Though still young enough to have as much future stretching ahead as past behind him, Kevin Morby has already clocked up nine albums that track his migrations – first from his native state of Texas to Kansas, then to NYC, LA and back to Kansas (City) – while fine-tuning his countrified folk-rock. Both Harlem River and City Music stand as odes to New York, while Sundowner documented his Midwest homecoming, and 2022’s This Is A Photograph was inspired by Memphis and largely written during a stay there in its historic Peabody hotel. On Morby’s 10th, specific places (and events connected to them) are again the stuff of his songs but now he’s taking stock of his 20 years on the road and mapping out much more of his interior terrain as a result. Despite the title, Little Wide Open is, Morby claims,“without a doubt the most personal and vulnerable album I’ve ever made”.
That’s obvious in hymns not so much to life in the fast lane as in an Econoline, with reflections on the existential challenges of touring, its physical risks, the literal and experiential distance he and partner Katie Crutchfield (aka Waxahatchee) have travelled since they first met, their sharing of an experience apart, the horizon’s eternal promise and the plain wonder of living. Though it’s clearly a team effort, Morby credits producer Aaron Dessner for having held him back “from throwing too many tricks at the songs”, which is apparent in their strikingly clean lines and the generous space that allows them to breathe, despite instrumental richness (piano, clarinet, synth, mandolin, harp, pedal steel and more) and an overall widescreen, yearning uplift that lesser artists too often overegg. Melodies are deceptively carefree, skating like cumuli across vast Midwestern skies. Vocal contributions from Justin Vernon and Lucinda Williams are on point. Morby’s lyrics are often vividly allusive and metaphorical – “Welcome to the badlands,” he sings on the galvanising opener, “where the sky expands and you and I expire/Just like sparks flying off some firecracker/In the big disaster we call home” – but as “Die Young”, “Javelin” and “Bible Belt” attest, he’s also a master of the micro-narrative. However Morby plays it, every song yanks the listener straight to its emotional source.
Perhaps nowhere is that more the case than on the title track, which runs at just over eight stately minutes and is the record’s centrepiece. Atop over-easy guitar and banjo twangling, with swoons of pedal steel and fiddle accents, Morby addresses the polarity of his titular state and privacy, then cranks the sentiment via a startling image: “Humiliate me baby, fuck me up bad/Drag all our secrets like cats from the bag/Use all our insides to decorate the parade/Turn me inside out babe, hang me on display”. “Natural Disaster”, with its Lou Reed-ish cadences, lowering mien and unexpected blooming around the two-thirds point, is another strikingly direct route to Morby’s psyche: “I’m up in the morning, then back down in the evening/It’s a mystery, baby, what happens in between them/They say don’t you medicate/Just breathe or meditate/But I need something for my befores and afters”. In between sits “100,000”, whose panoramic sweep, silvery keening at a clip and exhilarating surge of guitars suggest Adam Granduciel as a kindred spirit. Quite different are the aforementioned “Javelin”, the only song that clearly bears Dessner’s mark (a mellower “Bloodbuzz Ohio” springs to mind) and “Cowtown”. A bittersweet two-hander with a back-porch feel, it sees a restless Morby breaking the fourth wall in true country style: “No-one ever makes a sound ’cept me on this guitar,” he remarks of the anonymous town, before knocking out a deliberately clunky chord.
Morby’s lifelong hopscotching of America’s states is bound particularly tight to his artistry: the singer ticks off the Louisiana-Texas line where he “crashed the Ranger in a ditch”, Idaho, Oklahoma, Ohio, Mississippi, Tennessee, Georgia and Colorado. The geographical roll-call may be part of country music’s lore but on Little Wide Open it’s an intensely focused reminder of how travel chews up time and that belonging is temporary. These 13 richly expansive, tender-hearted songs also map the in-between places, questioning what living means now, in the face of an apparent apocalypse. “It’s not suicide if I die out chasing thrills,” Morby decides, in closer “Field Guide For The Butterflies”, “just me trying to grow wings.”