No More Morrissey? Plus: Inside The Moz’s Love and Theft

Morrissey mulls retirement; website checks his sources.

Morrissey has a five-year plan.

Unfortunately for fans of the sardonic and swaggering Smiths singer, that plan may well end in retirement. The 49-year-old British musician told XFM recently that his stint in the music industry (which began with a gig for punk outfit the Nosebleeds in the early 1970s, if you’re counting) may only take him to 55, in an effort to go out while he’s still relevant.

Is there a chance for this old singer-songwriter and former Smiths frontman to learn some new tricks? “I think it’s incredibly slim,” Morrissey exclaimed.

“I assume most people lose it because they become satisfied and they achieve everything they ever set out to achieve,” he explained. “More to the point, they become personally satisfied and that they’re quite happy and it doesn’t matter any more. It’s very interesting that it’s very hard to think of anybody who ages and still manages to mean anything.”

In other Morrissey news, Earfarm.com just compiled a list of songs for which the Brit may have “borrowed” from other artists. The list, similar to Rolling Stone’s “exposure” of Bob Dylan’s freewheelin’ ways, covers Morrissey’s artistic “influences” from the early days to the present. The site then poses the question “literary thievery or lyrical inspiration?”

Questions of creative theft aside, you can’t say that the man isn’t well-read, as many of the songs featured on the list take cues from famous authors. One of the more interesting examples of lifted literature is the song “Pretty Girls Make Graves,” whose title was taken directly from a line in Jack Kerouac’s not-so-fictional novel of nirvana and naughty behavior, The Dharma Bums.

Check out the full list here.

Morrissey’s latest album, Year of Refusal, comes out today.