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Rolling Stone
10 New Country Artists You Need to Know
by Jeff Gage | July 25, 2018
Surrounded by creatives growing up in Denton, Texas, a college town north of Dallas, Morales took to impromptu singing during family gatherings while she was young. Taught to play guitar by her father, she began performing in local coffee shops at age 13. Those singer-songwriter roots were evident on her 2015 debut, Amaranthine, but the newly released All That Wanting takes on a theatrical sweep and rock & roll edge as Morales delivers her dusky ruminating with a quaver somewhere between Joni Mitchell and Kate Bush. Also a freelance graphic designer, Morales masterminded a series of music videos to accompany the album, and has busied herself with several outside musical collaborations, including a pair of Halloween-themed albums written and recorded in a month each with boyfriend Daniel Markham. 2017 also brought the Twin Peaks-inspired “Where You Are” from an EP she did with Seattle’s Jena Pyle.
Since she first appeared regularly on the scene nearly half a decade ago, Denton-based artist Claire Morales has been captivating audiences with her mesmerizing songwriting and must-see live shows. She established herself with the 2015 album Amaranthine. Her commanding singing voice anchors each track with a firm rooting cloaked in a hazy swath of a dreamy country stomp that would make Neil Young and Crazy Horse, circa 1974, proud. Since then, her palette has expanded. Morales has taken forays into glam-rock-infused funkier sound collages and dabbled in echo chamber singalongs that at times resemble Kate Bush or Hope Sandoval.
dallas observer
8 Female DFW Artists Who've Taken a Sledge Hammer to the Glass Ceiling
by Jeff Strowe | March 12, 2018
d magazine
Why Claire Morales Is Denton’s Best Young Singer-Songwriter
by Jeremy Hallock | March 31, 2016
A solo acoustic singer-songwriter since she was 13, Denton’s Claire Morales put a band together and released her first album last year. The transition has been a resounding success. A recent performance at Harvest House for 35 Denton turned heads. People were looking at each other, wide-eyed over what they were hearing. Morales is a brilliant artist with one of the best live shows in North Texas.
“I honestly couldn’t tell from the stage,” Morales says when asked about the crowd’s response. Perhaps she missed the size of the crowd or how enthusiastically they responded, cheering after every song as if a virtuoso had just improvised a mind-blowing solo. She must have also failed to notice that seemingly everyone at a music festival with more than 100 bands appeared to have Claire Morales on their list of must-see performers.
Morales has a fearless voice that makes a dramatic first impression. She stretches her vocals out across hazy folk rock songs in all sorts of ridiculously dynamic ways. But as wild as her voice is, her enunciation is always very clear. “Prettier,” the opening track from her debut album, Amaranthine, comes out of the gate with a surprising amount of gumption. You find yourself wondering where she learned to sing like that.
Morales was in choir in elementary school, but that’s the extent of her formal vocal training. “I felt like it might change my voice and make it sound maybe technically good, but not as interesting,” she says.