Kevin Morby walked into the lobby of the Peabody hotel in a long red coat on a Tuesday night in late April and, turning twice, extended his arms toward the travertine pillars of the century-old Southern institution. Best known for serious folk rock, the songwriter often focused on death.
An hour earlier and a few blocks away, he had watched the Memphis Grizzlies go over the 13-point lead to win an important NBA playoff game. The spoils of victory spilled over the hotel’s grand entrance – goblets, high fives, the occasional hum. A player piano threw a rag of Scott Joplin, which scored the electric scene perfectly. “That thing was so creepy as I wrote it here,” said Morby, pointing as he passed, his grin drooping briefly. “I was so lonely.”
Just 18 months ago, in October 2020, Morby escaped the impending pandemic winter in his hometown of Kansas City by booking a three-week stay in Memphis. Since visiting Peabody two years ago with his girlfriend, Katie CrutchfieldPerforming as Waxahatchee, the singer had become a muse of the city’s complex history.
The sprawling hotel was so empty that the staff upgraded Morby to Room 409, a suite where he focused on new songs with the intensity and patience that always eluded him. Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King Jr. was killed; the point on the Mississippi River where Jeff Buckley drowned; The haunted section of Highway 61 to the Delta.
“When the coating happened, I wanted to go to the darkest place possible,” he said. Memphis almost shattered pandemic more than a century ago.
During this tenure, Morby wrote most of his seventh solo album, “This Is a Photograph,” due Friday. A confident 45-minute sashay through vulnerable devotions and existential reflections, harmonious folk and spirit of applause. Using Memphis as a lens to understand the fragility of bodies and the dreams they hold, the album takes survival into account as well as death.
“There was zero urgency for Kevin to make an album, and this is a good place to be as a songwriter,” Crutchfield said over the phone, laughing sarcastically. “He always works very fast, but a year of nothing has not let him look for it. The word here is intensity.”
When Morby was only 17, his third (and last so far this year) therapist asked him why he was there. “I told him I was so scared to die,” Morby, now 34, said during an interview weeks before the basketball game. “There was a life-affirming moment, ‘Kevin, what’s so bad about death?’ I guess nothing!”
As his parents traveled between various cities for work, Morby had transformed from a sports-loving boy to a particularly anxious preteen. He was terrified when he learned that his friends in Oklahoma City had lost their parents in the bombing there; Later, in Kansas City, bullets on a playground convinced him that his school was the next Columbine.
“He could have been sitting in the couch and having these fits of anxiety,” his father, Jim, recalled. “He felt it was coming, but it was going to happen anyway.”
Morby said it was an alternative school founded by hospitals, therapists, and a “Vietnamese veteran and a total hippie.” Finally, after a particularly gruesome spell, his parents offered their son a compromise – he could drop out, finish his GED and try a nearby college. “I felt like such a pathetic parent,” said her mother, Sandy, “but thinking about the relief on her face makes my heart water.”
When Morby turned 18, he took a train eastbound: to join a band in New York. He started writing songs in the seventh grade, notebooks full of words that adorned the house. A Bob Dylan anthology gave rise to the indie rock of Mountain Goats and the Microphones, which placed less emphasis on production than poignancy. “Are you telling me I can get a tape recorder and sing?” said. “I felt like I was accepted.” Morby joins the rising psychic-folk group Forest and toured non-stop, then co-founded the filthy pop-rock band The Babies. But the double duty, plus the chores of delivering meals and babysitting, was tiring her out. He single-handedly bailed out both groups to get a chance. “There’s always something to lose,” he said, “but I thought maybe there’s more to gain.”
Even while returning from New York to Los Angeles to Kansas City, Morby has written and recorded at a fever pitch, releasing one album or EP every year since 2013 except for one. He hastily noted, embraced mistakes, and threw out the lines while striving for productivity rather than perfection. “If I wasn’t working,” he admitted, “I felt crazy.”
This irritating program arose, in part, from the fear that everything would disappear. Shortly after arriving in New York, Morby befriended Jamie Ewing, the dynamo leader of the punk band Bent Outta Shape – “this magical, fun guy, always ahead of the curve.” Morby loved Ewing and the artistic possibilities it represented. Ewing died of a heroin overdose in 2008, which fueled Morby’s drive.
“I had this scarcity mentality,” said Morby, referring to Jay Reatard, who is also a Memphis garage rocker. writing man’s best songs was really a race against death shortly before he died. “I should have gathered what I could.”
While it was a medical scare in January 2020, it led to a change. Before a family dinner, Morby’s father accidentally doubled his dose of heart medication and passed out at the table. He recovered, but Morby worried that he had watched his father die.
That night, she was struck by an image of her father — then 32 years old, at the age Morby was about to become — posing shirtless in the Texas sun while she was browsing through old photos with her mother. He thought about his family’s sudden fragility and began writing “This Is a Photograph,” a galloping piece about the inevitability of death and the gratitude that fait accompli should inspire. “That’s what I’ll miss being alive,” Morby howls, putting himself in his father’s old frame of mind. What had his father lost? What would he lose?
Morby took these questions to Memphis. As he drove his blue Ford pickup truck down Highway 61, into the infamous Crossroads, or across the Mississippi, on Elvis’ childhood porch, he thought about how his big dreams had been shattered there. He was particularly obsessed with Buckley, who in 1997 applied for a job as a butterfly keeper at the Memphis Zoo while waiting for his group to arrive. A passerby soon saw his body floating at the bottom of Beale Street.
Morby visited the little bungalow where Buckley lived and even recorded the sound of the stream where it entered the water. “You’re Jeff Buckley – you’ve had different versions of the dream, but there’s still something you’re trying to achieve,” said Morby. “I am interested.”
Double tributes to Buckley are central to “This Is a Photo.” Embellished with gospel harmonies, “Don’t Disappear” offers a warning to tortured artists who might try diving into Mississippi. (“I really want to swim in it,” he admitted from his bank, adding that he knew it was a bad idea.) “Butterflies in a Coat” unfolds slowly, like an empathetic tribute to a musician who has spent his life defining himself with light. of his father’s fame. Morby found himself nailing the track as he left Memphis after the album’s third and final session, which he has repeatedly called “the best four days of my life.” He faced his fear of death and walked away.
The morning before his victorious basketball game, Morby took a jog on a concrete trail on the outskirts of Mississippi, taking up the hobby soon after turning 30. The trail threw it under high overpasses and a small clearing leading to the river. Buckley is believed to have entered. Just as he turned around, two butterflies fluttered beside him for a few seconds. That’s a sign that he’s headed in the right direction, he thought.
“You’re like a photographer. You know what you wanted to photograph, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to take a picture I could improve until I got here,” he said as his voice rose above Peabody’s noise. “The dead can help shape the living. I want to be open to that kind of magic.”