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May 15, 2026 By Mark Moody Photography by Chantal Anderson

Kevin Morby’s new album Little Wide Open is both a love letter and a goodbye to his Midwestern roots. So starting our conversation, with Morby Zooming in from Los Angeles, talking about the war in Iran, may seem like a strange place to begin. The conflict was only a few days old when we connected and news of the first American casualties had just broken. Though a small sample, more than half of those that died early on were from the Midwest: Nebraska, Minnesota, two from Iowa. Morby’s song “100,000” touches sadly and squarely on the topic: “Ugly boys, ugly brothers, die for your country, or one another.”

“I grew up in Oklahoma City, Tulsa, and Kansas City. The military would come to my high school. A lot of kids that I went to school with would end up going to the Marines or signing up for the military. You see it a lot in movies too. The Midwestern kid that seems kind of out of sorts, signs up to do this thing, and it turns into something much more intense than what they imagined. So the song is just depicting my idea of small town America and a lot of these towns you pass on the highway, but never turn into,” Morby says.

Ironically through our conversation we discover that we both lived in Oklahoma at the same time. Just after the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City. Again, the impact of tragedy seems to hit different in a smaller city where everyone knows their neighbors. “It is still taken very seriously,” Morby says. “The [OKC Thunder] basketball team takes a tour of the bomb site every year. I remember growing up and visiting the site and getting paw print autographs of the rescue dogs. And putting out stuffed animals for the kids that had died.”

Aside from these sobering remembrances, Morby has had a lot going on. In February, he attended the Grammy awards, where Mavis Staples walked away, trophy in hand, for her cover of Morby’s one-off single, “Beautiful Strangers.” Even though not on any of his albums, the song, which commemorates those lost to violence, was already a fan favorite. Staples, a bona fide standard bearer of the Civil Rights movement, made the song her own. “It’s just really amazing, really surreal that all that happened. So cool and Mavis’ whole album is amazing. The song selection with Gillian Welch and Sparklehorse is so great. I can’t believe [my] song ended up on the album, then they put it out as a single, and then it won a Grammy,” Morby says. One thing Morby didn’t share was that he and his partner, Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield, are expecting their first baby, which was revealed after our interview.

One thing that was not on Morby’s mind when he was composing for the record was a chance to record with The National’s Aaron Dessner. Aside from his day job, Dessner has produced seven original or re-recorded albums with Taylor Swift. Morby had opened for The National at one point and Morby was shocked that Dessner was able to make time for him. “He’s insanely busy, man. I don’t know if I’ve met anyone as busy as that guy,” Morby explains. “I really don’t know why he reached out to me, but I was really flattered. I didn’t know what direction I was going to go or who I was going to work with on this record. He kind of helped clean things up on the album. I think the strength he had was holding me back from doing too much. I’m kind of a maximalist in the studio. I always want to throw on string sections and backing vocalists. He really helped me practice a lot of restraint, which I think benefited the album a lot.”

Before we wrapped our conversation, I had to point out a reference to one of my all time favorite songwriters that Morby inserted in the album. On the song “Sinners,” Morby quotes the title of Townes Van Zandt’s “To Live Is to Fly,” but that’s not the song that most closely feels like a Van Zandt song. It’s the masterful “Dandelions” which is hanging out near the back of the 13 track album. The song has the same see-sawing rhythm of Van Zandt’s “Rex’s Blues,” and is flavored with a fiddle line, Katie Gavin’s (MUNA) laid back harmony, and Dessner bumping things along with a banjo. But it’s the line, “notice the water lines, up on the highway signs, written in rust,” that evokes Van Zandt’s lyrical mastery the most. It’s an indelible image anyone can relate to and is so simply said.

“I’m really glad [you noticed that],” Morby responds. “It was in my mind that I was trying to write like Townes Van Zandt on that one. That’s what I was trying to embody. It’s one of those lines I wrote and it’s so tucked into the back of the album. You’re about an hour in at that point and it comes late in the song too. But it’s one of those lines I knew I could hang my hat on. That’s one of the ones that I knew was good. So that one didn’t come from the Midwest. I wrote that when we were driving from Alabama to Kansas City and maybe I’m mixing things up. But I do remember visiting New Orleans after [Hurricane] Katrina and I remember seeing water lines on stop signs. So I was either remembering that or they are still there.”

Morby and Crutchfield ultimately moved to Los Angeles in late 2024, well after writing the bulk of Little Wide Open. But they had plans to depart Kansas City much sooner than they did. “We were planning on moving to L.A. or New York, but then the pandemic hit,” Morby explains. “It turned into a situation where living in Kansas City ended up being the most enjoyable time I’ve ever had there. It’s a great place to be in the forced solitude we were all in. But once the world opened back up, most of the communities that we are in are in bigger cities. It started feeling like we were missing out on being a part of all those people’s lives. So the album was written with the idea that we would be leaving soon. A little bit of a goodbye, but I’m not letting go of it forever.”

www.kevinmorby.com

Pick up our My Favorite Movie print issue to read a joint interview between Morby and actor Jason Schwartzman about the movie Rushmore, which Schwartzman starred in and is Morby’s favorite film. The issue is available here.

Read our interview with Morby on his 2017 album City Music, along with our City Music Track-by-Track interview with him.

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