BACK NEAR THE END OF THE 2000s, before she’d ever been to Kitsap, Morgan Chosnyk was the singer of a Seattle rock band called The Broken Knives. Their demo made its way into medium rotation on the radio and the band played an in-studio at KEXP. They recorded a follow up album that was never released, Morgan said, and the band ran its course in a couple of years.
Now thirteen years later, Morgan lives in Bremerton and I’m wondering if she’s ready to start a band on this side. She laughs, dismisses the thought and says those days are behind.
“I’m a professional appreciator of bands,” she says. You might know her better by her infectious laugh or her on-air name DJ Morgan.
She is now a DJ at the independent non-profit radio station KEXP. She’s hosted the Saturday afternoon show from noon to 3 p.m. for nearly a decade and you can hear that infectious sense of humor on the Morning Show with John Richards during the station’s bi-annual fundraising drives. Morgan is also a full-time behind the scenes employee at KEXP. She was recently promoted to Programming Group Director for the station.
“Which means, basically, second-in-command of the entire programming department,” she explains. “So I am responsible for executing our annual plan for the programming team. We have an annual plan of programming days that we’re doing throughout the year and I make sure that the project managers have what they need and that the projects are taking off on time and are on schedule and that kind of good stuff.”
She also oversees the on-air team, the audio production team and the video team with which she recently traveled to the Trans Musicales Festival in Rennes, France where they recorded 16 bands in five days. Those videos will be releasing in installments on the KEXP youtubes starting this month.
Morgan started at the station as an intern at 20 years old in 2008. She became an overnight DJ in 2012, took over the Saturday show a year later and started working behind-the-scenes as a DJ Manager and Assistant to the Associate Program Director in 2016.
“So I started as an intern and now I am a Programming Group Director which is mind-blowing,” she thinks about it for a second. “It’s weird.”
She snickers when describing herself as ‘The boss of…’
But as she matter-of-factly and ecstatically tells the story of her life long love and infatuation with music, it doesn’t seem weird at all. She seems quite legitimately a ‘professional appreciator of bands.’ And she’s been training for years.
“I’ve always been a huge, huge fan of music,” she says. “When I was a little kid, I was memorizing every song off the radio to the point where my mom was like, ‘How the fuck do you know this song? How do you know all the words?’ I was watching MTV and VH1 constantly as a kid. Remember ‘Rock & Roll Jeopardy’? My mom was like, ‘How do you know the answers to these questions? You’re like 8.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, I do!’”
Her first love was Beck, she says.
When ‘Odelay’ came out in 1996, she was nine years old, they lived in Illinois and she begged her mom to get the album for her. For some reason, mom said no for years. Mom had divorced and they moved around to different places after Illinois up into middle school for Morgan. A few years and few cities later, they landed in Phoenix and she finally got that Beck album for Christmas. Along with a new Discman to play it on.
“And I lived too close to my school for a school bus, but I still lived like three miles away,” Morgan remembers. “So I had to walk to and from school, through Central Phoenix, by myself, and I was like 11. So I just had my Discman and Beck’s ‘Odelay’ and I just listened to it constantly back and forth for like a year straight.”
Fast forward 20 years — after seeing Beck at the Mesa Amphitheatre for the first concert that she ever chose to go to, spending her life savings of allowance money on music with the guidance of her older sister who had lived in Seattle and worked at Cellophane Square, then moving to Seattle with her mom, sister and brother-in-law and settling in Shoreline just before high school, meeting and making friends with Calvin Johnson of K Records the summer between freshman and sophomore year, doing a job shadow at K Records as a school assignment sophomore year, going on to study art history at UW and becoming the general manager at UW’s Rainy Dawg Radio, working at both Easy Street and Light in the Attic Records all before she started full time at KEXP — and Morgan got to interview Beck in 2017.
“It was over the phone, thank god!” she laughs. “It’s up on the website if you want to listen to it.” She rates that in her top three “coolest interviews ever.”
Another of the top three was in 2019, when she was contacted by Geoff Barrow of Portishead to do a retrospective of that band’s debut album ‘Dummy’ for its 25th Anniversary.
“And we talked for like two-and-a-half hours,” Morgan explains emphatically. “We broke down every single track on the album. We talked about the whole process of making it and everything that was going on at the time.”
The third of the top three happened a few weeks ago, and only now can she talk about it as KEXP recently announced its release, scheduled for broadcast on air and on the KEXP youtube channel, Jan. 13. The band is kind of a big deal. It’s a new project from Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood, called The Smile. The band got Morgan’s vote for top album of 2022. She notes Thom Yorke her favorite artist of all time. The band came to the station to record the session and she hosted.
“It was terrifying,” she says, deadpan. “Isn’t that a trippy feeling? It’s like I’ve known you my entire life, but you don’t know me… and I’m trying really hard to be professional and not weird. Yeah… that was amazing. I was like, I can retire now. Except for I’m too young and I can’t afford to retire, but mentally and emotionally, I can retire now. My favorite artist of all time, that’s pretty crazy.” // BILLMAN
Listen to Morgan’s show from noon to 3 p.m. on Saturdays at 90.3 FM and find more at kexp.org
