Review by Will Haraway, Cover Photo by Zen Kramer

I was in this vinyl club with some other Atlanta music guys like Matt Wilson, Joel Grubb, Kelly Campbell, and Adam Blank, and it was a really fun concept. Every month you would buy a record for someone on the list and they had no idea what you were getting and vice versa.

So every month I’d get a blank package in the mail and do an unboxing like the kids do on TikTok. And it was always fun, because I would often get something I would never have picked, or even considered. One of these was Kevin Morby’s City Music. I learned later that Kevin does concept records, usually based on a sense of place, and this one was about his time living in New York City. It’s cool, I liked it and still do, but it’s not something I put on the needle regularly. But thanks to vinyl club, he was now on my radar.

This February, Kevin released Javelin as the first single for his new album and I’m instantly obsessed with it. Its groove, sense of place and introspective lyrics draw me in and I listen to it constantly. Then comes Badlands, and Die Young, and 100,000—all beautiful bangers in the same style—and I’m convinced the record will be an instant favorite.

Little Wide Open is released on May 15, and the very next evening I’m hunkered down on an overnight flight to Barcelona. I knock down a couple of Sweetwater 420s, put on an eye mask, take my sleep aid and press play on LWO. I proceed to listen to it all the way through and then start drifting off to sleep. It keeps playing. You know how it is with plane sleep, you get a couple good REM hours, wake up for a minute or so and then drift back off. In this cycle I would wake up to parts of All Sinners, Cowtown, Dandelion, and the gorgeous title track at various random points on the flight; all in all I think my subconscious listened to it 4-5 times in a row.                           

Then it became my soundtrack for the entire trip. Night walk to Sagrada Familia, bike rides to Park Guell, and Barceloneta? It Rode Passenger. As with City Music, it’s a concept record, but this one about the wide open beauty of the Midwest (Morby grew up in Kansas City and was living in Omaha until recently), but also the fresh perspective of a guy who’s about to be a parent for the first time, with (the wonderful) Katie Crutchfield, aka Waxahatchee. As a parent myself, I remember these moments of introspection. Immediately, time becomes your ally, not your enemy.

After this immersive experience, you can imagine how excited I was to see that Morby would be playing in ATL on 6/14, and at a place I love playing myself, Variety Playhouse in Atlanta.

Walking in, the stage had a huge backdrop of the LWE album cover of Kevin opening the backdoors of a van to reveal a seemingly endless field of five-foot sunflowers, a theme which extended to the actual stage adorned with multiple fake 5-foot sunflowers. Well done, production team.

Morby took the stage with Camillia Hartman on violin/keys and Cochemea Gastelum on percussion, alongside guitarist Liam Kazar, who opened the show with Morby rhythm section Cole Berggren and Dom Billet pulling double duty and backing him as well.

As I hoped, they started with all songs from Little Wide Open, kind of like a 45-minute mini-set, and yeah, that was literally everything I’d hoped for. Natural Disaster, aka the one on which Lucinda Williams guests, started the show and it was surprisingly explosive live, basically a build from the very first note into Die Young, Javelin, 100,000, All Sinners and Badlands, all of them reflecting their beautiful melodies and themes. Morby, of course, is a great guitarist and frontman, particularly when employing one of his (and mine!) favorite vocal tricks—staying in the low register until the dramatic build, when he explodes into the high octave, like here (vid), on Badlands. Love that shit, gets me every time. The whole band played all this material perfectly to my ears, especially Hartman and Kazar’s backing vocals and Kazar’s right hand/left hand duo thing he had going with Morby.

From here we moved into his Morby classics, and I moved up to the balcony for a different perspective, and got one—I didn’t really know these songs beyond This is a Photograph and City Music—so I got to see the difference in the sound. His ‘classics’ like the great I Have Been to the Mountain are more bombastic, punkier and edgier than the melodic, rolling-across-the-county with the windows down vibe he’d found in the new material.

How much of this new sound came from Crutchfield/Waxahatchee’s own sound evolution, brilliantly evidenced by the multitude of melodic earworms on 2024’s Tiger’s Blood? I’ve decided to think that’s at least some part of it, because that’s a beautiful testament to both art and love.

I rejoined my Morby obsessed friends at the front of the stage for Mountain, and then he closed the main set with the song I most wanted to hear live on this musical journey, Little Wide Open, an eight minute masterpiece that bridges this love letter to the Midwest with his own plea to be open, present, and available with his loved ones and the world at large as his own life evolves in a new place with a growing family.

A beautiful sentiment. A beautiful night. Now I own two Morby records.

Time, please be kind to me
Time, we’re not enemies, though it’d seem
Time, we share the same dream
To stretch on forever towards eternity