On the afternoon of Kevin Morby’s 38th birthday, we’re drinking three-dollar Bud Lights at a patio table outside the American Legion Post Bar #318 in Parkville, Missouri—population 8,000—cutting to the chase. A freight train horn blares in the distance, birds chirp loudly, and Morby, a preternaturally warm person, is telling me how he got so comfortable with death. For his entire adult life, he’s found solace in singing songs honoring his friends who died young. Even still, I’m trying to understand how the second half of Morby’s eighth album, Little Wide Open, came to feel so enlightened by ghosts. The train screams again. As signs on the highways remind us, we’re in “the heart of America,” and there’s no one around.
“In American culture, in Midwest culture, people tend to not want to talk about something that’s uncomfortable,” Morby says, wearing a camo trucker hat that dubs him a MIDWEST PRINCESS. “Other cultures will look it in the eye. I think that’s beneficial, or it’s beneficial for me.”
Morby and I drove a half-hour out to Parkville from his home in suburban Overland Park, where he and his partner of nine years, Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield, live in a sleek midcentury modern ranch. Tonight we’re all hitting a local cigarette-stained bowling alley to inaugurate Morby’s late 30s. For now, the objective of our Parkville adventure in his royal-blue Ford Ranger pickup is to repeat a process Morby has embraced since moving back home in 2017. Riding out to Parkville, he listens to his home-recorded demos; in between, he stops to clear his head near the Missouri River or sip a peppermint tea at a cafe inside a repurposed train car. The whole thing constitutes a holy trinity for Morby: highway, river, train. It feels like a small-town scene straight from the pages of some indie-rock Winesburg, Ohio.
These particular Parkville trips are soundtracked by his lovely Little Wide Open demos, which he and producer Aaron Dessner brought to life as Morby’s most eloquent and elemental work yet. But he’s also previewing its practically finished follow-up—a testament to his prolificness as well as a practicality. Soon he’ll be occupied by other responsibilities: Morby and Crutchfield are expecting their first child, a son, in August.
What the couple has built together in the Midwest over the past decade already feels like the stuff of modern indie legend: two former punk wanderers, who left home for the East Coast with rock’n’roll dreams, fell in love on the road and made a life together in the restless world of their songs. Little Wide Open is a window into their Midwest: the rolling plains, the tornado sirens, the Biblically big sky. “We have to honor that Kansas City opened something up in both of us creatively,” Crutchfield tells me earlier, in the living room of the house where they currently live with their two energetic spaniels, Ernie and Root Beer. Hung on the walls are original artworks by deceased cult rock legends like Blaze Foley, Daniel Johnston, and David Berman, Morby’s hero since high school (the first LPs he ever purchased were Silver Jews’ American Water and Bikini Kill’s Pussy Whipped). I stare for a while at Berman’s line drawing on electric-blue paper, which reads in cursive: “Its almost tomorrow… It is always almost tomorrow.”
Morby wrote the heartland folk songs of Little Wide Open while he and Crutchfield were facing big questions about their future, and he knew, whatever the answers, “my life was going to drastically change.” Singing about solar and lunar eclipses on “Javelin,” he evokes what it’s like to feel cosmically infinitesimal alongside a person you love. But it’s also a poignant metaphor for two songwriters constantly on opposite sides of the globe. Morby calls the album’s eight-minute-long titular ballad “an open love letter” that also addresses what it’s like to hear his own life reflected in songs—say, “Right Back to It,” or “Hell”—that mean so much to such big audiences that it can occasionally feel “like vertigo.”
