The Kansas City-raised singer-songwriter’s eighth solo LP of folk, rock and country is inspired by Missouri’s vast space, and features guests including Justin Vernon (Bon Iver), Katie Gavin, Lucinda Williams, Meg Duffy (Hand Habits) with production by The National’s Aaron Dessner. This album is described by Morby as the third in a trilogy of releases, following 2020’s Sundowner and 2022’s This Is a Photograph, which catalogued his time in the Midwest after moving back to Kansas City. The title expresses the big sky and small lives of his Midwest origins, the contradictory feelings of impressive vast space, with modesty and isolation, captured in simple opener Badlands, which opens with simple acoustic guitar then expands into thunderous exposition with beautifully bittersweet and poetic lyrics: “Welcome to the badlands / Where the sky expands and you and I expire/ Just like sparks flying off some firecracker / In the big disaster/ We call home/ Where God could be a dog / Barking in the dark/ And if it goes pitch black, would you come back?/ Would you follow my name through wild fields of lavender? / In this life, we're just passengers just passing by .. Heaven is a place on Earth beneath the golden sky/ Heaven is a place on Earth, wе see it by and by … Welcome to the Midwest / Where the sky knows best / And you'll finally get some rest / 'Til the tornado sirens start harmonizing.”
It’s very evocative work, with many gems to follow including the wistful Die Young, the toe-tapping folk rock of Javelin: “Towards this old cowtown in the Bible Belt / Remember when they asked us, baby, just how it felt / To be alone in the middle of / Middle America?”, the Dylan-esque All Sinners and Natural Disasters with images of wildfires and tornados. Then 100,000 is another highlight, a Byrds- style song of vivid, profound beauty that builds to a stormy guitar solo: “One hundred thousand people / One hundred thousand lives / One hundrеd thousand teardrops / Right behind their еyes.” The gentler country-ish title track is certainly a central, capturing universal divided feelings of a place that pulls you in yet also pushes you away : “Sometimes we're violent / Sometimes we scream / Sometimes the myth grows bigger than the dream/ We're stuck in a song, babe … It's a little wide open / And it makes me feel small.” Cowtown, Bible Belt, and I Ride Passenger are all delicate numbers, the latter flecked with banjo and an example of his penchant for insect imagery featuring fireflies, the lovely Junebug with gentle piano, violin, harp and clarinet, and not least the closer Field Guide For the Butterflies, inspired by the sorrow of finding dead ones on his car bumper, but then finding a book of the this title with a remote bookshop and suggesting something about the fragility of life, pursuing art and being “just me trying to grow wings”. Melancholy, profound and vividly beautiful. Out on Dead Oceans.
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