Kevin Morby
This is a Photograph
Dead Oceans
2022
Photographs capture moments that time cannot erase, except the images don’t tell the whole story, which Kevin Morby makes clear on ‘This Is a Photograph’. More than moments trapped in time, we get memories, fables and images captured by a lens focused on who we are and from where we have come. While you can see certain details, others need to be filled in. Morby takes to the task with a sense of awareness heightened by his father’s near-fatal heart attack.
From a room at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis, where Morby holed up while his father was in the hospital, he began to shape an album dedicated to the things that matter. “This Is a Photograph” leans in hard to survey old family pictures (starting with one of his father) framed by the memories and dreams of a son. As the song goes on, it picks up more force as the rock beat pushes the song further and further toward edges unseen yet well known.
Pushing toward memories on “A Random Act of Kindness,” the violins that initiate the song are quickly replaced by a lone organ. The song builds from nothing as we look at a man who seems beyond hope, out of almost everything, time, money, trust and lust. As the song rocks toward its inevitable conclusion, having built to a crescendo filled with piano, guitar, drums and strings, Morby seems to be begging, “Lift me up, by my hand/ Lift me up if you can/ lift me up, be my friend, through a random act of kindness, one/ that’s done from blindness.”
Morby calls on a multitude of friends, including Fruit Bat Eric Johnson, whose banjo, along with the voice of Erin Rae, both grace “Bittersweet, TN” with their presence. Strings and bass fill out the picture frame, but this is a song dealing with all the things that have been lost along the way. “Goddamn you got old, you got upset, you got sick/ The living took forever, but the dying went quick/ And oh, just to think you were a little kid/ Wondering what you’d be when you got big.” These aren’t simply memories; they are the stuff of life, and he creates indelible images that get to the heart of who we are, how we live and what we feel.
Evoking memories of everyone from Jeff Buckley to Ritchie Valens and Leonard Cohen to Muhammad Ali, “Coat of Butterflies” plays to the sounds of cascading guitar and the lush saxophone of Dap-King Cochemea Gastelum. One feels the pull of Memphis, a city that has had more than its share of sorrow over the years. Despite everything that has transpired, the song plays to the harp of Brandee Younger, with Makaya McCraven on drums (they both feature in the latest KLOF Mix here), while the final stanzas fill in the blanks, “When I was young, love drunk, and dreaming/ I’d dream of singing in some kingdom/ And just like birds my words would fly/ As they’d take flight then so would I.”
Kevin Morby captures the emotions that lie at the heart of This Is a Photograph. He finds the passion and emotion that make us living and breathing people, tingeing that with realities that humanise us all. “But I wanna go out dancing/ Soon as the world returns/ ‘Cause, Katie, when you’re dressed up, honey/ Oh, it’s hard to find the words” That pretty much says it all.