Photo via Kevin Morby
Kevin Morby on a van
Kevin Morby
Folk-rock singer and songwriter Kevin Morby doesn’t need a guiding theme to help him generate material. However, such themes seem to find him: his seventh album, 2022’s This Is a Photograph, centered on Memphis, and his eighth, this year’s Little Wide Open, broadly looks at Middle America.
“I didn’t set out to do it,” Morby said during a recent Zoom interview. “But you can realize that there’s a thread going between two or three of the songs, and, if you’re into that thread, you can write toward that theme.”
Over the course of 13 songs and nearly an hour, Morby explores that long swath of the United States that exists far inside the coasts. While Morby has spent most of his adult life in New York City and Los Angeles (and moved back to the latter again in late 2025 with his longtime partner, Waxahatchee frontwoman Katie Crutchfield), a pandemic-extended stay in his primary childhood home of Kansas City gave him perspective.
“So much of America is tied together,” he said. “Memphis isn’t too different from Detroit, and Detroit isn’t too different from Minneapolis, and Minneapolis isn’t too different from Kansas City.”
Recording Sessions
Photo via Kevin Morby
Kevin Morby with his guitar
Kevin Morby
None of those is too different, by that way of thinking, from Cincinnati, the birthplace of Little Wide Open producer Aaron Dessner, whose discography behind the boards includes albums by Taylor Swift and indie rocker Sharon Van Etten. The opportunity to enlist his skills arose after Morby opened for Dessner’s best-known band, the National, in London.
“The next day, he phoned and asked if we could work together,” Morby said. “It answered this big question for my life, and it was really flattering.”
During three separate recording sessions that lasted about a month altogether, Dessner played several instruments, including bass, slide guitar, banjo, and piano—“He’s a Swiss army knife,” Morby noted—and also provided a complementary sonic background.
“He’s able to take smaller-sounding folk songs and somehow make them sound really big,” Morby said. “While doing that, he’s not making them sound too dense, and keeping my voice as the focal point. I’m not even sure how he does it, but it’s a big gift.”
Dylan Comparisons
Morby’s voice, with its similarities to the drawling nasality of 1960s Bob Dylan, definitely stays at the center of songs like “Die Young,” a bluegrassy ode to maturity, and “Natural Disaster,” a seven-minute musing that Morby said is a nod to Lou Reed’s 1978 song “Street Hassle,” with Lucinda Williams as an omniscient spoken-word narrator.
“I wanted a voice of God,” Morby said. “I’m honored Lucinda, the first person who came to mind, did it and really came through.”
Overall, Morby achieves a sense of realism about the Midwest that can come only from someone who has felt the sweet loneliness of “Cowtown” or the fresh, yet stifling, air of “Junebug.” “I have this love-hate relationship with the Midwest and Kansas City specifically,” he said. “I tend to point out a lot of the things among the beauty that are wrong or bad about the place. The love wins out.”
Kevin Morby performs June 1 at The Argo.
