Kevin Morby Finds a Home Anywhere in the World
The former Woods bassist is back with "City Music," his fourth album in five years.
Photo: Dusdin Condren
Kevin Morby is in a self-imposed masterclass for keeping the wheels in constant motion. His initial claims to fame—former bassist of Woods and frontman for The Babies—are beginning to appear as footnotes in his rapidly expanding solo portfolio. On Friday he’ll release his fourth album in five years, City Music, which cycles through tides of weariness and jubilance. The characters in the songs, all of whom share Morby’s habit of wandering from one station to the next, wax existential with affable grins, like a childhood friend determined to probe your shared history until the pub closes.
When reached by phone this week, Morby was between two trapeze bars of his extensive tour, and was taking some time to swim and relax in upstate New York before months of Euro country-hopping. That kind of routine, he said, requires a certain resolve to muscle through the rigor and overstimulation and “get in that headspace to reach out and grab” the inspiration that is collected at each stop and feed it back.
“I feel like touring and traveling all the time exposes you to the world and the universe in a specific way that not a lot of people get to see,” Morby said. “It kind of opens the creative brain. It’s almost kind of like when I’m on tour, my creative brain will open up and it’ll collect all these things and it’ll put them in this bank. When I do get somewhere, and I get time to relax, and I can be with my piano or be with my guitar, all those things come out that I collected along the way. ”
Watch the video for Kevin Morby’s “Aboard My Train,” from City Music.
That sentiment is reflected in the collectivity and balance Morby applies to his studio work. He wrote City Music as something of a “devil’s advocate record” to last year’s critically acclaimed Singing Saw. The swooning adornments that were pressed into the fabric of the former have been sidelined in favor of the direct-contact jolt of Morby’s live show. The title track is streaked with bright, clear electric guitars that take their time propelling a slow-paddling groove into the rapids. Hearing Morby’s stony voice on “Come to Me Now” rise out of a haunting, celestial organ dirge with compressed bursts of drums is close to knee-buckling. Overall, the freewheeling, drum-bass-guitar Americana rock that formed the foundation of Singing Saw remains intact, but is tagged with stories of naked recordings and creative mantras like “Let’s do something we’ll regret later.”