It’s amazing to see a musician shoot outta the gate fully-formed, at full strength. But there’s something more edifying, in light of the lives most of us live, to watch an artist hit stride steadily, building a greatness over years. Long-game players. Kevin Morby is one of those.
Precocious? Sure—drops out of a Midwest high school, hits Brooklyn as indie crests, joins a rangy band with DIY ambitions (Woods) before he’s of legal drinking age, forms his own band with a talented co-conspirator (the Babies, with Vivian Girls’ Cassie Ramone), then goes solo, accruing catalog and keepers over a decade-plus, averaging about an LP a year. Midwestern work ethic, for sure.
Little Wide Open is the most cohesive, tuneful and cleanly drawn album of Morby’s career. It’s rooted in his history, particularly his knack for collaboration, though its sharp focus feels new and a little startling. Maybe it’s looming fatherhood; maybe it’s Morby’s comfort with shifting ambition. There was a fresh clarity and compositional fearlessness flickering through 2022’s This Is a Photograph (the title track and “Rock Bottom,” with its Carrie-echoing opener, “They’re all gonna laugh at you!”). That confidence suffuses Little Wide Open, a balancing act of personal and universal that suggests an inverted Blood on the Tracks: a folk-rock meditation on what happens when things aren’t falling apart. His obsessions with mortality, fuel for some of his best songs (see “Beautiful Strangers”), play out here in the voice of someone feeling happy and loved yet still unsettled; centered but inescapably conscious of hurtling down the road toward certain demise.
Morby loves quoting forebears, and it’s telling that the central reference in opener “Badlands,” title aside, isn’t to a David Berman deep cut but to the 1987 chart-topper “Heaven Is a Place on Earth” by Belinda Carlisle, another punk rock kid who went from band to solo, recalculating art and business. The reference fits Morby’s project thematically, and it resonates given his collaborator and producer here, Aaron Dessner, best known nowadays beyond precision-tooled guitar rips for the National as one of pop’s great humanizers, building artisanal LPs with Noah Kahan, Florence Welch, and Taylor Swift. Here, Dessner helps surface Morby’s hooks and shine his signifiers without diminishing his earnestly vision-questing American indie troubadour-ness.
Dessner’s touch is deft, and maybe as insurance, Morby keeps his heart pumping on his sleeve. Little Wide Open is rooted in a region, like City Music (NYC) and This Is a Photograph (Memphis), but it’s a place he probably knows better than anywhere: the Middle America he was raised in, tours through regularly, still lives part-time in and may well raise a kid in, with partner Katie Crutchfield. The songs certainly suggest biography and the lives of songwriters using their relationship as subject matter. There are the lovingly radiant lines that do echo David Berman in “Die Young” (“Let our songs build rooms in time/And see to it that if we die young/I’ll live on through you /And you'll live on through me too”). And there are moments when anxiety looms: In the hooky single “Javelin,” he wonders “am I a has-been?/Am I a husband?” and worries about “everything ending now.” And on the title track, Morby sings gently, “Humiliate me baby, fuck me up bad/Drag all our secrets like cats from the bag.”
Specifics are fused with well-worn American colloquialisms—“bible belt,” “cow town,” “the by and by”—which also provide through-line via repetition through multiple songs (the brief, lovely, back-40 breather, “Cowtown,” summarily rewinds a few). There’s flirting with cliché that doesn’t succumb to it, conjuring the conversational, while vocal arrangements add sometimes-surreal depth to the couple-narrative. Justin Vernon voices a tornado siren on “Badlands,” and Lucinda Williams does a nice Morgan Freeman-on-high spoken-word bit on “Natural Disaster.” But Amelia Meath and Katie Gavin do most of the heavy lifting. Meath in particular shines on “Javelin,” a hall-of-mirrors choir soaring behind Morby as he sings “alone in the Middle America,” around distorted vocal stabs that sound like they’re being cut in by a turntablist.
Little Wide Open—not unlike (it must be said) Waxahatchee’s Saint Cloud—shows a wordy and idiosyncratic artist sounding more soulful, not less, as their sound grows more polished and inviting. But Morby still values the odd and imperfect bits, having learned long ago that Rumi-cum-Leonard Cohen lesson about light coming in through the cracks. The music here still sounds true, and Morby remains vigilant. He recently posted a story on his Substack about how he had to insist that Jimmy Kimmel Live! remove the non-consensual Auto-Tune from the posted clip of his high-profile “Javelin” performance. Seems a well-meaning audio engineer draped the effect over the mix to smooth out the vocal burrs. It wasn’t necessary.
