Midwest muso Kevin Morby is no longer America's best kept secret

During the 2020 pandemic, US singer-songwriter Kevin Morby almost got stuck in Australia.

As quarantines tightened, he found himself in Melbourne before it had some of the world's toughest lockdowns.

He didn't panic. Instead, he remembers thinking:

He has become acquainted with Australia's bigger cities over multiple visits.

"Feel[ing] like, 'Oh, I know where I'm at. I know this neighbourhood — I love that one restaurant! It's nice," he tells Double J's Henry Wagons.

That moment of acceptance speaks to something essential about Morby, a folk-rock journeyman who finds belonging and meaning in transit.

That philosophy feels more relevant than ever as Morby returns to tour Australia next month, supporting his latest album Little Wide Open.

Following a discography inspired by adopted homes — Laurel Canyon (2016's Singing Saw), New York (2017's City Music), Memphis (2022's This Is A Photograph) — Morby's eighth solo album heads back to the Missouri farmlands and Kansas City suburbs where he grew up.

"I have a complicated relationship to it, just as most people do with their home towns. There's a lot of love and a lot of resentment. It's all these emotions and a lot of them come out on this record."

A collection of sentimental alt-country, dusky folk and lush Americana, Little Wide Open conjures rich imagery: fields of sunflowers and June bugs, late-night bars and long highways stretching into flat horizons dominated by wide open skies.

Porchside strumming and finger-picking score vivid portraits of "anywhere America" on songs with names like Cowtown and Bible Belt.

Small-town iconography and spangling riffs power 100,000, before a guitar explodes like a Fourth of July firecracker over the song's climax.

These tunes, built from tried-and-true chords and Morby's humble Dylanesque voice, romanticise the comforts of small towns but equally yearn to escape them for something larger.

"I don't mean that in a derogatory sense. The lifestyles are simpler. There's a quality of life, your money goes further, things like that. But with that, there's less opportunity and less culture.

"There can be great things about the Midwest.

You can hear the influence of Morby's "big five": Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Lou Reed, Nina Simone, and Townes Van Zandt.

But also, more pluck and twang ("Country music's great. One of [music's] backbones over the past two centuries") as well as the "rootsy, heartland rock and roll" Morby was immersed in making the record.

"I bought this pick-up truck with a free subscription to satellite radio. Part of that was the Tom Petty radio station and I just got super into him. He was a big influence."

He also cites the album World Without Tears by legendary artist Lucinda Williams, who provides a drawling, cautionary spoken word on stand-out track Natural Disaster.

"I wanted this voice-of-God thing to come in. I was so thrilled when she said she'd do it."

Williams isn't Little Wide Open's only notable guest.

In a sign of how esteemed Morby is among his peers, the album also features Bon Iver's Justin Vernon (emulating a tornado siren on rustic opener Badlands), backing vocals from MUNA's Katie Gavin, and players from Florence + The Machine, Perfume Genius, Sylvan Esso and Hand Habits.

Then there's The National's Aaron Dessner. Fresh from producing blockbuster records for Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran, Dessner recorded Little Wide Open at his studio in upstate New York.

"He made the songs feel big and dense in their ways without distracting the story or the vocal," Morby explains.

"He really kept my vocal front and centre. It felt like I was standing a little bit naked on these recordings, but I think it benefited the album in the end.

"Besides that, he's just an unbelievable musician. And really believed in these songs through moments where maybe I wasn't believing in them … 'Kevin, you gotta let these songs breathe.'"

Dessner's fingerprints are all over Junebug, with its gossamer guitars and piano decorated by oboe and harp. But those flourishes never overshadow Morby.

"Sometimes the myth grows bigger than the dream" he sings on the swooning title track, where banjo, slide guitar and fiddle comfortably sprawl past the eight-minute mark.

Little Wide Open is also charged by Morby "looking down the barrel of 40," and the sense of life moving too fast.

"Am I a has-been? Am I a husband?" he sings ruefully amid the otherwise upbeat Javelin. Nearly cut for being too vulnerable, the lyric was prompted by impending parenthood.

Morby recently welcomed his first child alongside his musician-partner Katie Crutchfield, better known as alt-country favourite Waxahatchee.

"We fell in love on tour. We're these creative sounding boards for one other. I really trust Katie's ear and her thoughts. It's real easy to walk in the other room and say, 'Hey, is this lyric good?'"

While she doesn't feature on Little Wide Open, "Katie is very much in the DNA. It's a lot of love songs," Morby says.

"It's a funny thing being in a public relationship because people are going to know who you're singing about."

Because Morby's music is presented with such easy-going charm, you can easily miss the serious subject matter of his lyrics, which contemplate existential questions about life, time and mortality.

"It's a darker song [but] for the longest time, I wanted to call the record I Ride Passenger," Morby says of a tune loosely inspired by a fan who died in a car crash on his way to see him perform.

The central lyric? "If time is a violent driver, then we ride passenger."

Die Young is a warm, mid-tempo reflection on aging, and surviving the fragile existence of a touring musician.

That idea is revisited on the plaintive closer, Field Guide for The Butterflies, which uses insects splattered on windshields as a metaphor for troubadours compelled to reach and share deeper truths despite the risks of lonely lives spent on the road.

But "it's not suicide if I die out chasing thrills" Morby confides in the album's closing moments. "Just me trying to grow wings."

It's a moving finish to a record where Morby ponders where he's been, what happens next and what it all means.

Kevin Morby's tour begins in Eltham on Thursday, November 12, before shows in Bellingen, Brisbane, Mt Glorious, Sydney, Brunswick Heads, Castlemaine and Melbourne.