Morray is in a chipper mood at New York’s Quad Studios. It’s a celebratory occasion; his new project, Long Story Short, his first since 2021’s Street Sermons, was set to drop in a few hours. The 12-track mixtape is his return to music and, as he puts it, the first step in a busy redux of his career. Lounging in one of the studio’s roller chairs, the Fayetteville native says he’s recorded over 400 songs in the past three years and has them organized and ready to go on his phone.
“Potential albums? Two. Potential mixtapes? Seven,” the 32-year-old says. “I’m loaded, bro. But the thing about being an artist like me who makes so much music, it’s like, ‘You really got to slow down, bro, and take your time and put it out,’ because I’m ready to give everybody everything.”
His vigor to drop is understandable. Morray went from working at a call center to a hit song with “Quicksand,” a melodic rags-to-riches reflection with over 236 million YouTube views. That same year, he dropped his debut Street Sermons, performed the hook on fellow Fayetteville artist J. Cole’s Grammy-nominated “My Life,” and opened up on Cole and 21 Savage’s The Off-Season tour. He raves, “2021 was probably the best year of my life to date.” He recalls wild tour memories of his like a Fayetteville mall-goer who tried to offer his girlfriend to him: “I said, ‘Look bro, no disrespect, but that’s weird. Y’all could have asked for a picture.’”
Morray seemed poised for more fan interactions and career accolades as his profile rose, but his musical output abruptly halted. He never stopped creating, but issues with his labels, Interscope Records and Pick Six, kept him from releasing music. Now, he’s out of his prior arrangement and is releasing Long Story Short on Empire Records. Interscope got to keep the 220 songs he recorded while under contract, but he says he got his freedom back.
He points to Long Story Short’s “No Excuses” and “Take Me Serious” as tracks that communicate his feelings about his previous label in a more aggrieved tone than the jovial demeanor he carried through our conversation. In the second verse of “No Excuse,” he mentions “snake niggas” and raps, “Fuck the label, fuck the CEO, they pussies, fuck ’em all / Get your name on dotted lines, they’ll use you up and write you off.” And on “Take Me Serious,” he rhymes, “If they aint got your back then fuck they front, that ain’t your man,” while rapping about the predatory duplicity that’s seemingly baked into the music business.
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“When I signed my deal, I ain’t know a lot,” he reflects. “’I’m fresh in the game, fresh from regular jobs, no manager, no lawyer, no nothing. You start finding out things, and now it’s like, conflict of interest popped up.” He got advice from industry peers J. Cole, Benny The Butcher, and VicBlends, and started to research for himself online. “Song credits, what does that mean? What does a songwriter mean? Can your lawyer also be your manager’s lawyer?” he says. “I’m looking up [what] I’m going through. And even Google was telling me, ‘Bitch, you’re stupid.’ So I’m like, ‘I can’t be stupid too much longer if everybody give me the information.’”
Morray also cites creative differences and a lack of control as reasons he sought to get out of his deal. Unable to release music, he started doing social media skits to stay in the public light. The content was funny, yet his real life was anything but. He says the industry purgatory put him “in a very dark place” that consumed him until he wrote the inspirational “Breakthrough,” the mixtape’s earliest song. The project represents a timestamp of him processing his feelings on his first industry go-around. But it’s not all glum. On the resilient “Good Day,” Morray reflects that he “spent three stacks on my little boy,” and on “Bet on Me,” he raps, “a real man stand ten toes for his daughter;” his three children loom large for him.
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And Morray tells me that his hometown ode “Carolina” came from an interaction he had with a dealer bringing him an ounce of weed. “Nigga brought the weed, he strapped up, I’m strapped up,” Morray remembers. “I gave him the money, I see his gun, he see my gun, we shrug it off, turned around, [and] I’m like, ‘This is some Carolina shit.’”
Long Story Short, like most of his recent music, has a deeper focus on melody than his previous, more “rap-y” work, he says. The project was predominantly done in North Carolina and Los Angeles, where he currently lives. At home, he’d write to different beats, then go to the studio for marathon eight-hour sessions where he’d record as many as 12 songs. His process sounds as procedural as life at the call center he worked at before “Quicksand,” but he’s navigating his new job with more agency. “You cannot treat the industry like a nine-to-five because, at the end of the day, you are the boss, you are the artist,” he says.
During his 2021 rise, Morray made waves in part for his deftness at fusing gospel elements with R&B and hip-hop. Even his first project, Street Sermons, referenced Christianity. “Every sound is gospel. Every sound to me is from God. No matter if it’s rock and roll, or hip-hop, country, R&B, we all blessed with the talent. So it should be easy to put back in what it came from.”
Morray considers himself “very religious” and says he watches Sarah Jakes Roberts (daughter of TD Jakes) and Cottonwood churches on television every Sunday. He says that in his mind, God answered his 2021 prayer for a bigger fanbase by taking his career back down to its roots and tasking him with starting over — this time with more industry know-how.
”I’m about to move like SoundCloud artists,” he says of his future plans. “I don’t give a fuck how much accolades I got, I’m about to be doing 300-500 cap rooms. I’m about to be doing whatever the fuck I can to let my people that fuck with me know, ‘Bro, I’m here.’” He tells me he lost over 60 pounds through a fitness regimen that heavily included boxing; he’ll be in better shape for tour life. Along with hitting the road, he also plans to expand his writing craft, working on a screenplay and TV show “that’s based on some Martin and Gina meets Belly shit.” He reflects, “It’s so crazy, the shit you find out you can do when you become an artist, I didn’t know I was going to do this shit until I started rapping.”
Going forward, Morray hopes Long Story Short is the start of a veritable anthology of music. “Long Story Short is going to tell you where I was,” he explains. “The next album going to tell you where I’m at and where I’m going. And then the next album’s going to tell you exactly where I want to be and where I’m at, hopefully. But I have to live life.” He may have had a long gap before his sophomore season, but Morray is taking it in stride. “I’m not going to sit here and blame nobody for my mistakes. Now I know better. I’m still blessed with the light to be able to have this second go around.”
