Kylie Morgan's imperfect journey to country stardom finally yields a debut album

For the first time, Kylie Morgan is renting a tour bus for arena dates with Old Dominion to close 2023.

She hasn't gone a day yet on the tour bus without spilling a glass of red wine.

The 28-year-old laughs about the notion that she thought sun-kissed late afternoons on the tour bus would be so idyllic that she could lavishly drink wine from wide-mouthed glasses with her beloved trademark mermaids on the stems.

The sky is threatening a rainstorm, and the mermaid glasses are gathering dust under a sink.

For the first of many times in a conversation with The Tennessean, the moment allows her to acknowledge how healthy her relationship has grown of late with imperfection.

Unfortunately, she has to grow to accept imperfection while squarely caught between who she realizes herself to be and what the country music industry is already quite comfortable accepting of her.

Troubling those waters is that the Oklahoma native is also a peak-era Shania Twain devotee. Thus, she's keenly aware that first impressions often lead to second chances for songs to resonate.

Her EMI Records-released debut album "Making It Up As I Go" finds her finally emerging from the final vestiges of who she was when she was 14 and beginning her country music career fueled with a naive, child-like sense of what Nashville success entailed.

Contemplating gold-medal-level success since trading in balance beams for guitar strings at age 12 and arriving as a country star 16 years later — still seeking that gold-medal equivalent — is quite the journey.

"Making It Up As I Go" has her further along her creative path as a fully realized adult and nearer to golden acclaim than ever.

That realization required using the romantic heartbreak inflicted upon her as the best canvas to paint the flaws inherent in her truth.

Thus, songs like "Sugar Daddy," "Bad Girlfriend" and "If He Wanted To He Would" reflect a frank awareness of the lessons learned along the way during adulthood's formative years.

"Speaking my truth makes me comfortable in my skin, but it's also terrifying," Morgan says. "I feel like an open wound and afraid of getting hurt even further."

Undeterred by feeling metaphorically wounded, her album contains "Quarter Life Crisis," a song she solo-wrote five years ago.

It reflects feeling wholly unprepared for seemingly unbelievable dreams that are already — and unexpectedly — having a tangible impact on her life.

The moment plunged Morgan into a vulnerable headspace that she overcame.

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"As an artist and creative, your brain always moves in a hundred different directions," she says. "However, being in the moment and loving exactly where I'm at has allowed the music I'm releasing to feel invigorated by being mature enough to survive a turning point in my career and life."

There are 21 co-writers on the 12 tracks of "Making It Up As I Go," helping her with those songs.

In a town where songwriters are driven by an "authenticity" ethos, using them as a series of checks and balances to maintain a newfound awareness of the meaning of creating from a hyper-self-actualized place is important.

Having songwriters around her with "perspectives of (herself) that (she) cannot see" yields results like her work with Megan Conner and Jeff Garrison on "Old Me."

The song is the culmination of Morgan's late-night guitar meanderings ("I woke up in the middle of the night and thank God my husband's an artist, saw me over-writing a song, as I often initially do and was like, 'You do you, Boo'") being filtered through the perspective of those looking to refine her thoughts-as-lyrics.

"I'm an Energizer Bunny," Morgan adds. "I have so many things I want to accomplish in what feels like so little time.

"When I was 14, I was led to believe I could win the entertainer of the year award by the time I was 16. I'm glad that didn't happen. I couldn't have envisioned how grateful I would be for the work it would take to get (to that level of success). However, even better, it makes remaining excited by that work and hitting milestones like this album along the way, mean that much more."

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Nashville singer-songwriter Kylie Morgan releases her debut album