by Ciara Dolan
![music-layperson-jmorris.jpg]()
“Honestly, well, the ticket is worth the price,” Portland musician Julian Morris sings in the first breath of Layperson’s new folk-pop EP, Tidings. This opening track, “The Big Borrow,” comes across like an exhausted sigh of relief at the end of a long journey. For Morris, it’s the sound of resuming his place as “master of my own game.”
HANNAH CANTRELL
“Honestly, well, the ticket is worth the price,” Portland musician Julian Morris sings in the first breath of Layperson’s new folk-pop EP, Tidings. This opening track, “The Big Borrow,” comes across like an exhausted sigh of relief at the end of a long journey. For Morris, it’s the sound of resuming his place as “master of my own game.”
Morris currently plays in the local bands Little Star and Post Moves, but his latest record as Layperson represents a major reclamation of his voice.
“I didn’t have anybody to play in my own project, so I was just like, all right, I’m gonna learn how to play bass and drums and just see where this goes,” he says. “And that coincided with me deciding that I wanted to transition. When I started taking hormones, my voice changed and dropped like an entire octave. So I also didn’t feel confident in my ability to sing.”