Name: Mia Morgan
Occupation: Singer, songwriter
Nationality: German
Current release: Mia Morgan's new album silber is out via Wiedergänger.
Recommendation for Kassel, Germany: Kassel has a lot of castles and chateaus, hence the name, so one should always pay the Orangerie and Schloss Wilhelmshöhen, perhaps even Schloss Wilhelmstal, which is more instagram-able, a visit when around.
Topic I am passionate about but rarely get to talk about: I do have a lot of niche interests and fixations on media or trinkets, but there’s always thousands of others who share them. I’m into vampires, of course, and horror, but I never shut up about it, and I know exactly why so many people are interested in them, too. I’ve recently developed an intense hyperfixation on the anime "Death Note“, and thought since I was so late to the party, I’d find no up to date content online to feed my obsession.
But apparently, there’s hundreds of thousands of people on TikTok who want to suck on L’s toes! NOT ME THOUGH. I hate feet, that’s something I rarely get to talk about. I can admit they can look appealing on a woman, but something about touching them makes me want to throw up.

If you enjoyed this Mia Morgan interview and would like to know more about her music, visit her official homepage. She is also on Instagram, and tiktok. 



Do you think that some of your earliest musical experiences planted a seed for your interest in writing lyrics or poetry? How and when did you start writing?

I started writing little stories, poems and lyrics as soon as I’d learned how to put words together. To me, making music and writing - in whichever sense - have always been two sides of the same coin. And its shimmer has drawn me in ever since I can remember.

I do recall asking my mother for the translations of English song I listened to as a child and obsessively collecting the “lyrics“ pages from teenage magazines later on because I wanted to be able to really get to the actual meaning of the music that meant so much to me. And then I just started making up my own.

Some songs I came up with as a kid still get stuck in my head from time to time. One I had dedicated to my grandmother more often than others. The lyrics went (loosely translated): “Thank you so much for cooling my mosquito bites, dear Grandma, thank you, thank you“. I must’ve been around three or four when I came up with it.

Entering new worlds and escapism through music and literature have always exerted a very strong pull on me. What do you think you are drawn to most when it comes to writing?

I’ve always had very vivid daydreams, strong emotions and a heavy sense of melancholy within me. Writing and creating makes me feel like I’m in control of those intense feelings when nothing else does.

As soon as I turn what’s in my head and my chest into written (and/or sung) words, it detaches from my core to fulfil its true purpose outside of me. The purpose of a vivid daydream might be being turned into fiction. The purpose of strong emotions might be to inspire a song. The purpose of melancholy might be to create something everlasting.

I think I’m mostly drawn to writing because it makes me feel like I am fulfilling my purpose, just as performing does, and because to me, writing is the closest thing to immortality one can experience. I used to journal everyday and only stopped because life got so busy.

I still have the urge to document everything I do and feel and not giving in to it most days kind of feels like I’m depriving myself one of my most basic needs.

What were some of the artists and albums which inspired you early on purely on the strength of their lyrics? What moves you in the lyrics of other artists?

Both as an artist and a fan, I’m drawn to contrasts: Melancholic lyrics colliding with heavy instrumentals, touching on uncomfortable or even sad subjects while upholding a sense of morbid humour, submission to pop-hook-keywords but never to easy rhymes, these are some things I both love to play with (I think “(spielen mit den großen) JUNGS“ checks all of these boxes) and love to listen to.

As every other girl who came of age in the 2010s, browsing tumblr while listening to Lana Del Rey’s love songs about beautiful, but evil men, Pepsi cola and The American Dream really had an impact on me.

The way she wrote about affection and desire really resonated with me. It wasn’t the empowering "I’m gonna get that guy cause I’m hot“-radio pop we were used to, it was filled with existential dread, longing and guilt.



I’ve always been the type to yearn, I think it shows in my songs. “Vage Ahnung“ off my first album FLEISCH is a song about limerence …



... “indeinerhaut“ off silber deals with the feeling of desiring someone so much you want to crawl into their skin and live inside their body just to know what it feels like to them when they fuck you.



Raw honesty, brutality and a bit of body horror were often perfectly combined by this once-beloved-now-despised German metal band I don’t necessarily want to name as well. Their earlier work contains some of the most gut-wrenching lines I’ve ever heard.

