Kevin Morby had barely returned home to Kansas City from a three-week European tour when his first child arrived. His partner Katie Crutchfield, who records as Waxahatchee, was two weeks from her due date.
“We both naively thought that we were going to have like two weeks to prepare and get ready for the whole thing,” he recalls. “I got back in the evening, we went to sleep, we woke up like two in the morning, her water broke, and we had to like go to the hospital.”
He hadn’t even had a full night’s sleep when the baby was born. “Our little guy is pretty big actually, and part of us thinks that maybe Katie was further along than we thought,” he says. “But also, I like to believe that he was waiting for me to get home.”
Stay up to date with what’s happening in and around Melbourne here.
After nearly a decade together, the pair are accustomed to balancing touring schedules. “I think it’ll actually be good having a kid that we’ll have to account for,” he says. “We’ve both been touring our whole adult lives, so it’s just something that we’re so used to. It’s unconventional, but it works for us.”
Having met on tour and released music together, Morby and Crutchfield are accustomed to sharing ideas. “We’re always bouncing ideas off of one another,” says Morby. “Usually when one of us is working on some demos or something, just coming out and being like, ‘can I ask you a question? What do you think of this line?’”
How fatherhood influences Morby’s songwriting remains to be seen. “I have worked on one song since he’s been alive that sort of mentions a baby,” he says. “I’m usually just so influenced by my environment, whatever it may be, so… probably lyrically and maybe in other ways too.”
On his eighth solo album, Little Wide Open, Morby took a less certain approach to songwriting. Rather than arriving at the studio with a fixed vision, he says he found the record as he went. “I went in with a lot of songs, and it was sifting through a lot of stuff, and I felt like I was editing stuff maybe in a way that I don’t usually do.”
The result is a sprawling album that ranks among the strongest collections of songs in Morby’s career. Its breadth allows him to showcase his strengths as a storyteller and melodic songwriter. On 100,000, Morby’s use of Midwestern language reflects his connection to the region, while the vocal arrangements on Javelin give the chorus added weight.
Place is a constant theme in Morby’s work, though his idea of home is less fixed than most. He and Crutchfield split their time between Kansas City and Los Angeles, with both cities and the experience of touring feeding into his music.
Before moving to LA, Morby lived in Brooklyn for seven years, where he played in Woods and co-founded The Babies. “I don’t know how anyone lives in one city all the time – I wish I could,” he says. “Maybe I just need to find that place in my life, but it’s for me, it’s like I need two polar opposites, or else I start to lose my mind a little bit.”
That sense of place carries through to Little Wide Open, where Aaron Dessner’s production is perfectly suited to Morby’s songwriting. It gives the album a warm, in-the-room feel without smoothing over its rough edges.
Dessner approached Morby to collaborate after Morby opened for The National in London in 2024. “Despite the fact that Aaron’s this huge producer now, and works with the biggest pop stars in the world, he’s still just a very down-to-earth Midwestern guy,” he says. “I think because we’re both Midwestern, we both like baseball, and we both are like indie rock guys… there’s a lot of overlap in our Venn diagrams.”
Like Morby, The National spent years working hard and touring before reaching a wider audience. “I think that the people that I’ve always really admired the most are people who have a slow, inclining career that keep building,” he says. “Just doing their thing and making what they want to make. So, I just try to stay that course, really.”
Morby has spent the better part of his life touring and releasing music, and says he’s exactly where he’d like to be. “I’m just still so blown away that the crowds are getting bigger and that the people are wanting to come at all – it still just blows my mind,” he says. “I’ve gotten into a place where I really feel like I’ve got a communication with my audience, which is really, really amazing.”
Morby plays the Forum on 22 November. Get tickets here.
