Slow Runner is the creative alias of Michael Flynn, an Americana-adjacent singer/songwriter based in Saluda. His songs have been featured on shows like Grey’s Anatomy and Shameless, and on commercials for useful products like cars and shampoo. He’s also won a few awards for songwriting, most recently the 2021 Newsong Music Grand Prize. After a few year performing under his own name, Michael signed a record deal with SonyBMG in 2006 and began releasing music as Slow Runner in a collaboration with producer/multi-instrumentalist Josh Kaler and other musical friends. Slow Runner has spawned 6 full length albums among other EPs and singles, and has toured internationally with acts like The Avett Brothers, Josh Ritter, and many others. His music explores disparate genres from dreamy synth-pop to confessional folk, always anchored by compelling lyrics and an authentic emotional core. 

Called ‘a pioneering solo artist’ by American Songwriter, with ‘songs as catchy as they are clever’ (Relix magazine), Slow Runner continues his evolution as a standout writer and performer still evolving nearly two decades into a fruitful career.

Formed in the wake of a series of bands that explored everything from dark, heavy rock to polished, indie twang, Mountain of Youth—and its remarkable debut, Nowhere, NW—emerges as a sort of equilibrium state, balancing Morris’s breezy heartland and lo-fi garage influences with his ’70s singer/songwriter and ’90s grunge sensibilities. The songs are mature and reflective, reckoning with loneliness, regret, and mortality, and the performances are raw and vulnerable to match, with lean, muscular arrangements centered around Morris’s gritty guitars and riveting live vocal takes. Add it all up and you’ve got an honest, empathetic meditation on purpose and impermanence delivered by a keen observer of the human condition, one who’s only just begun to truly understand himself.