Little Wide Open review | Kevin Morby makes peace with the Midwest and his best album yet

Kevin Morby is expecting a child, has moved to Los Angeles, and has made an album about the flat, ugly, beautiful place he came from. Little Wide Open is the third and final part of an unintentional trilogy that began with Sundowner and continued with This Is a Photograph, both written from inside the Midwest.

This one is written from a distance, and you can hear it. The details are sharper, the feeling is warmer, and for the first time it sounds like he’s made peace with the place rather than still trying to work it out.

Producer Aaron Dessner, who asked to work with Morby after watching him open for The National at Crystal Palace, keeps things simple. Pedal steel, fiddle, banjo, warm room sounds. No big production moves, no polish.

The eight-minute title track is where this pays off: Dessner’s banjo, Katie Gavin’s harmonies and Mat Davidson’s fiddle build slowly around the album’s central line: “It’s a little wide open, but I hope it don’t close / ‘Cause I wanna drift off in it where nobody knows us.”

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‘100,000’, with Meg Duffy on guitar and percussion, is the album’s loudest moment, a slow build that finally lets go in a burst of noisy guitar after 40 minutes of careful quiet. ‘Natural Disaster’, with Lucinda Williams and Justin Vernon, is slower still – Morby at his most open, writing around death without naming it directly.

I’ve had ‘Die Young’ on repeat this week. Mat Davidson’s violin sits under a lyric about getting older that somehow ends up feeling like gratitude rather than dread. It takes a couple of listens but it’s the best thing here.

The album runs 59 minutes and not all of it lands equally. The second half gets quieter and more inward, and tracks like ‘Junebug’ and ‘Dandelion’ pass without making much of a mark. Folk-Americana is a crowded genre and at a consistently low volume for an hour, the album occasionally disappears into itself.

There’s a track here that quietly references a fan who died in a car crash on the way to one of Morby’s shows. It doesn’t dwell on it. It just acknowledges it and moves on, which is pretty much how the whole album works. Eight albums in, Morby has stopped trying to prove anything. It turns out that was the right move.

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