You might not expect something called “Piss River” to be one of the most beautiful songs released so far in 2019, but that just so happens to be the case.
“What a dream to have ever felt the air so warm,” sings Kevin Morby near the song’s climax, the gently plucked strains of a harp swirling all around him. “What a dream to have even ever been born.”
The song — a midtempo waltz full of gorgeous vocal harmonies — is the seventh track on Morby’s fifth solo record, Oh My God, which was released via Dead Oceans in April. Like most of the songs on the record, “Piss River” is haunted by the concepts of death and religion. And according to the 31-year-old songwriter, singer and multi-instrumentalist, that’s very much by design.
“Growing up, my family never practiced religion, but I grew up in the Midwest in the ’90s, and religion was kind of everywhere,” says Morby via phone from his hometown of Kansas City. “Growing up where I grew up, there’s religion, and there’s the Wild West. You’re sort of beaten over the head with those two things. … I just kind of took a fascination in both of them from afar. I think someone who grew up in the church probably wouldn’t be making a record in their 30s called Oh My God. But for me, it’s just something that’s always sparked a lot of interest in me from a distance.”
Though he’s back in the heartland now, Morby has spent much of his adult life in Brooklyn, where he played with acclaimed indie-folk act Woods as well as The Babies, his project with Cassie Ramone of Vivian Girls. After that, he did a four-year stint in Los Angeles, where he began to hone his sound, releasing a steady stream of consistently impressive solo records that earned him comparisons to gifted contemporaries like Kurt Vile, Angel Olsen and Cass McCombs.
Oh My God feels like a major step forward in Morby’s evolution, both conceptually and in terms of execution. Its 14 tracks are wildly diverse sonically, from brief found-sound snippets to richly textured arrangements and simple but potent piano ballads. Each of them, though poignant in its own specific way, is still tied to that central concept of God and death.
“When I was 20, my best friend at the time, he passed away,” says Morby. “And I think up until that point, death was very abstract. ... Ever since that, it’s been something that I’ve been open in talking about and exploring, because it’s, you know, it’s so huge. When you have someone close like that to you die, it becomes this huge part of your life.”
The longest track on Oh My God, the five-and-a-half-minute “Hail Mary,” runs through a list of characters and their circumstances — Naomi, Flannery, Ben, Pauline and others. Morby explains that while some of the names belong to people who really are in his life, the circumstances are largely imagined. Even so, as he sings about them in his casual croon — an insouciant baritone that lands somewhere between Leonard Cohen’s and Lou Reed’s — his message feels deeply earnest and genuine, as if he were an old friend catching you up on hometown gossip. This is an uncommonly personal record, as full of emotional payoff as rich instrumentation.
While Morby has spent much of the year touring behind Oh My God with an eight-piece band, the current tour, which brings him to Jack White’s Third Man Records on Sept. 10, is just as a duo. He’ll be accompanied by saxophonist Cochemea Gastelum — who’s played with the Dap-Kings, among others — with Nashville’s beloved native son and current Angeleno, guitarist William Tyler, set to open. (Morby, who says he’s contemplated moving to Nashville, says Tyler will also “probably make his way in to my set.”)
The move from an elaborate, eight-piece set-up to an intimate duo, says Morby, is designed as a study in contrasts.
“I wanted to have the juxtaposition of the record and of my whole catalog as sort of having this big, grand, crazy show,” he says, “and then going back out into America, and to Europe, and bringing this other thing that’s smaller and more intimate. It’s kind of the first time I’ve felt like I can do that in my career, and I’m excited about it.”
