Rex Moroux
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Rex Moroux

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Band Americana Singer/Songwriter

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"The Celebrity Cafe.com"

Rex Moroux is an honest, intelligent and refreshing voice in the world of country music. This album is musically complex while still being strait forward. His songs seem to come directly from the heart, with no gimmicks or concessions toward making money over artistic expression. In some points his voice is so honest and clear it almost resembles that of a young choirboy singing strait from his soul. Rex comes across as intelligent but not stuck up. He has opened himself here in a refreshingly open and honest way. “Royal Street Inn” is the sort of album that brings you to a different place, an easier way of looking at life away from the fast pace of the 21st century.

Reviewer's Rating: 9.5
- Drew Mulkins


"The Times of Acadiana"

Rex Moroux: Royal Street Inn (www.rexmoroux.com)

October 11, 2006

I left Grant Street at 11:30 a few Fridays back when Rex Moroux hadn't yet begun inaugurating his CD-release party and I didn't feel like waiting. Now I wish I'd stayed. This disc, his second official one, not only begins with the mellow vibe that 105 and a Lullaby ended with, it continues with and expands it as well. Cincinnati glides by on electronica-glazed soundscapes both frosty enough for Coldplay and warm enough to accommodate cellist David Henry. No doubt producer Justin Tocket deserves some, and maybe a lot of, credit for aiming for and establishing such a precarious balance, but Moroux wrote the songs, and he sings them too, in a plaintive, quavering tenor that aches but never goes wimpy. Any one of these songs could light up Triple-A radio, but my favorite is Blow Away, which sounds like the music I'd like to think Rick Danko is making in rock-and-roll heaven.

Rating: Four-and-a-half last waltzes out of five.



- Arsenio Orteza


"ink19"

10/18/06

Royal Street Inn is Austin-based Rex Moroux's sophomore release and charts the people and places the singer/songwriter has encountered since he first started writing songs only six years ago.
Those experiences shape Moroux's unique blend of Americana, folk and country, as material such as the melancholic "Cincinnati" -- written during what must have been a particularly depressing visit to Memphis -- and the more upbeat "Blow Away" emphatically demonstrate.
With among other things, the death of a family member and a short-lived stint in LA to chronicle, Moroux has no shortage of deeply personal material such as "For Kali", but the brilliant "Extended Stay" -- describing "a dream sequence through any American city" -- emphasizes the range and diversity of his songwriting.
Royal Street Inn is drenched in honest personal recollections and although its lyrical observations are not always of the obvious kind, it provides an illuminating glimpse into the mind and muse of a talented troubadour.

Rex Moroux: www.rexmoroux.com



- Andrew Ellis


"Smother.net"

Lafayette is the home to one-time playwright turned musician Rex Moroux. His music is purely ‘merican with roots rock, folk rock, and Americana swirled together. A bit of honky tonk culture is culled for emphasis on some of the songs. But the majority of the tracks seem like future Dylan pieces composed in a multi-million studio but recorded in a home studio—at least that’s the earnest vibe that’s going on throughout the stirring “Royal Street Inn”. - Smother.net


Discography

Peggy Sue Is Punk Rock (EP) - 2000
105 And A Lullaby - 2004
Royal Street Inn - 2006

Photos

Feeling a bit camera shy

Bio


“I’ve been a drunk, a lover, occasional liar, sweetheart, asshole, unemployed troublemaker, raconteur, bon vivant, wannabe Teddy boy, wannabe Bob Dylan, and on occasion a pretty goddamned good boyfriend.”

That’s Austin singer/songwriter Rex Moroux’s capsule self-assessment, offered not as lyrics in a confessional tune – though the sentence does take on a sweet little rhythm – but in answer to a question regarding what jobs he held before embarking on his music career.

And if the Lafayette, La., native couldn’t express himself musically, he says, “I hope I would have access to morphine, Gertrude Stein’s ‘The Making of Americans’ and air-conditioning, because that’s about the only other three things I could see myself doing.”

