As 2025 comes to a close, we’re taking a moment to revisit some of the stories that resonated most across the 280 corridor. These aren’t just top clicks or biggest headlines — they’re pieces that captured something real about the people, places and moments that defined the year.
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Photo by Alex Ayala
Myles Morgan's rise in country music in 2025 has seen him headline shows in Birmingham, perform at major music festivals, launch a series of singles and sign with powerhouse agency WME.
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Photo by Alex Ayala
Former Spain Park High School baseball player Myles Morgan performs during his sold-out show at Iron City in Birmingham. It has been a rapid rise in country music for Morgan, who recently signed with agency WME, had his first single top 1 million streams on Spotify and performed at a music festival alongside headliners such as Jelly Roll and Jason Aldean.
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Photo by Alex Ayala
Former Spain Park High School baseball player Myles Morgan performs during his sold-out show at Iron City in Birmingham. It has been a rapid rise in country music for Morgan, who recently signed with agency WME, had his first single top 1 million streams on Spotify and performed at a music festival alongside headliners such as Jelly Roll and Jason Aldean.
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Photo by Alex Ayala
Former Spain Park High School baseball player Myles Morgan performs during his sold-out show at Iron City in Birmingham. It has been a rapid rise in country music for Morgan, who recently signed with agency WME, had his first single top 1 million streams on Spotify and performed at a music festival alongside headliners such as Jelly Roll and Jason Aldean.
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Photo by Alex Ayala
Former Spain Park High School baseball player Myles Morgan performs during his sold-out show at Iron City in Birmingham. It has been a rapid rise in country music for Morgan, who recently signed with agency WME, had his first single top 1 million streams on Spotify and performed at a music festival alongside headliners such as Jelly Roll and Jason Aldean.
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Photo courtesy of Myles Morgan Music
A big exposure opportunity for Myles Morgan came when he performed at the Barefoot Country Music Fest in Wildwood, N.J., in June.
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Photo courtesy of Myles Morgan Music via Instagram
Myles Morgan's first steps into the music industry have included getting to hang out with superstars such as Post Malone.
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Photo courtesy of Steve Morgan
At Spain Park High School, Myles Morgan was known as a baseball player who could play almost any position on the field. Little did anyone know that, during his junior year, his dad's decision to buy a guitar would send Myles rocketing toward a career in music.
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Photo courtesy of Steve Morgan
4-year-old Myles Morgan performs a Beatles song during preschool at Pioneer Playschool in Hoover, an early clue that he might someday display performing talent.
BIRMINGHAM - The line outside Iron City stretched down the block before dark, spilling onto the sidewalk, boots tapping on the curb, girls in sundresses leaning against the wall waiting to get in. Security moved scaffolding to make room for the crowd they knew was coming. Inside, the floor filled early, hometown friends and old teammates pressed up to the barricade, phones raised.
Backstage, Myles Morgan moved from well-wisher to well-wisher, taking time with every handshake, every hug. He was calm. Focused. His first hometown headlining show — one of the biggest moments of his life, and it didn’t show on his face.
He glanced out at the room, then back at his dad, Steve.
“I’m headlining my own show now at the same place where it all got started,” he said.
Photo courtesy of Steve Morgan
At Spain Park High School, Myles Morgan was known as a baseball player who could play almost any position on the field. Little did anyone know that, during his junior year, his dad's decision to buy a guitar would send Myles rocketing toward a career in music.
Just a year earlier, he’d stood on this same floor as a fan, holding a cardboard sign in the crowd, hoping to get noticed by singer Larry Fleet. That night set everything in motion. Now Myles’ name was on the ticket.
What nobody knew then was how ready he was for this moment. What nobody saw was everything it took to get here — the late nights, the packed barstool gigs, the songs that came out of nowhere.
This wasn’t a miracle. This was a grind.
BORN FOR THE SPOTLIGHT
In Hoover and along the U.S. 280 corridor, everyone knew Myles Morgan as a baseball kid. Only child, Spain Park standout, smooth swing, a glove at every position. He grew up on the ballfields, playing T-ball at 4, competitive travel ball by 7, and all the way through high school.
But his father Steve remembered something else. Something most people had forgotten.
“When he had just turned 4 years old,” Steve said, “he was in preschool at Pioneer Playschool, and they had a little recital thing. And he … he performed. He did two songs. One of them was ‘When I’m 64,’ the Beatles song. He dressed up as a 64-year-old man. He was 4, walking slow, limping, playing the part, eating it up. You could tell: this kid loved the spotlight.”
There’s even video of it now — little Myles in suspenders and a cap, cane in hand, shuffling to the mic and belting the Beatles tune as the room laughed and cheered.
But after that? He left the spotlight alone for years. Music wasn’t even on the radar.
“Nobody in Hoover ever saw this coming,” Steve said. “To everybody there, he was just Myles the baseball player. That’s all anybody knew him as.”
