Such a Broken Heart'

Around the peak and fizzle of Y2K fears, Rex Moroux dreamt he sang and strummed a guitar to Hank Williams' "Lost Highway" and all the girls dug it. As soon as he could, he picked up a pawn shop piece and a friend taught him the song. Nearly five years later, he sings and writes songs that would make the original Cowboy Crooner tear up ... and the girls? Sitting at Tsunami during a recent Friday lunch, it seemed every young thing who passed by loaned him a smile and a gentle hand on his shoulder.

"Thankfully, it was three chords," Moroux says of the song that lead him to the stage. By his looks alone, Moroux is hard to finger as the creator of 105 & A Lullaby, a new disc chock-full of perpetually heart-broken country and honky-tonk tunes. There's the hair: brushy, tight curls. There's the face: scruffy. There's the shoes: well-worn, old-school Reeboks. There's the menu: sushi, which is an exception to his normal diet. ("I can't eat anything fun.") There's the vernacular: well-read and well-traveled city boy. But the songs - some so heart-broken that you'd swear he grew up somewhere that isn't known for having a good time - pushes aside his image snags. Moroux, born and raised in Lafayette, wears his heart on his sleeve and in pieces.

"I love sad songs; I'm a sucker for them, all my life. Some of my favorite songs are sad songs. I've had I guess I've had my share of bulls--t happen to me in my life," Moroux confesses. "Music is a real emotional art form. If you are really, really feeling strongly on it, often that emotion is sad or is longing. Those feelings really kind of put the pen to paper for me (rather) than, say, a happy moment. I'm a happy guy and I have a very fun life, but sometimes I am not ... I guess when you are at your most vulnerable, creatively you are at your best."

Last year, Moroux - and his band The Johns, a plural reference to the only constant member Cavan Carruth - recorded his demo Peggy Sue Is Punk Rock (an irrelevant reference to the Buddy Holly classic) at Ivan Klisanin's in Lafayette. Mention of the disc's name tends to lead Moroux into a twangy rendition of the song's dwang, dwang, dwangs. The new album takes its name from a less-than-conspicuous source. The last song, "105 & A Lullaby," is typical Moroux weeper, relating how it feels to make only $105 a week. As he says, "I love the idea that the only time you don't feel broke is when you're sleeping."

Although it only took a total of eight early-fall days to record, mixing it and other loose ends pushed the release four months past what Moroux hoped would be an pre-2004 drop date. He originally picked a studio in Austin for a summer recording session, but thanks to connections and a deal he couldn't pass up, Moroux & The Johns laid down the tracks in Nashville. "We were hooked up with a deal, so if you don't really pay for it you can't bitch about it."

Moroux's have-talent, get-female-attention plan started in high school, where he fronted cover bands mainly to land chicks. The gimmick would eventually be shelved and buried. Later, graduation brought him to the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He loved literature and writing, but in the end he says it wasn't what he wanted to do.

Then on a July 4, 2000, visit to an open mic at Ego's - a bar in a parking garage in Austin - with a days worth of courage fermenting in his stomach, he took to the stage and performed solo for the first time. It was another Hank tune. Not too long afterwards, he and a friend decided they needed a change of scenery. So, armed with a play that he convinced himself was good, but "might not have been," he headed to sunny California and figured out what he wanted to do with his life - write songs with the three chords he knew.

"I liked the forum; I liked to manipulate words on the smaller scale and not have to write a complete story. It's all about word choice and how to fool with them," says Moroux. Out West, he picked up gigs in coffee shops and sharpened his skills. After about two years, though, it was time to come home.

For the student-turned-free-range poet, songwriting is not limited to the tear-stained variety. His inspiration may come from a melody, a certain political expression he'd like to make or an emulation of Bob Dylan. Another favorite is building a song based on an expression that pops into his head.

Here and there, peppered between weeping guitars and moaning lap steels swirl lines like, "Prisons only reek of sympathy;" "There's a stands-for-nothing city and a firewater bed;" "The border towns take out the trash/Senoritas feed ya devils/El Dorados turn to ash."

"A lot of this stuff is really just wordplay; it doesn't have to have an end to it. There's been songs where you start out with just this neat little phrase and something that rhymes," he says regarding songs like "Ruth Mathilda," which he wrote around the line, "The city is for lovers/The highway is for me."

"You build the song that way around it. It doesn't even have to be the first words or the last words," says Moroux. One of the most solemn tracks on the album comes not from a clever phrasing coined but from the flip side of having a huge heart. "Greatest Mistake" is the tale of waking up to someone else's sunrise. In the lyrics - "The sun paints an terrible picture ... Let the moon tell a lie" - you can almost taste the dew in the air and smell the funk of last night's beer and cigarettes.

"With me anyway, I want to constantly be in tune with little things like that, little ways to say things that are different. Songwriting to me is completely an exercise with fooling around with the English language, seeing how neat it can be."



Man of the Road

If Moroux had his first pick, following his CD release party and an upcoming Blue Moon Festival International de Louisiane gig he'd embark on a tour of a magical land of midnight golf, Legoland, lakes and Fjords. Some intrepid promoter might dub it the Cold Wind, Colder Tears tour.

"I really want to go to Scandinavia." Scandinavia?!? "Yeah, " says Moroux, "I don't know, I have been hearing that they just really accepted this kind of music. So I was thinking about doing a show or two in Scandinavia."

He hasn't planned it out yet, but his other option would likely take him on the road at least a couple of months, no shorter than one, as he enjoys putting some new dirt under his feet.

"I've actually never been to Nebraska ...," he laughs of a song titled with the same name, "... but I have been to a lot of places. It's important, and I think that some of the songs really function as road songs, and I think that there is a rhythm to the road. There's all these great songwriters that always have these great road songs. It really affects the way you think. It's always a muse: being able put yourself in unfamiliar territory to not be comfortable, that's always going to help. Some of the best songs I have written haven't been in Lafayette, that's for sure."

For Moroux, the Hub City can be a clever muse. It's here that he experienced love and loss of thereof. And it's here that most of those heartbreakers remain. Lafayette's reputation as a non-stop good time burg doesn't hurt his affection either. Just as tight as it draws him in, it also does its part to shove him away.

"There's a flip side to that in that you get so familiar, you get so comfortable and you get so drunk, all the time you get into just being like happy-go-lucky, not doing s--t and you find that you really haven't sat down and wrote and really sat down and worked in a couple of weeks. So you kind of have to constantly keep that in line," says Moroux.

"Not that I am a total night owl ... although I probably am ... yeah, it's true. I definitely party too much. There's this whole romantic ideal about living the night life and going home and writing songs, but the fact is that it just doesn't happen that way. You might draw on something that happens, but I've never gotten drunk and written a f---ing masterpiece. I have gotten drunk and embarrassed myself."