Kevin Morby

Singer/songwriter Kevin Morby emerged from supporting roles to establish a thriving solo path, crafting material that fuses Dylanesque lyrical enigma with earthy arrangements. With peers such as Angel Olsen and Kurt Vile, he embodies a cohort of incisive, indie-rooted songwriters from the 2010s whose followings expanded rapidly once their individual styles matured. His artistic growth proved especially swift, crystallizing across a series of acclaimed releases that encompassed 2017’s immaculate City Music, 2019’s thematic odyssey Oh My God, and 2022’s introspective This Is a Photograph, an album in which the songwriter examined aging, kinship, and unsettled eras. The subsequent year, alongside scoring duties, Morby issued More Photographs (A Continuum), a collection that reinterpreted the material from This Is a Photograph while introducing fresh compositions.

Residing in Los Angeles, Morby had relocated from his Texas birthplace to Brooklyn during the mid-2000s and eventually took up bass duties in the noise-folk outfit Woods. While based in Brooklyn he forged a close bond with Cassie Ramone of the punk trio Vivian Girls, leading the pair to launch a side project called the Babies, which delivered albums in 2011 and 2012. After shifting to L.A., Morby tracked a set of songs alongside Babies producer Rob Barbato as a tribute to New York City; these tracks marked a turn toward a roots-inflected indie aesthetic and also incorporated Babies drummer Justin Sullivan plus additional contributors. Issued in 2013 on Woodsist Records, the eight-song set titled Harlem River marked Morby’s first solo outing.

In August of that year Morby left his Brooklyn home for Los Angeles and promptly commenced work on what became his second solo album, Still Life, which appeared on Woodsist in late 2014. His following LP drew from two pivotal shifts: settling into a residence equipped with a piano and participating in the Complete Last Waltz, an ensemble assembled to honor the music of the Band. The former altered his compositional approach, while the latter connected him with bandmate Sam Cohen of Yellowbirds, sparking their ongoing partnership. Recording for Morby’s debut on the Dead Oceans imprint occurred in Woodstock, New York, and included keyboardist Marco Benevento as well as Quilt’s John Andrews on musical saw. Singing Saw arrived in April 2016. The next year brought the companion release City Music, captured at the analog-focused Panoramic House studio in rural West Marin, California, and spotlighting its 19th-century pump organ; on the record Morby evoked Lou Reed and Patti Smith across a sequence of inward-looking vignettes.

Two additional years passed before he returned with his fifth album, Oh My God. The expansive double LP carried a loose conceptual framework in which each track orbited religious motifs, and several selections were pared back to one or two instruments rather than the denser arrangements typical of his other work. A reversion to four-track cassette demos produced the raw, earthy Americana of his sixth full-length, Sundowner, which surfaced in October 2020 and featured the track “Campfire” alongside Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield. The following year brought Night at the Little Los Angeles, a four-track demo version of Sundowner.

His seventh album, This Is a Photograph, appeared in May 2022. The project stemmed from Morby’s contemplation of mortality after his father suffered a sudden health crisis; as his father recovered, Morby journeyed to Memphis to compose the bittersweet, emotionally probing songs that formed the record. In January 2023 his score for the 2021 film Montana Story emerged via Dead Oceans. That May, More Photographs (A Continuum) supplied both reworkings of three songs from This Is a Photograph and six new pieces. ~ Timothy Monger