Photo courtesy of Steve Morgan
4-year-old Myles Morgan performs a Beatles song during preschool at Pioneer Playschool in Hoover, an early clue that he might someday display performing talent.
GUITAR IN THE CORNER
It started late in his junior year.
Steve, on a whim, bought himself a guitar. Just to mess around with it.
“It sat in the corner for weeks,” Steve said. “Then one day Myles picked it up. Fumbled with it. Put it down. Next day he asked me to drive him to buy his own.”
From then on, he was hooked.
By the time that year ended, the Morgans moved to Orange Beach for his senior year. He still played baseball, and he was even homecoming king, and of course graduated like everyone expected. But that summer, Steve told him he needed to get a summer job before heading off to college at the University of Alabama. Myles just shrugged and said he’d play in restaurants.
That was May 2023.
Myles walked into Ginny Lane Bar & Grill at The Wharf on a Wednesday afternoon and asked if they’d let him play. The owner said they’d had a cancellation and told him he could go on Friday night.
Myles got in the car and called his dad.
“He said, ‘Dad, good news is they’re letting me play Friday night. Bad news is I don’t know three hours of music,’” Steve said, laughing.
Myles stayed up two straight nights learning songs — mostly Riley Green and Morgan Wallen, his favorites.
When Friday came, a storm rolled in and delayed the Whiskey Myers concert across the street. Hundreds of fans ducked into the steakhouse to stay dry.
That night the place was packed to its 350-person capacity. Myles sat on a barstool wearing a baseball cap and an Orange Beach High shirt, guitar in his lap, and just started playing.
It was then that Steve knew his son might be onto something more than just a hobby and a side gig.
“When he’s able to sit down wherever it is … and people are engaged and people are mesmerized and people are attracted to it and want more of it — that’s a gift,” he said. “And I knew that… he had something special. And I knew that he was probably going to go further than just, you know, ‘I’m a guy with a guitar in a restaurant.’”
THE CARDBOARD SIGN
By early 2024, Myles was grinding every weekend, playing gigs in Tuscaloosa and at the beach, but still just another young guy with a guitar. Then came the night he bought a ticket to see Larry Fleet at Iron City.
He stood in the crowd holding a cardboard sign that read: “Can I play ‘Where I Find God’ with you?”
Fleet noticed. After the show, Fleet’s photographer brought him backstage.
That connection led to introductions in Nashville.
By May, Myles was cutting his first single, “Nobody’s Fault But Yours,” with Morgan Wallen’s guitarist Dominic Frost playing on the track.
That song now has more than 1 million streams on Spotify, and Myles’ singles are starting to stack up. He recently signed a management deal with WME, the famed talent agency based in Nashville. His next single, “Thought You Were Leaving,” was to drop in August, and a full extended project is expected to be completed before the end of the year.
HOW THE SONGS CAME
Myles has a little section of his Notes app filled with ideas. Lines, phrases, images. A lyric that comes to him at a stoplight. A title that pops in his head at 2 a.m.
“You have to put yourself in a songwriting state all the time,” he said. “You’re driving or walking somewhere and you see something, and you think, oh — that’s a song right there. That’s going to be my next song, I just have to figure it out.”
That’s how “Is This Seat Taken” came to him — a memory of how he met his girlfriend at an Alabama game. And “Nobody’s Fault But Yours” — his first song, written before he even thought it was good enough to record.
“I took it to my producers and said, be honest,” he said. “And they said, dude… this isn’t bad. That’s when I thought, OK. Maybe I can really do this.”
He doesn’t force it, though.
“You can get stuck in a rut if you sit down and say, ‘let’s write a song’ and you don’t know what you’re writing about,” he said. “I wait for the light bulb to go off. And it usually does.”
One such moment came in a way that so many young men can relate to – football brought them together.
“When I went to Alabama, I met my girlfriend … and that song … is quite literally how we met,” Myles said. “I went up to her in the stands at a football game, said ‘Hey, can I sit here?’ and we’ve been dating for a year and a half.”
That meeting became the inspiration for his third song, “Is This Seat Taken?” She was by his side at that fateful Larry Fleet concert.
And she’s now in the music video.
STILL CLIMBING
These days, his name appears on the same lineups as the guys he used to cover. He’s playing venues like the Flora-Bama, a launching pad for many country stars. At June’s Barefoot Country Music Festival, he was backstage with Jelly Roll, Jason Aldean and Jon Pardi.
This fall, he’ll open for Miranda Lambert and Muscadine Bloodline.
That night at Iron City, his father stood upstairs and watched his son work the stage.
“You know, anytime he’s performing and the fans enjoy it,” Steve said, “that’s just a super cool feeling.”
And then he thought back — to the baseball fields, to the preschool recital, to that kid on a barstool playing Riley Green covers two years earlier while rain poured outside.
From that to this. Full circle.
And still rising.
