Kevin Morby's eighth album, Little Wide Open, opens with a track titled Badlands. The title evokes the unforgiving terrain of the American Midwest, as well as cultural touchstones like Terrence Malick's bleak 1973 neo-noir film and Bruce Springsteen's ferocious 1978 song about a frustrated blue-collar worker. Yet the song itself is not straightforward. Driven by big, punchy drums, it features a clean guitar riff, conversational vocals, and sweet harmonies. Lyrics speak of 'the big disaster we call home' while also suggesting 'heaven is a place on Earth beneath the golden sky.' Morby concludes with a shrug: 'I can't tell if I'm in heaven or the badlands.'
Grey Areas and Push-Pull
This sets the tone for an album that, in the best way, cannot quite decide what it thinks. Morby is especially acute on the weird push and pull exerted by one's hometown. Comforting familiarity and nostalgia do battle with the sense of never quite fitting in. On Cowtown, a bluesy acoustic lick disrupts an austere sound as Morby sings about being the only one making a sound. Equivocation seeps into everything. On Natural Disaster, Morby cannot decide whether his mood swings require medication or meditation, or if they are natural occurrences like landslides or hurricanes that fuel his songwriting. Die Young looks back on youthful hedonism with a shudder that cannot fully undercut the fondness with which he recounts touring scrapes.
Musical Understatement
Musically, Morby deals primarily in introspection and understatement. His back catalogue has touched on soul and jazz, but its foundation remains well-crafted Americana drawing on Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, Tom Petty, and Leonard Cohen. He has never sold vast quantities or written a breakout song, but the genesis of Little Wide Open shows how well respected he is. The National's Aaron Dessner, who has worked with Noah Kahan, Taylor Swift, and Ed Sheeran, apparently asked to work with Morby and has shared his music with everyone he has worked with.
The supporting cast includes Justin Vernon of Bon Iver imitating a tornado siren, alt-country star Lucinda Williams delivering a monologue, and members of Muna, Sylvan Esso, Florence + the Machine, and Perfume Genius. Their efforts return Morby to the bedrock of his sound. There are a couple of moments that leap out, such as the climactic maelstrom of noisy guitar on 100,000, but for the most part, the album's main currency is subtle pleasures: the lovely melancholy exhalation of the title track's chorus, the way the banjo-assisted closer Field Guide for the Butterflies gradually builds from fragility to toughness, and the beautiful piano and clarinet motif running through Junebug. Filled with songs that take their time to unspool—the title track and Natural Disaster both last more than seven minutes—this music eschews flash and encourages the listener to sit with it, fitting its lyrical uncertainties and sense of someone working out feelings in real time.
Personal and Vulnerable
Morby has called Little Wide Open his most personal and vulnerable album. It is identifiable as the work of someone age 38, on the cusp of fatherhood, powered by doubts that might assail anyone at that point in life: 'Am I a has-been?' wonders Javelin. 'Am I a husband?' But its emotional tone feels universal: in a climate that tends to extremes, it is a welcome safe space for admitting you are not sure; that things are complicated.