Currently, I’m really into Sofia Isella as well.



Whoever puts terrible things into beautiful words inspires me. Whoever manages to speak on the terrible aspects of beautiful things, as well.

Have there been song lyrics which actually made you change (aspects of) your life? If so, what do you think, leant them that power?

If only I could quote any niche underground artist’s lyrical masterpiece right now, but instead, I’ll, once again, bring up the topic of Die Ärzte …

Much like every German alternative kid, I grew up on their music and even though the majority of their lyrics is purposely goofy, there’s one line in an otherwise silly song that always stuck with me: “Dein Spiegelbild ist anderen egal“, from “Lied vom Scheitern“ [A Song about Failing] off their 2007 Album Jazz ist anders.



It basically means “others do not care for your reflection (in a mirror)“. People don’t see you the way you see yourself. They do not value what you look like in a mirror, but who you are in the real world.

That’s a very comforting and beautifully sobering thought to me.

The relationship between words and music has always intrigued me. How do you see it? In how far can music take you to places with your writing you would possibly not have visited without it?

Writing lyrics always challenges me to be more precise and minimalistic. I tend to ramble a lot and really explore feelings with words.

Back in school, I’d always exceed word counts in essays with ease. Nowadays, I get terribly frustrated when I have to cut down on lyrics in the process of writing a song, but it’s almost always necessary, and the song almost always eventually profits from it.

On my first album, FLEISCH, it’s a little more obvious: I wanted to squeeze a lot of text into a few minutes of music. For silber, I let my producer challenge me to let go of my overbearing need to go into detail with every single line. I’m glad silber isn’t as stuffed with lyrics as FLEISCH was.

Less can be more. I would’ve never said that two years ago.

What are areas/themes/topics that you keep returning to in your lyrics?

As previously mentioned, yearning. Hunger. Anger. The monstrosity a young girl can be. Female desire and rage. Sex. Jealousy. All “deadly“ sins. Religious imagery and metaphors. Body horror, hair, nails, skin and blood. Disappointment in myself and others. Resignation. Hope.

On the basis of a piece off your most recent release, tell me about how the lyrics grew into their final form and what points of consideration were.

For silber I knew there’d be an overall theme. Each song off the album is loosely tied to the idea of receiving a consolation price. You’re good, but never good enough. You know what you want but you just can’t get it. And you’re well aware you should be grateful for what you’ve got, but something is missing and you can’t rest until you have it, and everything else, too.

In Hole’s “Doll parts“, Courtney Love wants to be „the girl with the most cake“. I always did, too.



The title track “silbertablett“ is very explicit about these notions, I view it as the lyrical root of all other songs.



I recorded the first demo in winter 2023, and back then, I had a different first part of the chorus in mind. Twice as many words at an even faster pace, and as mentioned, I got a little angry when Lukas, my producer, told me I needed to get to the point quicker, and that the lyrics weren’t quite desperate enough for the frustration I wanted to convey.

So we switched it up. From something along the lines of “I give it all I got, I really dig into it, I try so hard to pull myself together“ to (loosely translated) “What else do I have to try for a little slice of cake?“ That question is, in my opinion, way more powerful, and a much better reflection of the anger and dissatisfaction that inspired “silbertablett“.

And what worked for this particular song worked for the entire album: I really had to get to the point quicker. It’s an angry album after all, and the time angry women can command an audience’s undivided attention is very limited.

Do you tend to start writing with what will be the first line of the finished lyrics? The chorus? At a random point? What are the words that set the process in motion?

That really depends on the song!

Sometimes, a random chorus just pops up in my head, as though a piece of my mind secretly wrote it for me a while ago, then proposes the idea of turning it into a song. Sometimes, I’m in the studio working on an instrumental, and at some point, I have to consciously decide which topic I want to write, then sing about. Sometimes, there’s a finished instrumental and some written notes that just fit perfectly together.

It really does vary.

I'd love to know how you think the meaning or effect of an individual song is enhanced, clarified or possibly contradicted by the EPs, or albums it is part of. Does the song, for example, need to be consistent with the larger whole?

