Kevin Morby - Little Wide Open

The wandering folk record is well-trodden territory. The open horizon, the longing for home, highways as existential mile-markers. While his previous albums have honed into the sound and place of both New York and Memphis, Kevin Morby’s eighth album instead focuses more on the great expanse of the US Midwest, where he calls home. Described as a reflection on the “time spent on the road” that comes with being “an American entertainer”, things could very easily collapse into cliche. But the Kansas City musician has always done country-folk with a bit of a twist.

Its cover art, at first, appears pure Americana. Donning a stars-and-stripes tasselled jacket, it shows Kevin reaching out of a camper van towards an idyllic landscape of orange sunsets and sunflower fields. And there’s plenty of this vibe on the record too: lyrics of crossing state lines, motel mirrors and blush-coloured skies. But on ‘Little Wide Open’, things are rarely as straight-forward nor idealised as many odes to middle America. Instead, there’s uncertainty and conflict at most turns, and a world outside full of landslides, tornados, fires, floods.

Opener ‘Badlands’ sees Kevin question the underbelly of modern America: “In the big disaster we call home / Where God could be a dog barking in the dark”. While on ‘I Ride Passenger’, the road is depicted less as an escape and more as a journey to oblivion, offering one of the album’s many great couplets: “Carry me back, I’ll ride passenger in a body bag”. Yet later, he inverts these same familiar nihilist troubadour tropes into something more uplifting: “Even though we tried in the beginning not to survive / Well, thank God that we didn’t die young”.

Kevin recorded the LP with Aaron Dessner, The National guitarist who’s quietly become one of indie-pop’s most reliable production hands, his fingerprints over recent records by Taylor Swift, Gracie Abrams, Laufey and Florence Welch. Kevin may lack those other artists’ commercial might, but together the pair have crafted perhaps the most vivid and essential record of his career. Aaron, who Kevin has credited with helping strip things back and prioritise the key bits, knows instinctively when to elevate things, when to let the atmosphere breathe and when to pull back.

There’s more star power bringing the project to life too. The rousing tones of Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon are spliced in, there’s harmonising with MUNA’s Katie Gavin on ‘Dandelion’, while Lucinda Williams, Amelia Meath (Sylvan Esso), and Meg Duffy (Hand Habits) also lend their talents. But even with all these embellishments, the record’s strength lies in Kevin’s knack for turning simplicity into poignancy. The stripped-back closer ‘Field Guide for the Butterflies’ sees him contemplate the fragility of mortality, choosing defiance over despondency as he sings: “In a world that kills, oh, I will not sit still… just me trying to grow wings”. It’s a quiet closing statement that reframes the record not as listless wandering, but as an album about returning home, putting down roots and that ongoing search for whatever comes afterwards.