L.A. singer-songwriter Kevin Morby’s latest contains echoes of his KC past

When Kevin Morby isn’t at his place in Los Angeles, or touring the world, he can often be found hanging around Kansas City. The 29-year-old singer-songwriter recently bought a house here, which he shares with a friend, local filmmaker Christopher Good. It’s a stone’s throw from downtown Overland Park, close to where Morby’s family lives. He just picked up a stereo for the living room, which allows him to enjoy a pastime that mostly wasn’t accessible to him when he was growing up here: buying records.

“Throughout my whole [formative] years, there were no record stores [in KC],” Morby recalls. “There was Recycled Sounds for a while, but then that closed down probably when I was 14 or 15. And then there were just no record stores in the area. So just the fact that you can choose what record store you want to go to [these days] is pretty mind-blowing.”

Morby lit out for New York in 2006, at the age of 18. He did well for himself there, playing bass in the psych-folk outfit Woods and co-fronting the more rock-oriented act The Babies. About four years ago, Morby took leave of those bands and relocated again, to Los Angeles, and began recording solo albums. He’s been prolific. This month marks the release of the fourth Kevin Morby record, City Music, just out via Dead Oceans. 

City Music acts as a sort of companion piece to Morby’s critically acclaimed 2016 record, Singing Saw. The airy, often dreamlike indie-folk compositions on Singing Saw were written at the same time as the songs that appear on City Music. But if Singing Saw is a record for driving out into the desert mountains, the more electric City Music is more of a soundtrack for walking down a bustling sidewalk surrounded by skyscrapers. 

“Singing Saw is very rural and rootsy, so I kinda wanted to create the opposite of that,” Morby says. “Where that [Singing Saw] speaks to more of a country landscape, I wanted it [City Music] to speak to an urban landscape.” 

Oddly, Singing Saw — an album inspired by the rural areas around Los Angeles — was recorded in New York. Sticking true to this running series of contrasts, City Music was recorded in Stinson Beach, California, at Panoramic Studios, in a house-turned-studio overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Morby recorded vocals as he gazed out into the night sea. He says he likes having a distance between where he is and what he’s writing about. “It’s kinda good to step outside of it and look at it from the outside perspective when you’re documenting it,” Morby says.

Some tracks on City Music see Morby reacquainting himself with his KC punk roots. He grew up attending and playing punk shows at downtown Kansas city venues such as the Stray Cat and MoMo Gallery. That influence was detectable in his previous work — the Babies had a punkish wildness to them, as does Morby’s band when he performs his solo songs on tour — but it’s more pronounced on City Music. 

Folk for the punks? Punk for the folks? Call it what you want (although don’t call it folk-punk). “1234” is a snappy blast that name-checks all four original Ramones. “Caught in My Eye” is a stripped-down cover of a love song by the Germs; it’s unclear whether Darby Crash would approve. 

Dylan has always loomed large in Morby’s songs, and elsewhere on City Music, tracks, such as the wordy and electric-guitar-heavy “Tin Can,” call to mind Highway 61 Revisited–era Bob. Morby acknowledges the Dylan influence but says he hears more Velvet Underground in that song.

“It’s funny: Whatever I think I’m ripping off, people always think it’s something else,” Morby says, pointing out a different song that he thinks sounds like Townes Van Zandt but in which others have said they hear Leonard Cohen. “They’re all kinda coming from the same place, so any of those comparisons are fair,” he says. 

Those iconic artists all share a literary bent, something Morby has been increasingly angling toward in his solo career. Nestled between the bluesy “Dry Your Eyes” and City Music’s soulful title track is “Flannery,” a spoken-word excerpt from the Flannery O’Connor novel The Violent Bear It Away, which Morby was reading while writing the album. The passage describes a child riding away from a house fire in a car, toward a city that he’s never seen before. The bright lights of the city frighten him, and he confuses them for the fire he just escaped. 

“I just like that sentiment of a city kind of resembling a fire,” Morby says. “I think it’s a really good metaphor. And also it’s just a thing I’ve seen a million times being on tour. That is kinda how it looks.”

Morby will see dozens of cities in the coming months. A massive tour stretching through November will take him across the U.S. and to Europe. In the midst of it, he’ll stop in at RecordBar on Thursday, September 14, to play City Music for one of the only cities that can legitimately claim him as its own. Lucky us.