Kevin Morby Releases New Album Little Wide Open

Today, Kevin Morby releases his eighth studio album, Little Wide Open, today via Dead Oceans, and in conjunction, releases the video for album highlight, “100,000.” The track illustrates what Little Wide Open means to Morby.  As award-winning novelist Rachel Kushner writes in her astonishing essay about Little Wide Open entitled “Field Guide to the North American Troubadour,” “for him, the LWO is the big sky, the small lives—it’s his origins in the Midwest and every duty and modesty and familiarity and isolation: the land, the people, and the parts of that inside him. Kevin elaborates: 

“I consider any town with a population 100,000 or less to be a small town in America. This song is a fantasy of all the mysterious and quiet lives taking place in those anonymous towns that you often pass on the side of the highway. Yet all those tiny lives must feel just as big and significant as anybody else’s, of course; full of people falling in love, dreaming their dreams, living their lives day by day.” 

I was inspired by Tom Verlaine’s guitar work on this one, who had passed away around the time I wrote the song. I called in my guitar-sibling and long-time collaborator Meg Duffy whose explosive guitar work at the end of the song is one of my favorite parts of the album. We have a kind of short hand telepathy with our guitar playing that has always been influenced by Verlaine and Television, so it really felt effortless being back in the studio together.

In the summer of 2024, Aaron Dessner had asked Morby to support The National at their London show in Crystal Palace Park. Shortly after, Dessner—who was on a hot streak, having produced albums for Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran, and Gracie Abrams—reached out to Morby to say he’d love to produce his next album. They began recording at Aaron’s Long Pond Studio in Stuyvesant, NY, early in 2025 and finished in September of that year.

The album, which includes a host of contributors such as Dessner—who plays multiple instruments across it— Meath, Justin Vernon, Katie Gavin, Lucinda Williams, Mat Davidson, Meg Duffy, Oliver Hill, Rachel Baiman, Stuart Bogie, Tim Carr, Andrew Barr, Benjamin Lanz, Colin Croom and Tom Moth, has been described by Morby as the third in an unintentional trilogy of releases, following 2020’s Sundowner and 2022’s This Is a Photograph, which catalogued his time in middle America after moving back to Kansas City. This time out, Dessner’s production elevates Morby’s recordings while never losing focus of the songs themselves. There’s a newfound confidence and clarity in both Morby’s writing and Dessner’s production that recalls Tom Petty’s 1994 classic Wildflowers. Now primarily living in LA, the atmosphere that runs through Little Wide Open has changed somewhat from its predecessors. The feeling of restlessly hurtling towards something new. A future unseen and untested, but inevitable. 

Last week, Morby kicked off an extensive North American tour, which brings him tonight to the Kilby Block Party festival in Salt Lake City. For a taste of what to expect, watch his performance of “Javelin” alongside Amelia Meath on  Jimmy Kimmel Live! from  late last month.