Matthew Burnette, Staff Writer

When Nashville-based singer songwriter Morgan Johnston takes the Who stage at this year’s Bonnaroo, it’ll be her first time stepping foot on the festival’s hallowed terrain.

“I’ve never played Bonnaroo but obviously I’ve been living in Nashville for like eight or nine years, so I’ve always wanted to play there,” she said. “When I signed to a booking agency recently and they told me, I was like so excited. I told all of my family.”

Johnston says she is most looking forward to just taking in the environment of an event like Bonnaroo.

“I haven’t been to that many festivals in my life, so I think I’m excited to experience a festival like this one, the kind that you camp at and stuff,” she explained. “I think I’m just excited for the whole ‘Bonnaroo in a field’ experience.”

While growing up around Cape Cod, Massachusetts, Johnston, whose father plays guitar and drums, began writing songs as a way to express herself.

“I started writing songs as kind of an outlet when I was little,” she recalled. “Then as I got a little bit older, I started to play local bars and kind of get paid gigs. Then when I turned 21, I took a trip to Nashville for the first time.”

Through a friend, Jonston was connected to country star Brett Young who at the time was still in the early part of his career, having just signed a record deal.

“He showed us around town, and I got to see Nashville and they way that people are getting into the music industry. I loved to write songs, but I didn’t really know how to make the connection, in that, how to actually make this happen as a career,” she remembered. “I was hooked. I moved here about six months later and ever since I’ve been grinding away.”

“There’s such a contagious excitement for dreamers here,” she added. “I think people have this view on life that anything is possible, so I think the community has been my favorite part about being here.”

One highlight that Johnston noted from her music career so far was getting to open for Dustin Lynch at her hometown venue the Cape Cod Melody Tent.

“It was already exciting enough to be opening for him in front of my hometown friends and family, but he pulled me up on stage to sing his duet ‘Thinkin’ About You’ with him,” she recalled. “I wasn’t expecting him to do that so when he did that and I got to sing that in front of my mom and dad and all of my family and friends. That was pretty cool.”

Johnston writes everything that she puts out and often pulls from either a personal experience or a shared experience. For instance, one of our songs “Family Tree” deals with finding people in life that aren’t related but blood but have a hand in shaping who you are.

She said it was a song that she had trouble writing at first because she wanted to properly honor those people.

“It was something I had wanted to write about for a long time, and I couldn’t quite get it right to a place that I liked it,” she said. “Then I wrote this one with Lydia Dall and Joe Tounge and it just felt right, and it felt like it captured my experiences with people who have loved me who aren’t blood but have kind of helped shape me into who I am.”

Life itself, Johnston says, isn’t black and white but instead “full of the gray” and she also enjoys writing songs that aren’t down the middle.

“I feel like I love writing concepts about the gray area and finding ways to put words in people’s mouths,” she explained. “I love when someone listens to my song and they’re like ‘You just took the words right out of my mouth. I didn’t know how to describe that feeling,’”

Johnston says that her music is ever evolving, and she feels like she is in a large stage of evolving at the moment. In addition to working in the “gray” area, she also tries to maintain a balance between connection and her “fun” side.

“I like to be able to relate to people and bring a vulnerable aspect through my music that makes people feel like we are the same,” she said. “I’m also kind of trying to pull out the more fun side of me too because I am a fun happy person, so I’ve been trying to do some more up tempo, honest, vulnerable stuff but still fun.”

Though she says that she hopes to one day have a number one song on the radio and tour and even headline arenas, her biggest goal right now is to stay true to herself.

“I think my biggest goal is to stay close to myself and my why through all of the things that I accomplish because I think it’s easy to get lost in a lot of the goals,” she said.

Johnston will have around half an hour or so to play in the mid-afternoon on the last day of Bonnaroo this year. She says the set will be “stripped down.”

“It’ll be me with a guitar player singing harmonies and a keyboard player,” she explained. “It’s going to be a mix of everything: some of my heartfelt kind of ballads and my up-tempo fun stuff. It’s going to be a range, and it’s going to be a lot of fun.”