There’s a new kid in town at Kevin Morby’s house. He hasn’t been there long, but he has changed the lives of the 38-year-old and his partner of almost a decade, fellow singer-songwriter Katie Crutchfield, who makes music as Waxahatchee.

The two became parents to a baby boy three weeks before this interview, and everyone is asking Morby how he’s handling the lack of sleep.

“And I have to tell them that we’re actually all sleeping fine,” says Morby. “The baby is really chill, but I feel weird about telling people that. I have a couple of other friends who just had children this year as well, and they aren’t getting much sleep, and I feel like they don’t want to talk to me. They kind of hate me.”

Morby is speaking from the family’s mid-century ranch house in Kansas City – the couple divide their time between there and Los Angeles – ahead of an Australian tour behind his latest album, Little Wide Open. He wrote the songs when he and Crutchfield were contemplating their future, and he was aware his life was about to change. It made him think about time and his relation to it.

“On my previous album, This Is a Photograph, which I love, it felt like being in a boxing ring with time, waiting to be knocked out. But now that I’m a bit older and making some big life decisions, I understand that time doesn’t have to be an enemy. It can be your companion if you’re on this trip together with someone.”

Morby’s journey to this moment has had some definite turning points. He had a transient childhood, moving house multiple times due to his father’s job with General Motors. He was born in Lubbock, Texas, then the family shifted to Detroit, then Tulsa, then Oklahoma City, before settling in the suburbs of Kansas City. As a teenager, he suffered panic attacks.

“There were a couple of years in high school of just living moment to moment, terrified of when the next attack was going to happen. I eventually dealt with them through meds at first, and then a really good therapist, and I started eating more healthily and riding a bike all the time, which helped.”

He also started playing music and joined a band, but it was when he played his first solo show at a bookstore that he had an epiphany, “because I couldn’t believe how cathartic it was. It was like finding this enlightenment, and it felt like a huge weight off my chest. It was exhilarating.”

Morby with Katie Crutchfield of Waxahatchee, his partner of almost a decade. The couple welcomed their first child in July.
Morby with Katie Crutchfield of Waxahatchee, his partner of almost a decade. The couple welcomed their first child in July.Getty Images for The Recording Academy

Soon afterwards, at the age of 17, he dropped out of high school, and after saving $600 from a job in an Indian restaurant, he got on an Amtrak train and moved to New York with a suitcase, a sleeping bag, his guitar and a four-track tape machine.

He lucked out by scoring free board at a home in Brooklyn’s Carroll Gardens in exchange for babysitting. It was 2006, and he immersed himself in the vibrant music scene that was blossoming in Brooklyn at the time, seeing Jeffrey Lewis, Kimya Dawson, Dirty Projectors, TV on the Radio and more.

Morby and Crutchfield had a meet-cute in 2012 while both playing on the same bill – at the merch table she undercut him on the price of a tour t-shirt to a prospective customer. They kept crossing paths on tour over the years and became friends, eventually getting together in 2017.

Fans love dissecting their songs to decode whether they are writing about each other, none more so than the 2024 Waxahatchee breakout track, Right Back To It, an affecting ballad about keeping a long-term relationship alive, where Crutchfield duets with MJ Lenderman.

“I actually listened to it again yesterday when it came up randomly on a playlist and thought ‘Goddamn that’s a great song!’” says Morby. “There’s certainly a back and forth between us, where it feels like some of the songs are talking to each other. On this new album, I’ve been jokingly saying that I made it more Americana so Katie can really hear it and get into it.”

In a recent interview, Crutchfield said, “it’s a strange situation to fall in love with an album that’s also kind of about your life.”

The new song Bible Belt was inspired by a tragedy. A couple were on their way to see Morby play in Denver in 2021; they never made it. Their car was involved in a crash – the girl was badly injured and spent a long time in hospital; her boyfriend died. When Morby heard what had happened, he made contact with her.

“I wrote Bible Belt in the back of the tour bus after hearing that news,” he says. “A year later, I’m in Paris and playing the Bataclan, where the horrible shooting happened in 2015. And I look down from the stage and there in the front row is this girl and she’s with her boyfriend’s mother. They said it was important for them to be there. Like a symbol, you know?

“Touring can be a slog. You’re travelling a lot and trying to figure out where to eat and where to take a shit and you’re tired all the time. But then there are moments like that, when you realise there are people who have gone through hard times or tragedies, and in some small way you’ve helped them through. And that’s an honour.”

Sometimes the honour goes the other way. In 2016, Morby released a stand-alone protest song called Beautiful Strangers. It referenced Bataclan, along with the Pulse nightclub mass shooting in Orlando, Florida, and Freddie Gray, who died while in police custody in Baltimore in 2015. It’s a song about remembrance, solidarity and strength in the face of prejudice, brutality and violence.

Years later he got a call telling him that the legendary gospel and soul singer Mavis Staples wanted to cover the song. It ended up on her most recent album, Sad and Beautiful World, and won the 86-year-old a Grammy for Best American Roots Performance.

“I mean, this is someone Bob Dylan idolised,” he says. “She marched with Martin Luther King. She’s a historical figure. Everything she’s done in her life is just unbelievable. And here she is covering my song.

“When we finally met, it was like being in the presence of greatness. And she said, ‘Kevin, you went to the other side of the mountain, and you wrote Beautiful Strangers, and you came back and gave it to all of us.’”

He shakes his head. “It’s the most amazing thing that’s ever happened to me... Besides Katie and my son, of course,” he quickly adds, smiling.

Kevin Morby’s Little Wide Open is out now. He will perform at Eltham’s The Eltham on November 12, Bellingen Golf Club on November 13, Brisbane’s Old Museum on November 14, Mt Glorious’ Elm House on November 15, Sydney’s Metro Theatre on November 18, Brunswick Heads’ Hotel Brunswick on November 20, Castlemaine’s Town Folk Festival on November 21, and Melbourne’s Forum on November 22.

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Source: The Sydney Morning Herald · Barry Divola

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