Place has always played a central role in Kevin Morby’s music. Thirteen years ago, the Kansan songwriter’s debut album, Harlem River, coincided with his move to New York and paid homage to the city’s lineage of artists and misfits. 2016’s Singing Saw documents his life in Los Angeles, taking cues from the Seventies’ Laurel Canyon scene that bred now-classic songwriters such as Joni Mitchell and Jackson Browne. For 2022’s This Is a Photograph, Morby decamped to Memphis and dedicated himself to its rich musical history, particularly as the site of Jeff Buckley’s untimely demise. “No matter where I’m at or what I’m doing, I’m gonna be influenced by my surroundings in some way, shape, or form, whether good or bad,” he told me. “Even if I’m in a place and I hate it, it makes me think about another place. It’s gonna still inform what’s creatively speaking to me.”
In the case of his eighth and latest album, Little Wide Open, Morby pens a love letter to his home in the heartland. Here in Kansas City, where both Morby and I live, tornado sirens squeal every springtime and vast skies dominate the horizon line, and the rolling plains encircle the city like a golden-brown halo. Whereas Tom Petty wrote a paean to the great wide open, Morby documents something at once sprawling and intimate. Middle America is vast yet isolating, and that tension animates what Morby dubs the “Little Wide Open.” Here, something as lofty and intangible as Heaven is just another place on Earth.
So goes the refrain of the opening track “Badlands,” a tone-setting missive from KC, which portrays the city and its regional neighbors in their beauty and ruin alike. “Welcome to the Midwest / Where the sky knows best / And you’ll finally get some rest / ‘Til the tornado sirens start harmonizing,” Morby sings in his signature reedy timbre, with Justin Vernon joining him in a falsetto imitation of those very sirens. On “Javelin,” he, Aaron Dessner, and Amelia Meath take us to this “old cowtown in the Bible Belt” and ponder what it feels like “to be alone in the middle of Middle America.” Late-album highlight “Bible Belt” explores the Heartland’s imposing loneliness. But in Morby’s eyes, solitude, often mistaken for desolation, is a gift. “Life on Earth may take some time / And you can’t avoid a void so wide / So just smile,” he offers as a salve.
On the stirring “Natural Disaster,” Morby widens his scope, chronicling nature’s idyllic scenery and violent storms alike, and how strife is inevitable no matter where you call home. “The hills, they all landslide / Tornadoes strip the plains / And my whole Earth quakes / When I find a good thing,” he sings. But then again, “natural disasters” are often a byproduct of man-made activity, and Morby is aware of how we can become the makers of our own destruction: “I’m afraid I’ll just hurt it / So I burn it down and collect the insurance.” Lucinda Williams joins him on the second verse, anchoring the mix with her husky lower register and lending credence to its protagonist’s worst fears. “That love may not want you / Then that love will haunt you / And no, you won’t die / They’ll just simply leave your side,” she mutters like an omnipotent, indifferent messenger.
Isolation may be one of Little Wide Open’s recurring themes, but Morby surrounds himself with a coterie of collaborators. There are aforementioned performers such as Williams, MUNA’s Katie Gavin, Hand Habits’ Meg Duffy, Sylvan Esso’s Meath, and Bon Iver’s Vernon, but, most notably, there’s Dessner, with whom Morby tracked the record at Long Pond Studio in Upstate New York. He touches various parts of the tracklist with a guiding hand; his distinct, whirring guitar tone appears on cuts like “All Sinners” and “Die Young” just as it does on his own band’s “Terrible Love” and “Day I Die.” His gossamer, melodic finger-picking adorns tracks like “Bible Belt” and “Junebug” the same way it embellishes “I Need My Girl” and “Daughters of the Soho Riots.” But Dessner’s presence never overwhelms the material; this is Morby’s vision first and foremost. The Ohioan is here only to buttress Little Wide Open’s filigreed folk songs.
In fact, Little Wide Open is the most feature-heavy album in Morby’s discography, but, aside from Williams, the album’s guests are more like an ensemble cast, serving the greater force at hand. Similar to how Blood Orange’s Dev Hynes taps high-profile pals for the subtlest of contributions, Morby’s friends sound as if they’re all standing behind him, ushering him down a path toward self-realization. That introspection presents itself in its manifold meditations on time and new beginnings. Morby and his long-term partner, Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield, are expecting their first child in August. Though the news came after he wrote Little Wide Open, Morby’s illustrations of major life changes—a partial move to L.A., the anticipation of marriage—are clear-eyed and linear.
“I’m going to have a kid now, and I see time as this completely different thing, where I’m like, we’re in cahoots,” Morby told Pitchfork earlier this year. “I do not need to view time as this enemy that’s gonna knock me out in the boxing ring. If anything, I need to view it as my friend who I’m grateful is having me along for the ride.” That perspective materializes across the record’s thirteen tracks. “If time is a violent ride, then we ride passenger,” he sings on “All Sinners,” a lyric that reappears on the plucky, banjo-led “I Ride Passenger.” “Stuck on loop somewhere inside time’s race / As I watch dandelions break upon your face,” goes the end of the first stanza on the penultimate “Dandelion.” In “Field Guide for the Butterflies,” he repurposes splattered butterflies on windshields as a metaphor for the weathering life of a touring musician, always on the highway, always putting oneself in danger. Neither butterfly nor musician has much time, but “it’s not suicide if I die out chasing thrills, just me trying to grow wings,” Morby sings.
Dessner’s gentle banjo, Gavin’s harmonies, Mat Davidson’s fiddle, and Collin Croom’s pedal steel converge on the eight-minute title track, guiding Morby toward one of the record’s greatest epiphanies: “It’s a little wide open, and it makes me feel small / It’s a little wide open out here after all / It’s a little wide open, but I hope it don’t close / ‘Cause I wanna drift off in it where nobody knows us.” Placed at the album’s center, the song is its thesis: the Midwest can be a lonely place sometimes, and time may move slowly here, but amid the storms and seclusion, the clouds eventually part to reveal a big, blue sky that welcomes all. “Time, please be kind to me / Time, we’re not enemies though it’d seem / Time, we share the same dream / To stretch on forever, toward eternity,” he sings toward the song’s finale. With Little Wide Open, Morby has crafted something eternal, something that encapsulates the Midwest in all its rugged glory. It may just be his true masterpiece. [Dead Oceans]
Grant Sharples is a writer, journalist, and critic. His work has also appeared in Interview, Uproxx, Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Ringer, NME, and other publications. He lives in Kansas City. You can follow him everywhere @grantsharpies.
