Knox Morris stands onstage, stares out into the depths of the famed 9:30 Club in Washington, DC, and raises his arms to the heavens. The backing track to his song, a synth-heavy pop-punk number called “Going, Going, Gone,” begins to play at an absolutely deafening volume. Morris grins through the first few staccato bars of the track, arms still up, then grabs the mic and starts to sing. In only 12 hours, Knox will perform this song for more than a thousand people, on the opening night of his first headlining tour — and yet somehow this is the first time he’s heard his own album at concert volume.
It’s about noon on a spring Saturday, and he’s currently sound-checking for the crew, his band, and exactly four other people. Morris is a lanky, pale, late-20s Ohio native who says “dude” in basically every sentence, and right now his outfit — black joggers, Crocs, and a white hood-up hoodie that doesn’t quite manage to cover up his mop of curly red hair — says “up all night playing Fortnite” much more than “up all night playing the hits.” But as Morris picks up the mic and begins prowling around the stage, he seems immediately and surprisingly comfortable up there.
This is more than just a rehearsal for Morris, who goes simply by “Knox” as an artist. Today is the first day of the tour in support of his first album, also called Going, Going, Gone. He made the album in a studio; perfected it by listening to tracks over and over in the pickup truck he bought himself when he got a record deal; and did all his tour rehearsals with earpieces in. Now he gets to hear how they sound at room-shaking levels. “It’s so much different hearing it coming out of the front,” he tells me a few minutes later, flopping into a chair after finishing his sound check. “It’s just a new energy.”
Over the last couple of years, Morris has lived out more or less the exact dream of millions of aspiring musicians. In a few hours, when the 9:30 Club fills up with his fans, many of them will have found him via a single TikTok he made on a whim three years ago. His music, which he describes to me at one point as “what if you took singer-songwriter music and put an electric guitar solo in it,” has shades of early-aughts bands like The All-American Rejects and Fall Out Boy but with the lyrics of someone who has screamed Vanessa Carlton and James Blunt songs in their car. People liked it: Morris quickly signed with Atlantic Records, started touring with his favorite bands, gained a following, sold out small shows, sold out bigger shows, and put out an album that has both radio hits and fan favorites. His tour will take him all over the US, and to Europe later this year.
One argument you often hear about the internet is that it is a democratizer — great work can come from anywhere, and YouTube and TikTok have demolished the gatekeepers of old. (At least YouTube and TikTok would like you to believe that.) But even in the dream that tech platforms are selling, it doesn’t often go this well. I asked multiple people surrounding Morris how typical his story is in the modern music business, and every single one of them laughed at me.
“This never happens,” more than one said. They chalk Morris’ story up to a mix of his preternatural talent, his work ethic, and the fact that he’s managed to tackle the music industry in exactly the right order. He’s a wannabe rock star, turned social media star, turned actual rock star. He probably couldn’t have done it without TikTok. But he also couldn’t have done it with TikTok alone.
A few minutes before the sound check, I find Morris in the back of his tour bus, parked right outside of the venue. He’s eating breakfast and hanging out with his girlfriend, Alicae, and his writing and producing partner, Cameron Becker. Alicae is on her phone, and Cameron is playing Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga on the bus’s Xbox. This bus will be home for the next month or so, but they’ve only been on it for a day, and they’re still in awe of the thing.
“People wonder what it’s like being a touring rock star,” Morris says, laughing as he points to the two — two! — TVs showing Becker’s ongoing assault on a bunch of lumbering Lego AT-ATs. “We have an Xbox!”
Not that long ago, all of this seemed impossible to Morris. It wasn’t even really something he dreamed about. He grew up near Dayton, Ohio, loving music but not necessarily hoping to make any. “All my friends started listening to Drake and Lil Wayne,” he says, “and I was listening to these singer-songwriters like Train and Ed Sheeran and The Script.” Sheeran in particular became a fixation. It might be a pasty redhead thing.
Around the time he enrolled at Ohio University, he saw a video of Sheeran performing live — which Sheeran almost always does alone, with a loop pedal, building songs in real time, one instrument and layer at a time. “He was playing these massive rooms,” Morris says. “And he was playing G-C-E-D.” Those four chords are so ubiquitous in pop music that Sheeran himself once sat in a courtroom playing them on guitar to win a copyright lawsuit. And with just those four chords, “he would have rooms in the palm of his hand,” Morris says. “I was like, dude, I just feel like I can do that.” Morris started to teach himself the guitar (he now knows at least four chords) and began writing music.
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