Gold Motel

After The Hush Sound went on hiatus, Morgan moved from Chicago to Los Angeles looking for inspiration. There, she soaked up the Southern California music scene, going to five or six concerts a week.[1] Morgan began writing nostalgic, summery music inspired by her time in California, which would eventually be the songs for Gold Motel. Upon her return to Chicago, Morgan started recording songs with friend Dan Duszynski of Chicago band This is Me Smiling, which led to the recording of Gold Motel's first single, "Perfect in My Mind". Morgan and Duszynski were then joined by Matt Minx and Adam Coldhouse, both from This is Me Smiling, and Eric Hehr formerly of Chicago bands, The Villains of Verona and The Yearbooks. The band worked as a complete unit to finish the rest of the songs that would come to make up their first album, Summer House.[2]

In an interview with SPIN.com, Hehr talked about the inspiration for Summer House's lead single, "Safe In LA," which was a song he wrote prior to joining Gold Motel: "Hehr wrote "Safe in L.A." before he joined Gold Motel, while enduring wintertime in Chicago. "I was kind of bummed out, living in dreary Chicago, and my friends were in L.A., so I wrote the song as a love letter to California, romanticizing about the lifestyle I presumed they were living out there," he tells SPIN.com. Hehr brought the song to his new bandmates, and, to use Morgan's term, they "Gold Motel-ified" it, changing the lyrics a bit and imbuing the soulful, '60s pop that surges through the entire album. "We made it a little more bouncy, sweeter, and softer than the other version," Morgan says. Adds Hehr: "Everyone in the band loves Motown, and I think you hear that, too."[3]

The band decided on the name Gold Motel after pulling words out of a hat.[4]

Gold Motel's first show ever was at the Beat Kitchen in Chicago with Secret Colours on December 22, 2009, before a sold-out crowd.[5] In January 2010, Gold Motel opened for Butch Walker during his residency at Schuba's in Chicago. Since then, Gold Motel has toured across the United States with bands like Family of the Year, Skybox, Mark Rose, hellogoodbye, and Steel Train. Gold Motel played at South By Southwest and Lollapalooza in 2011 and in June 2011, Gold Motel toured the UK with hellogoodbye.[6]

In August 2011, Gold Motel released a new single called "Leave You in Love", which appeared on the band's self-titled album.[7] The song was written by Hehr and Morgan, who took a collection of Hehr's unused lyrics and pieced them together to form the song. In an interview with The Total Scene, Morgan describes the writing process: "Usually, one of us brings a skeletal sketch and then we arrange and record together. For example, Eric brought "These Sore Eyes" with lyrics, melody, chords. I brought "Brand New Kind of Blue" in the same way – with lyrics, melody, chords, and we just arranged together. For a handful of the songs, Eric and I sat down and wrote lyrics together. "Leave You in Love", for example, is an amalgam of a handful of free-write lyrics he had laying around that I then organized and added to."[2]

• Thetotalscene.blogspot.com
• Spin.com