Kevin Morby on I-40, Dad Rock, and New Horizons

Driving through Kansas’ rolling hills, the rain-fed country of early summer unfolding around him, Kevin Morby picks up my call in a scene straight out of Little Wide Open, his recently released Midwestern eulogy.

“Kansas looks really lush and green right now, feels like not Kansas, and we just drove past [an] alpaca farm.” There’s wonder in Morby’s voice, a familiar tone for those familiar with his songwriting. “We feel like we’re in Ireland right now.”

He and partner Katie Crutchfield, who makes music as Waxahatchee, are crossing into the Western states on one of many road trips they’ve made between Los Angeles and Kansas City, the disparate metropolitan hotspots where they’re planning to raise their son, expected in August. In a lifetime of touring, Morby has built a mental map of favorite pit stops.

“I love eating at Duran’s in Albuquerque, which is a little New Mexican diner that’s in the back of a pharmacy. I love Ojo Caliente outside of Santa Fe,” he says. The Lubbock-born musician muses fondly about Oklahoma’s lack of traffic and the familiarity of Amarillo, wondering if a Lonely Planet guidebook could be in his future. “I love I-40. I always say: Take the southern route,” he gushes.

Little Wide Open unfolds along this route, among fireflies and thunderstorms on long stretches of highways dotted with roadside crosses, decaying muscle cars, and flowering fields of many varieties. It’s an emotionally evocative landscape. 

“Where God could be a dog/ Barking in the dark,” Morby sets the scene on record opener “Badlands,” digging into the balance of stasis and unease found in Bible Belt towns and prairielands. “Where the sky knows best/ And you’ll finally get some rest/ ’Til the tornado sirens start harmonizing.” 

“There’s just some sort of peace that comes over me in the Midwest, whether I like it or not,” he says. “Whenever I leave it for any period of time, I always feel a real pull to get back to it.” No matter the strength of that hometown tug, Morby also feels strongly about maintaining roots on the coast. “It feels important to me to also have a foot planted on one of the coasts, because that’s where a lot of my – and our – community live, a lot of other people who do what we do,” Morby says. He spent years in New York, playing in the Babies, and moved to Los Angeles to launch his solo career. 

Place has always featured heavily in his introspective songwriting, but Morby’s last three records have been an unofficial trilogy of sorts exploring his landlocked roots, starting with 2020’s Sundowner.

“I made that as I was moving back to the Midwest, so it felt like a ‘Hello, so nice to see you again’ album,” he says. “Then I made This Is a Photograph deep in the pandemic in Memphis, and that felt like I was really trying to embed myself into the middle of the country as much as possible, and this one feels a little bit …” he cuts himself off. They’ve just driven past an RV park called “Sundown.” The road holds many signs and serendipities. It feels like a farewell to the Midwest, he continues – “at least in the way that we’ve been knowing one another.”

Not only does the release mark an end of time spent more exclusively in Kansas City, it marks the end of child-free life and a new chapter of adulthood for the pair. “Am I a has been?/ Am I a husband?” Morby wonders on lead single “Javelin.”

“I feel like I’ve always made some sort of brand of dad rock, and now I’ll legitimately be dad rock,” he says. Raised by distinctly non-musical parents, Morby already sounds a bit awe struck imagining the upbringing his son will have, raised by two songwriter parents deeply embedded in a nation-spanning community of fellow musicians and creatives. 

Sharing a tour van with Hamilton Leithauser and his two young daughters for a couple weeks helped him visualize the road ahead. “That was a real moment where I was like, I want to do this,”  he says. “Having kids around was so wonderful.”

Winding down familiar highways, stopping in familiar venues and haunts, Morby’s retracing old paths with fresh eyes on the cusp of a new horizon. He and an improvised, minimal band played then-unreleased versions of Little Wide Open tracks during a second-annual South by Southwest stop into the Long Time back in March. He’s already started recording a “very different” new project, but “that’ll all be revealed in time,” he says. 

Now, with the trilogy cincher out in the world, he’ll return to Austin to play full arrangements of these grassland-roving songs before, as always, traveling on to what’s next. 

Kevin Morby plays Stubb’s on Saturday, June 20.

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