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The title of Morgan Nagler’s solo debut, I’ve Got Nothing to Lose, and I’m Losing It, speaks to the sort of wisdom you can only accrue after several decades in the game, the kind that compels you to put your name to an album for the first time at the age of 47. But Nagler’s MO was there from day one, as an 11-year-old child actor going for a bit part as a popular girl on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. “I showed up and there were 200 girls there,” says Nagler. “I remember thinking, I’m never gonna get this. So I decided to read the lines as a super-nerd.” The producers rewrote the part and hired her to kiss Carlton.
Today, Nagler lives in the same neighbourhood as Will Smith himself – not Bel-Air but a semi-rustic enclave of Malibu, California, albeit in the guesthouse of her friends’ place rather than a celeb mansion. She started acting around age five, after her family moved from rural Oregon to California. She did it for two decades, taking parts in shows including Frasier, Star Trek and Clueless. But, at 26, Nagler jacked it all in to pursue music after realising how fulfilled she was playing guitar in her trailer between takes. Some people told her she was making a mistake, but she knew otherwise. Music, says Nagler, “is the only thing that makes me feel connected in any meaningful way. For me, that’s way more important than comfort or stability. I’ve always had this blind faith.”
I’ve Got Nothing to Lose bears this out in gorgeous Americana full of tough optimism and casually persistent hooks: “Good old-fashioned grassoline always gets me where I wanna go,” she sings on Grassoline, a happy ode to weed so indelible it feels as if it’s existed since the heyday of outlaw country. She’s backed on the record by artists including Courtney Barnett, Madi Diaz, Bethany Cosentino (FKA Best Coast) and Allison Crutchfield (Snocaps), connections testament to her “lifer” status in music. “Along with all her sunshine and wordplay there is a great, heavy ballast of human sorrow and compassion,” another of her collaborators, Gillian Welch, tells me over email. “That is the hallmark of great poetry, for me.”
The record gradually came together alongside Nagler’s main gig as a co-writer for other artists including Haim, Phoebe Bridgers and Kim Deal. “These songs were written because that’s what I do,” she says in her cheerful, scratchy voice, video calling from her boyfriend’s studio in Los Angeles, lava lamps blooping in the corner. There was no grand plan. “I was never gonna sit down and write a record that’s going to represent me on my ‘solo mission’,” she says. “I just feel it’s important to share ourselves with each other, because it’s such an isolating time. Connecting to each other on a deep level is important because we make each other feel seen, and less alone, more connected to the universe, that we’re able to do more positive things.”
To be a professional songwriter you have to be a great hang, and Nagler clearly is; for an hour, her sunny sense of purpose makes me forget that I feel like a sickly Victorian orphan in week three of Britain’s never-ending winter lurg, even if her excitement at LA having a rare bout of rain is hard to choke down.
Despite her early convictions, Nagler still took some nudging to pursue music properly. Her best friend is the musician Jenny Lewis, also a former child star. They were vaguely aware of one another as kids on the circuit, but it wasn’t until Nagler acted with Blake Sennett, Lewis’s bandmate in Rilo Kiley, that they connected. “She’s been my champion,” says Nagler. “When I started writing songs in my trailer, I really had no intention of sharing. She forced me to do it, found my first guitar player, told me: you’re gonna have a band.” This became the Americana outfit Whispertown. “She paid for all my records to be recorded – then I pay her back; she always had me opening up for her.” Nagler’s glass-half-full mindset is immortalised in Rilo Kiley’s 2004 song The Absence of God: “And Morgan says, ‘Maybe love won’t let you down / All of your failures are training grounds / And just as your back’s turned, you’ll be surprised.’”
In 2006, Whispertown were supporting Lewis and the Watson Twins on the tour for that year’s Rabbit Fur Coat album. They included a cover of David Rawlings and Welch’s song Look at Miss Ohio on their set list. Unbeknown to Nagler, the respected duo were in the crowd one night. Two years later, Rawlings called and invited her to Nashville to spend six months writing with them. Nagler describes the experience as her version of going to college. “I’d come up in this very DIY mentality, and I used to call it the ‘puke method’ – the song just comes out and who am I to mess with it? They taught me craft – that, no, you sit with it, edit, refine the song to be the best; that it’s not a good song unless you think it’s a good song.”
Still, the puke method unlocked something for Welch and Rawlings, who wrote the song Sweet Tooth with Nagler. “Morgan has great faith in her own imagination and the power therein,” Welch tells me. “She lets connections happen, even if the line of logical sense is broken. It’s a deeper pathway. David and I were feeling very self-critical at the time, and it was super helpful to restore this sense of nonlinear playfulness in the writing.” (Also key to being a great hang: Nagler “makes a mean braised brussels sprout,” says Welch.)
As Nagler’s bands kept ploughing their DIY furrow, other cowriting opportunities popped up. Whispertown supported the Breeders: Kim Deal admired Nagler’s tiny stage shorts and her voice, and asked her to write together, which produced a few songs. “I don’t know if she remembers this,” says Nagler, “but years back, we were taking a break on the patio, and she said, ‘Morgan, not everyone is going to like you.’ I was like, oh, you just hit me where it hurt!” Then she realised: “It’s almost the same lesson as from Gill and David, which is: do your thing, what you think is cool.”
Nagler ended up writing with Haim on their debut because Danielle Haim was playing guitar with Lewis; around 2019, she helped Bridgers finish her 2020 song Kyoto, which was nominated for best rock performance and best rock song at the 2021 Grammys. It made Nagler realise that she should formalise her own publishing deal and make a real go of songwriting, trying to help artists find their own voice: in recent years, she’s been working with artists including Diaz, Tyler Ballgame and Claud. A session “ideally starts with a mini therapy session”, she says. “When I started, I would come in with several ideas of beginnings of songs, and I realised that it makes more sense to utilise the energy in the room, the special thing you have going on in the moment.”
You may have clocked that Nagler’s songwriting career started as the pandemic hit, not exactly a great time to be starting a new gig. Making a living as a songwriter in this day and age is “absolutely terrible”, she says. “It’s super depressing. Unbelievable. It’s a 1% situation – you need a [cut on a] Beyoncé song or something to fund the rest of your existence.” The full effect of AI undercutting those limited revenue streams is still an unknown, she says. “I think I’m already a niche person and, having my hopeful spirit, I think niche might actually become more valuable because it’s so easy now to sound perfect.”
Nagler’s own album is full of songs about pursuing your goals against the odds: “Follow your gut / Nobody said it would be easy / I’m hanging tough, but / My own medicine makes me queasy,” she sings on the yearning, moonlit Greetings from Mars. She’s proud to be putting out her first official solo record at age 47. “I want to talk about it, because the older you are, the more experience in life you have to draw from,” she says. “That is an important perspective. I am proud to have been able to shape a life where I’m able to continue to make art, and I’m completely dedicated to it. It feels like a real accomplishment, because it’s not easy.”
You can see the album title as bleak or optimistic, she says. “I kind of hate the term ‘toxic positivity’, but I think it’s important to be realistic and understand what’s going on in the world, and it’s equally important to continue to have hope.” Going solo, she says, is “chasing a dream, but not really – the dream is just to exist and be happy and put beauty in the world”.
