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Sep 01, 2020 By Christopher Roberts Photography by Johnny Eastlund Kevin Morby

Kevin Morby has announced a new album, Sundowner, and shared its first single, “Campfire,” via a video for the song that also features his real life romantic partner, Katie Crutchfield (aka Waxahatchee), who has a brief vocal part in the middle of the video. Sundowner is due out October 16 via Dead Oceans. Johnny Eastlund and Dylan Isbell directed the video, which was shot at Castle Rock in Kansas. Watch it below. Also below are the album’s tracklist and cover art.

Morby has also announced a virtual tour via Noon Chorus where he’ll be performing each of his albums in order, each Thursday, starting September 10. Those dates are below.

Sundowner was written and recorded after Morby moved from Los Angeles to his hometown of Kansas City, KS. When they weren’t both on tour, Crutchfield would join him there. “They shared many things, including a mutual melancholy that seemed to appear every night around sunset,” a press release explains. “They began to refer to themselves as ‘sundowners.’”

Morby wrote the album on a Four Track Tascam model 424. “I wrote the entire album wearing headphones, hunched over the 424, letting my voice and guitar pass through the machine, getting lost in the warmth of the tape as if another version of myself was living on the inside, singing back at me,” he says in the press release. “I was mesmerized by the magic of the four track not only as a recording device, but also an instrument, and considered it my songwriting partner throughout the whole process.”

In January 2019 Morby recorded the album at Texas’ Sonic Ranch with producer Brad Cook. “My end goal was to capture the cadence of what I had found inside the four track but make it three dimensional, and Brad seemed perfect for the job,” says Morby. Morby played most of the instruments on the album, including lead guitar, mellotron, and “a slightly out-of-tune pump organ.” Cook also contributed bass and keys, with Big Thief’s James Krivchenia playing drums towards the end of the session.

Morby released his last album, Oh My God, in 2019 via Dead Oceans. It was billed as Morby’s “first true concept-album” and tackled religion. Morby took time away from Sundowner to tour Oh My God, but returned to the album this March, as the world went into quarantine, mixing the album remotely with Cook and Jerry Ordonez (from Sonic Ranch).

Morby describes the album as such: “It is a depiction of isolation. Of the past. Of an uncertain future. Of provisions. Of an omen. Of a dead deer. Of an icon. Of a Los Angeles themed hotel in rural Kansas. Of billowing campfires, a mermaid and a highway lined in rabbit fur. It is a depiction of the nervous feeling that comes with the sky’s proud announcement that another day will be soon coming to a close as the pink light recedes and the street lamps and house lights suddenly click on.”

Prior to Oh My God, Morby released two albums in back-to-back years: Singing Saw in 2016 and City Music in 2017, both via Dead Oceans.

Read our 2017 interview with Kevin Morby on City Music.

Also read our 2017 Track-by-Track interview with Morby on City Music.

Read our review of Singing Saw and check out our 2016 interview with Morby about Singing Saw.

Waxahatchee released a new album, Saint Cloud, in March via Merge.

In March we posted our in-depth interview with Crutchfield about the album and quarantining during COVID-19 and you can read that here.

Sundowner Tracklist:

1.Valley
2. Brother, Sister
3. Sundowner
4. Campfire
5. Wander
6. Don’t Underestimate Midwest American Sun
7. A Night At The Little Los Angeles
8. Jamie
9. Velvet Highway
10. Provisions

Kevin Morby Virtual Tour Dates:

Thu. Sept. 10 - Harlem River
Thu. Sept. 17 - Still Life
Thu. Sept. 24 - Singing Saw
Thu. Oct. 1 - City Music
Thu. Oct. 8 - Oh My God
Thu. Oct. 15 - Sundowner

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