Curtis is not the only one who hasn’t heard Moran. The singer-songwriter has released two gorgeous, painfully overlooked albums over the last 20 years. But those who have heard them love them passionately.
Which is why, on its 20th anniversary, the Scottish label Last Night From Glasgow is reissuing her debut album, A Girl Called Eddy – both the title and the name she records under to avoid getting mixed up with the more famous Erin Moran, the actress who appeared in Happy Days and passed away in 2017 – remastered by Paul McGeechan.
A record blue in colour and mood, it felt like a classic when it came out and seems even more so now 20 years on.
“Yeah, well, I am proud of it,” Moran admits. “I think it stands the test of time. I said what I wanted to say in the way that I wanted to say it. It was the story of my life pretty much up to that point. I found the right band to help me get that out and my only ambition for it was to make a beautiful record.
“Even though it didn’t sell bazillions the folks that got it really got it and that means something still.”
New Jersey-born Moran has been in Nashville for the last couple of years. She made her second album Been Around there with Daniel Tashian, best known for his work with Kacey Musgraves and his own band The Silver Seas.
She came here with the idea of writing for others and because New York, her long-time home was getting a bit too much.
“I thought I needed a change. Post-Covid in New York City things got pretty wild.”
Indeed, she was attacked by a man in a bank lobby near her home downtown. “And I just thought, ‘Enough is enough I’ve got to get the hell out of here.’ and I just left two years ago.
“Not to say I won’t go back. I actually might go back in February, but I just needed a break.”
This flitting fits with the pattern of her life. She has spent much of the last two decades jumping back and forth across the Atlantic, earning a living in various ways and not recording anywhere near enough.
But what she has is golden. That first album was born out of love and heartbreak in New York in the early years of the century.
“Even though I was born in New Jersey I’ve lived and worked in New York City since ..” she makes a noise. “… The Civil War. Since basically the late eighties, early nineties. New York is basically my home and still is. I still have my apartment there.
“So I was there, happily married, just dealing with the death of my mum and that’s when I started demoing all the songs that would become that album.
“I just put my head down and that was my way of dealing with everything really. I threw myself into that. I was working at recording studios in downtown New York to pay the rent, living in a tiny little studio apartment in the West Village, just working on these songs every day, hoping I could get a bunch of them together enough to where I could bring them to somebody and say, ‘Will you help me make this record?’ Because I didn’t think I could do it on my own and I didn’t want it to be a little sparse indie four track demo kind of a thing.
“So once I got the songs into a decent shape I started thinking about who to approach and that was a bit of a long road to get there as well.”
One that took her in 2002 to Sheffield of all places where she recorded the album with Richard Hawley. Moran didn’t know Hawley from Adam, but flew to Sheffield and sat in with him and his band as they tried to perform Moran’s songs.
“I think the first one we tried was Tears All Over Town. The band went in live and just started playing it. I started crying. ‘Holy s***, this is it.’ It was a dream come true in terms of what it sounded like. It was exactly what I had dreamed of it sounding like. And so, yeah, we just went forward from there.”
The resulting album felt both fresh and lovingly familiar at the same time. There’s a lot of heartbreak on that album, Erin.
“Oh, a touch,” she says, laughing. “A huge lot of it, really, was dealing with the death of my mother. And, yes, sure, a bit of boy-girl stuff. That’s always necessary and a part of it all. And not every song is autobiographical. Most of it is with me, but some of it is not.”
The album came out to rapturous reviews but polite indifference from the general public. But those who got it really got it.
“It’s a weird one. I’ve had the strangest people like that record. I remember when it came out somebody emailed me and said, ‘Hey, do you know that one of the guys in Motorhead loves your record?’ I was like, ‘What? It’s not Lemmy, is it?’ It wasn’t Lemmy.”
Moran’s album was slightly ahead of the curve. Soon after Amy Winehouse and Duffy began to dig into some of the same references; that 1960s Bacharach and David-fuelled suburban vision of pop, all heartache and modernism.
“You grow up listening to what you listen to,” Moran notes. “My house was filled with that – Bacharach, the Beatles, Sinatra. I think there’s an internal template as a songwriter you grow up with if you have a family who likes music.
“The second record, I think, was a bit of an evolution from that, a bit more seventies. You just are who you are.”
There were 16 years between records though. And a lot of life happened in between.
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“I was married, got divorced, got ill for quite a bit of time with a mystery illness which I’ve recovered from. They thought it was MS for a hot minute and it wasn’t.
“So, a lot of craziness. Getting my degree from the University of London, worked at a zoo, worked a lot of different jobs. I just pulled away from the whole music thing.”
Hold on, worked in a zoo? Was that fun? “Oh yes, absolutely. The smell of hay and mucking out donkey poop, absolutely. I actually really liked it.”
Eventually, Moran settled back in New York. “I officially went back in 2010 and holed up there in my neighbourhood in the West Village and lived my life and started writing songs for the second record and contacted Daniel in Nashville because I thought that would be a good fit.”
Been Around came out in 2020 and saw her drawing on the music she listened to as a kid in the 1970s.
“You’ve got to grow in some direction. I wanted to dig into the vibes I loved as a kid, whether it was Todd Rundgren or Carol King.
“It’s a slightly happier record,” she adds, laughing. “A little bit more rhythmic movement ,a little bit more digging into different lyrical alleyways. The third record, we shall see.”
There’s going to be one? “I’m thinking about something. It’s all stewing and brewing and hopefully I won’t be pushing a zimmer frame by the time it comes out.”
In the meantime, next spring will see a covers album of songs from the 1970s which sees her with the likes of Rundgren, Aimee Mann and David Scott of Scottish band The Pearlfishers.
It seems there has always been a Scottish element to her music. Many of her favourite artists, she tells me, are from Scotland. “Paul Buchanan is just a massive, massive hero to me. Next to Prefab Sprout, The Blue Nile is probably my favourite band. The Blue Nile and Prefab Sprout have been in my life forever; they’re the soundtrack to my heart in a way.
“The Blue Nile hovered over me heavily on that first record. You might not hear it … Well, you probably hear it on Tears All Over Town. But you love what you love and then you put it through your own little funnel and what comes out on the other end is hopefully your own.”
These days Erin Moran spends her day walking the dog, doing odd jobs to pay the rent and dreams of breaking into musical theatre. These days Erin Moran has two fantastic albums to her name. These days it’s time Richard Curtis and everyone else started listening to her.
A Girl Called Eddy is rereleased on vinyl and CD by Last Night From Glasgow on November 29
