Kevin Morby

Kevin Morby’s music dances on the divide between death and delight, between wringing every experience out of existence while also understanding that said existence is finite. “In a world that kills, oh, I cannot sit still,” he sings near the end of his excellent 2026 album, Little Wide Open. “Is it suicide if I die out chasing thrills?” This tension has been with Morby since he was a teenager, moving across the Midwest with his parents and worrying about what it meant for life to end, for bad things to happen. When a therapist told him there was nothing actually wrong with death, a light bulb went off—he’d better get on with living. Morby headed east to New York, joining Woods and starting The Babies before releasing a constant stream of solo albums that bundled together the raw ends of his feelings as he ping-ponged from New York to Los Angeles and back to the Midwest.

As Morby wrote Little Wide Open and recorded it with Aaron Dessner and a panoply of pals like Lucinda Williams and Justin Vernon, he was also nearing 40 and addressing the questions of settling down with his partner Katie Crutchfield—being a father, a dog owner, a husband. An album whose scope and concerns are as vast as a horizon-wide expanse of tallgrass prairie, Little Wide Open counters its worries about death with a gratitude for having been here at all, for having survived youthful hijinks long enough to actually live. “May all sinners be forgiven by Jesus Christ/’cause it’d sure be nice to see all my friends again in our private heaven,” he offers in lines less about dying than having had the chance to have lived and sinned with those friends in the first place. To wit, Morby is a livewire performer, too, inhabiting the moment and offering the crowd the chance to do the same. We only get so many, after all.