Photo Credit: Allen Halas
Morgan Wade
With the sun setting on the Milwaukee skyline, as well as the U.S. Cellular Connection Stage at Summerfest, the sounds of Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer” started to bump over the house sound system. Rising country act Morgan Wade and her band walked onstage, with Wade donning a Green Day shirt from the band’s American Idiot artwork. While her sound may be pushing towards a more commercially viable version of the genre, there’s a bit of rebel that makes Wade and her band stand out, and that found a way into their set on the final night of Summerfest.
Much of the music that Wade has released thus far has delt around topics of addiction and mental health, topics she wears on her sleeve alongside numerous tattoos. On set opener “The Night,” she sings about the unspoken nature of discussing those topics in country music, ironically to a crowd with many a beverage in hand, looking to party with headliner Scotty McCreery later on. Wade would do both the first and second parts of “The Night” in her hour-long set, with the second part leaning more into the country singalong territory than the first. By that point, the crowd had been socially lubricated enough to the point where they would sing just about any lyrics thrown their way.
Within the course of an hour, though, Wade could convince just about anyone in attendance that she is worthy of the headliner status that she has been pushing toward as of late. The crowd amongst the Connection Stage bleachers continued to grow, as she would lean into material from 2021’s Reckless for the majority of her set. Many in the crowd may have seen Wade at Fiserv Forum in October of last year, where she opened for Chris Stapleton. In the time since that performance, her and her band have already demonstrated tremendous growth in terms of stage presence, with Wade commanding both sides of the stage when she wasn’t with guitar in hand.
Wade’s newest single, however, feels like a precursor of what’s to come for her. Newest single “Psychopath” had the crowd singing along, and it seems like more eyes will be on her next album than Reckless initially saw. There was also a memorable moment initiated by Wade, who spotted a young fan in the crowd with a sign and shouted them out. By the end of the set, the fan was brought to the front of the VIP area, where she handed out a pair of signed hats before tossing a t-shirt to the bleachers. If her music didn’t win you over, the heartwarming gesture certainly would.
It certainly helps, of course, that the singer/songwriter also had a stellar band behind her as well. That was apparent with a blistering organ solo at one point in the set, as well as a short drum solo after the opening lick of Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” brought the band in. While Wade has plenty of her own music to win a crowd over, giving the crowd a bit of familiarity seemed to help the matter. A mash-up of “Your Love” by The Outfield and Rick Springfield’s “Jesse’s Girl,” two cover band staples, had the crowd singing along late in her timeslot. That fed into closer “Wilder Days,” the song that kickstarted her breakout, and had perhaps the loudest reaction of her original material.
There’s a lot of good things on the horizon for Morgan Wade. It’s very possible that her next Summerfest set is a headlining one, and she demonstrated that on the festival’s final night Saturday. The pieces are all certainly in place for that trajectory, and Wade showed that she has the presence and composure to handle it all.
