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.
No score yet, be the first to add.
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.”
