A funeral director who writes pop songs sits down every Tuesday night and says the things most people are afraid to feel. Death, fatherhood, burnout, songwriting, walking away from the career that defined you, and figuring out what comes after. The Mortals is a live conversation hosted by Nathan Morris — no script, no guests most weeks, just one man in a room being honest about what it means to be alive. New episodes every Wednesday.
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You never met them. You never shook their hand. So why does it feel like you lost a friend when the news says they're gone?nnThis week on The Mortals, funeral director and singer-songwriter Nathan Morris sits with the grief nobody gives you permission to feel — the artist whose songs raised you, the voice that was in your kitchen for fifteen years, the stranger whose passing put you flat on the…
This week on The Mortals Live, we walk through what a visitation at a funeral home is really for. Not the version you see in movies. The real thing. Why we gather, what it does for the living, and how showing up for someone in grief is one of the most important things you will ever do. Then it gets personal. I share the night I almost became the one on the other side of that room. The night…
Before my new single "Names I'll Never Lose" drops Friday, I wanted to give you the other half of it. Fifteen years as a funeral director taught me something almost nobody gets to see: exactly how much one ordinary life adds up to — because I'm standing there on the day the world does the subtraction. In this episode I tell you about a man I'll call Ray, who spent his whole life certain he didn't…
There was a stretch of time where I did not want to be here anymore. Not in a dramatic way. In a quiet, tired, hopeless way.I want to tell you how I got there, because I think a lot of you know how it happens. It doesn't happen all at once. It happens in pieces. It happens the way erosion happens — you don't notice the ground leaving until you're standing on nothing.My friend and business partner…
Last night The Mortals Live did something it's never done before — we went live on two platforms at once. Katharine and Chris of As The Hearse Turns pulled up a chair, and what followed was the kind of conversation only people who've stood on both sides of the arrangement table can have: the real weight of this profession, the stories that stay with you, and why talking about death openly might be…
He was blinded as a child, preached and sang on Texas street corners for coins, and died penniless in the ashes of his own burned house. They buried him in a grave with no name. Thirty-two years later, NASA bolted his wordless, three-minute song of grief to the side of the Voyager spacecraft and launched it past the planets. Tonight, Blind Willie Johnson's voice is the farthest-traveling human…
"Pick a lane." I've heard it my whole life — funeral director, musician, divorced dad, creator — like one of them has to cancel out the others. Tonight I'm done apologizing for being all of them.This is The Mortals Live. Every Tuesday, 7PM ET. We open with a story of someone the world mostly forgot — tonight it's Gordon Parks, who refused to be just one thing his whole life — and then we get…
Tonight on The Mortals: the funeral songs that undo an entire room — and the one thing almost nobody thinks about. It's not which song you play. It's when. A funeral director and songwriter on grief, the music that says what we can't, and how you keep showing up when life hands you a season you didn't choose. Pull up a chair. 🖤🎵 The new song, "Just Me, Just You" → laylo.com/nathanmorris/VWYZ2m🖤…
He was blind. He was self-taught. And for nearly thirty years he stood on a sidewalk on 6th Avenue in Manhattan dressed like a Viking — cloak, horned helmet, spear — while the city hurried past and called him a curiosity.His name was Moondog. What almost no one rushing by understood was that the man on the corner was a serious composer, building orchestral works in his head and on paper, year…
A funeral director on what happens after you put something into the world and the room stays quiet. The story of Sixto Rodriguez — who released two albums into total silence, went back to demolition work for 25 years, and never knew that across the ocean he was a legend — and why we have to stop creating in hope of applause. On music, grief, and any goodbye you finally say out loud. 🎥 Watch:…
There's a man who never had a near-death experience. He had something more honest. He had a slow death he could watch coming. And he wrote it all down before the cancer took him at 37.His name was Paul Kalanithi. Neurosurgery resident at Stanford. Eight months from finishing the longest training in medicine. Diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer he'd never earned. He went back to the operating room…
0:00 Cold open — sit down, grab the tea 2:00 Opening statement: October 1956, Chicago — Vivian Maier walks down a sidewalk 6:00 The 150,000 photographs nobody ever saw 13:00 Why did she do it? The question I keep sitting with 15:30 The room with the door closed — this episode's thesis 17:30 My grandfather, the double Windsor knot, and the mundane that mattered 23:00 Grief as fuel — what Vivian and…
