a reliable measure of personal worth yet he keeps searching.

“I fully understand, and I'm drinking the Kool-Aid because I know it's bullshit,” he says. “I know it is, and I know there's nothing wrong with having a normal life. But I feel like social media almost makes you feel like if you're not hustling all the time, grinding, doing something stupid, that you're a piece of shit.”

His awareness of the machinery does not exempt him from its effects. If anything, it makes his participation more frustrating. He sees the trap and still feels compelled to walk right in.

Perhaps this is why he gravitates toward artists who make a kind of spectacle out of their own contradictions. He thinks of his music as the love child of Lana Del Rey and The Neighbourhood, though his relationship to each influence is more complicated than the shorthand suggests. From Del Rey, he admires the willingness to be a problem, to court chaos and rebellion. He is drawn to the romantic desperation of her work, the sense of someone flirting with self-destruction because feeling something intensely is preferable to feeling nothing at all.

From The Neighbourhood, he takes the washed-out textures, guitar tones, and melodic undertones. More than anything, he likes the desperation that runs through the music. “I feel alive when I'm in a super desperate situation,” he says.

Even when he is talking about the artists he admires, he is preoccupied with the question of what he can take from them without losing himself.

That question is also at the heart of “One Night Stand,” one of two recently released singles ahead of his new album “Kiss Me Extra Hard,” releasing 10/23. Asked how he would introduce the song to someone unfamiliar with his work, he does not lead with its production, genre, or place in his catalog. Instead, he describes it as an act of companionship.

“If you are extremely lonely in your life, I'll be your friend,” he says. “This song will make you feel like I'm your friend.”

He is particularly interested in loneliness that persists in the presence of other people, the feeling of being disconnected even when intimacy should present. A generous way to describe a song from an artist who is otherwise so willing to expose his less flattering impulses. Beneath the ambition, the competitiveness, and the desire to be seen, there is a recognition that other people struggle with the same things. 

The intimacy is personal but not necessarily confessional in the conventional sense. He is not promising to provide answers or to emerge from his experiences as a more enlightened person. He is offering recognition: I have felt this, too. You are not the only one. Sometimes it is enough to sit in that uncomfortable realization and let it simply exist.

When he distills the motivations behind his work, he is considerably less sentimental. “I've wanted to make money, I've wanted to get high, and I've wanted to get laid or feel like I'm loved,” he says. In other words: sex, money, drugs. The bluntness is funny, but it also reflects the same philosophy that informs his songwriting. He is not interested in cleaning up his desires before putting them on record. He acknowledges them, however unflattering they might be, and sees what happens when he does.

He has a running joke with Artemas about cracking the code to surpass artists he views in a competitive lens. He is aware of the absurdity of treating another musician as a personal benchmark, but the joke contains a sincere ambition: to make something that reaches people on the same scale. His proposed strategy is less about studying the competition than refusing to be embarrassed by himself.

“Comparison is the thief of joy,” he says, before immediately qualifying the sentiment with his own particular brand of affection: “Fuck everyone else, but also love, peace and love to everyone else.”

He wants to be left alone and desperately wants to be seen. He wants to win, but he wants to believe the work would matter even if he loses. He wants to rebel, but wants someone to tell him how. He knows the internet is making him miserable, but he still wants to make something extraordinary enough to justify his place within it. Maybe authenticity is not the absence of these contradictions, but the willingness to admit they exist without trying to make them more palatable.

For now, he just keeps showing up. He writes, meditates, and collaborates with people he trusts daily, and is learning to stop waiting for the perfect feeling or the perfect moment to make something. He reminds himself, and us, that the point of making music and art is not to become the coolest person in the room. It might simply be to make something that allows another person, solitary in their headphones, to feel a little less alone.

“I feel like if I do what I want to such an unashamed degree,” he says, “I'll be fine.”

For someone who spent so much of his life trying to figure out how to be cool, it is a fitting place to start.