Not necessarily, no. I do, however, think, that meanings of songs are always enhanced, clarified and verified by the artists who wrote them. And tied to who they are, what they look like, what they represent in public and what they choose to keep private.

I think my music - the lyrics as well as the instrumentals - only really begin to make sense when listeners know at least a little bit about me as a person. And I do think that applies for most artists, at least those who write their own music. Despite my decision to transition from wave pop to heavier sounds, both FLEISCH and silber make sense in its consistency with ME as the larger whole.

And I’ve always wanted to be known for who I really am, that’s why I never took on a stage persona or took any precautions to divide my true self from who I am to my audience. There’s artists I’ve shared stages with, colleagues, you could say, who grew up ridiculously rich and perfectly neurotypical, yet sing about their struggles with poverty and mental illness. That could never be me. I get that it sells and it’s always great to draw attention to serious topics when you’ve got a big audience, but I loathe inauthenticity for the sake of being “relatable“.

I sing what I feel, I sing what I know. Therefore, I do understand that my core audience is limited to people who’ve had similar experiences as me, who were part of the same subcultures, who listen to the same music, watch the same films. Potentially have the same diagnosis. And while silber definitely stays consistent in its lyrical theme, the overall sound of the album plays with different genres in a way that could possibly seemingly shake that theme from its embedding for those who don’t pay much attention to what exactly I’m singing about.

I’ve had a few journalists complain about a lack of coherence within the lyrics of silber, which I can only trace back to their very own lack of experience as a woman with a BPD diagnosis that tries to navigate through a male dominated, creative field while art is slowly being replaced by artificial intelligence (or empathy for such). Good for them.

When you're writing song lyrics, do you sense or see a connection between your voice and the text? Does it need to feel and sound “good” or “right” to sing certain words? What's your perspective in this regard of singing someone else's songs versus your own?

That’s a very good question, I do think it happens subconsciously, at least to a certain degree.

I struggle with harsh S- and T-sounds when I record, every producer I’ve worked with had to De-Ess my vocals to the point where it began to sound as though I had a lisp. So I caught myself trying to write lyrics with as little S- and T-sounds as possible lately.

I would love to know a little about the feedback you've received from listeners or critics about what they thought some of your songs are about – have there been “misunderstandings” or did you perhaps even gain new “insights?”

Feedback from my core audience has been almost exclusively positive in the sense that I feel as though they really understand what I’m trying to convey. Like I said, I think if listeners come from a similar background or made similar experiences, and if they know me as a person, as well as they can, they just get it. Some things can only be truly understood when they happen to you.

But even though some experiences one writes about might be limited to a certain demographic, doesn’t mean people outside cannot relate in other ways. You’d think “VaterMutterTochter“ would only speak to other girls who are their parents’ only child, but in fact, I was proven wrong during my tour earlier this year.



In “VaterMutterTochter“ I sing about the pain of being my parents’ only child and the fear and melancholy that comes with being an only daughter. The song deals with topics of my father’s illness and disability, growing older, motherhood, generational trauma and my eating disorder and is therefore my most personal song. I never intended for it to be relatable.

So naturally, you wouldn’t expect a middle aged man to be able to find his own meaning within these lyrics, but on tour, I’ve had a beautiful, long talk with male listener in his, I’d say, late forties, who was grieving. He told me driving to my show to hear me play this song was an essential, necessary part of his grieving journey. We’re all someone’s child and we’ll always be.

Then, there’s “indeinerhaut“, which I wrote about a heterosexual relationship.



As previously mentioned, it’s a song about wanting to feel yourself from inside of your loved one’s body and general gender envy. I’ve learned that these lyrics can also be interpreted in a way that makes them very relatable to FTM trans members of my audience, which I love.

For the most part, I’m fascinated by how songs become “their own“ once I’ve put them out. They’re such an important part of me, but they belong to people, then.

There’s one misunderstanding I’m utterly appalled by, though, and I recently just found out about it. For some reason, instead of “Vielleicht bin ich untot“, which translates to "I might be undead“, a lot of people were convinced I’m singing “Vielleicht bin ich Unzucht“ which translates to “I might be sodomy“ in “JENNIFER CHECK“.



I do NOT understand how a person could BE sodomy, and why people would assume I, out of all people, would WANT to BE sodomy(?).