(photo by Adarsha Benjamin)
I was lucky enough to catch a solo set by Kevin Morby last Tuesday. I had traveled in that morning and was beat. I was gloriously tired as he sang a bunch of tunes of the excellent Singing Saw with nothing more than an acoustic guitar. He then hopped behind the piano for Destroyer and it was magical. I had no idea that he was releasing a new album.
But here we are, Morby just announced City Music via the fine folks at Dead Oceans. Here’s a little more on the album via the PR Team – His fourth album, City Music works as a counterpart to Morby’s acclaimed 2016 release Singing Saw, an autobiographical set that reflected the solitude and landscape in which it was recorded. Saw was imagined as “an old bookshelf with a young Bob and Joni staring back at me, blank and timeless. They live here, in this left side of my brain, smoking cigarettes and playing acoustic guitars while lying on an unmade bed.”
And now follows City Music, the yang to its yin, the heads to its tails. It is a collection crafted using the other side of its creator’s brain, the jumping off point perhaps best once again encapsulated by an image. “Here, Lou Reed and Patti Smith stare out at the listener,” explains Morby. “Stretched out on a living room floor they are somewhere in mid-70s Manhattan, also smoking cigarettes.” It finds Morby exploring similar themes of solitude, but this time framed by a window of an uptown apartment that looks down upon an international urban landscape “exposed like a giant bleeding wound.”
Follow me on Twitter at @WoodyHearYa or @HearYa
Kevin Morby is here