Moroux doesn’t mention that he’s funny, self-deprecating and whip-smart – and actually, pretty honest – but those traits come through in his conversation and his music, a rootsy amalgam of influences as vast as the record collection amassed by his late father, who DJed in high school.

Fortunately, Moroux, 28, has been able to devote himself to developing his art – and his second album, “Royal Street Inn,” named for a New Orleans hostel, is filled with the winning results.

Moroux started composing songs while living in Los Angeles, where he’d gone in 2000 to write for a playhouse after attending Loyola in New Orleans and the University of Louisiana in Lafayette. He’d already written a play and wound up doing some pieces for actors’ workshops, but once he discovered songwriting, he says, “I knew that’s what I really wanted to do.

“It’s such a beautiful, simple, and wonderfully enlightening form,” Moroux explains. “I view songs as immortal; they are on the wind, they can’t be burned or banned… I grew up in the heart of Cajun Louisiana, so it always seemed like music was in the air. It usually was, but even when it was silent, someone was crying. I think that’s what it comes down to. People who write honest songs are criers. I don’t like to cry, normally; I have to control it, then it’s like an orgasm. That’s why I do this.”

He began performing at coffeehouses in L.A., doing what he calls his “pseudopolitical, Marxism lite songs” (“I was a Dylanophile, like most people,” is his explanation). He loved it, and was well received, but a family tragedy drew him back to Louisiana. His beloved first cousin, a football player for the University of Florida, died of heat stroke during a practice. When Moroux went home for the funeral, he couldn’t face returning to L.A.

He wound up forming a band, Rex Moroux & the Johns, and playing what he describes as “heavy alt-country, kind of honky-tonk, real Telecaster-heavy stuff.” (Moroux, who didn’t pick up a guitar until six years ago, plays only acoustic.)

In 2002, he recorded an EP, “Peggy Sue is Punk Rock,” and followed it up with an album titled, “105 and a Lullaby,” that he describes as “very honky-tonky.”

But Moroux decided he wanted to try a different direction. He was spending a lot of time listening to Wilco and fellow Louisianian Jeff Mangum (of Neutral Milk Hotel), and they touched a nerve. He noticed his songs were getting more esoteric, and less band-friendly, so he went back to working solo.

His songs can still be described as comfortably Americana, colored with pop-rock flourishes like the electric guitar and twinkly piano of “Extended Stay America,” an upbeat tune Moroux refers to as “a neat little dream sequence through any big American city.”

“Cincinnati,” a song inspired by a depressing visit to Memphis, layers strings around Moroux’s plaintive vocals. “Blow Away” has a slightly countrified, rockabilly feel, and lyrics like, “It’s a one-room circus/It’s a song in black and white/It’s a candle a bit too nervous/blow away, baby blow away.”

“I write the lyric with the melody; I don’t like to do one or the other,” says Moroux. “The most exciting thing about songwriting to me is that there is no process. Some I sit and work at, some come in five minutes.”

“I wrote ‘Cincinnati’ while my producer (Nashvillian Justin Tocket) was setting up the mikes in about three minutes. And I think it’s far and away one of the best songs I’ve ever written. At the same time I’ve had songs that have taken a week to get just right. Sometimes I’ll be thinking about some little saying or something and I’ll build a song around it. Sometimes a melody will jump out of nowhere from an invisible Mexican radio station and I’ll be afraid I ripped it off. Thankfully, usually I haven’t.”

Tocket and Moroux met through Ross DuPre’, Marc Broussard’s road manager and now Moroux’s manager as well.

“We’re definitely kindred spirits,” says Moroux of his two-time producer, who also plays bass with Radney Foster.

Certainly they share at least a few influences. Among the many Moroux claims are Townes Van Zandt, Leonard Cohen, Jeff Tweedy, the Stones, the Faces, Hank Williams, Willie Nelson, Tammy