In Praise of Kevin Morby, Indie Rock Bard of the Midwest
Welcome to the latest edition of All the Music of All the World, our weekly series where we aim to share music worth being passionate about. Consider us a guide who can help you get the most out of your Victrola by giving you new music to listen to, or new ways to think about music you already know.
If he holds to his word, Drake’s “comeback” album Iceman is out today, and your guess is good as mine if he’ll ever recover from his battle with Kendrick Lamar. This email is not about that album out today. Instead, it’s about the stunning, beautiful new album from indie rock/folk troubadour Kevin Morby, the Midwest’s current poet bard.
Little Wide Open is Morby’s eighth full length album, and his first produced by Aaron Desner, he of the National and producing Taylor Swift albums fame (he collaborated with her on Evermore and Folklore). Like all Morby records, it’s concerned with place and time, but unlike his past records, this one turns its focus onto the Midwest, and the feeling you get when you’re living in a wide-open landscape so huge that you can’t help but feel small. It’s filled with lightning storms, and sunflower fields, and drives on gravel roads. It’s a record of little, quiet moments leading to monumental events, a record that has Morby tackling the feeling of coming home—he moved back to his hometown of Kansas City after Bradford Cox of Deerhunter advised him to buy property there with his first advance—and coming into a life that you feel you left behind when you were a teenager, and how that’s totally great. Morby obliquely sings about his impending fatherhood—his first kid with his longtime partner, Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield is due this summer—and about the impermanence of life (“Bible Belt” is about a car crash that killed one of his fans who was on his way to see him perform). It’s a record about being glad to be nearly 40, that getting your shit together after a wild youth is good, actually; dying young would have meant not experiencing all that life can offer. “And even though we tried, in the beginning to not survive, well thank god we didn’t die young,” Morby sings on one of the albums lead singles, over swirling violins.
After the last year—when Morby won a Grammy thanks to Mavis Staples winning one for covering his amazing single “Beautiful Strangers” from 2016--it’s tempting to paint Little Wide Open as a breakthrough for Morby, the album where he ascends to something higher, but all his albums have lead to this moment of capturing what it’s like to be alive in the middle of Middle America. You can only love the Midwest properly if you’ve left it, and Morby’s previous albums all had a sense of a Midwest kid figuring out what it was like to be someone living somewhere else. Harlem River and City Music captured New York, the latter especially wondering how a city of such life could be the same place where people die every day in apartments, alone, with no one knowing. Singing Saw is the splendor of L.A., cut with the horror of police brutality and the decadence of Laurel Canyon, and This is a Photograph captured the river of musical ideas of the city of Memphis.
Little Wide Open, as Morby has said in pre-release interviews, is a record tailor-made for long drives in the country, a record that could sit alongside the Tom Petty records he discovered as he moved back to Kansas City. It’s a record that I can’t wait to let soundtrack my own ATV drives, like it does for Morby and comedian Caleb Hearon in the video for “Javelin.”
Little Wide Open is a life-affirming a record, and one of the year’s best so far. If you listen to one new album today, make it this one. You can do so here.
