City Music is the new album by Kevin Morby, which will be released June 16th via Dead Oceans. Full of listless wanderlust, it’s a collection inspired by and devoted to the metropolitan experience across America and beyond by a songwriter cast from his own mold. As he puts it: “It is a mix-tape, a fever dream, a love letter dedicated to those cities that I cannot get rid of, to those cities that are all inside of me.”
His fourth album, City Music works as a counterpart to Morby’s acclaimed 2016 release Singing Saw, an autobiographical set that reflected the solitude and landscape in which it was recorded. Saw was imagined as “an old bookshelf with a young Bob and Joni staring back at me, blank and timeless. They live here, in this left side of my brain, smoking cigarettes and playing acoustic guitars while lying on an unmade bed.”
And now follows City Music, the yang to its yin, the heads to its tails. It is a collection crafted using the other side of its creator’s brain, the jumping off point perhaps best once again encapsulated by an image. “Here, Lou Reed and Patti Smith stare out at the listener,” explains Morby. “Stretched out on a living room floor they are somewhere in mid-70s Manhattan, also smoking cigarettes.” It finds Morby exploring similar themes of solitude, but this time framed by a window of an uptown apartment that looks down upon an international urban landscape “exposed like a giant bleeding wound.”
Today, Kevin shares the first song off the new album, “Come To Me Now.” From the very first note, it should make the ears of anyone familiar with Kevin’s music perk up, as a pump organ heralds in the new record and a sound unlike any other song in Kevin’s songbook.
“The organ you’re hearing on this song is an old pump organ from the 1800s, I wish?I could remember the brand – but I don’t. This was my favorite part of recording this album, playing this thing and pumping air into it with the foot pedals, it had such a presence from the moment I entered the studio. For the first few days I think I thought it was just there for looks, that there was no way it still worked, but sure enough it did. Above it hung a framed photo of the original owner of the studios property who died sometime ago. Apparently his ghost still occupies the premises.” – Kevin Morby
WATCH A LYRIC VIDEO FOR “COME TO ME NOW”
CITY MUSIC TRACKLISTING
- Come To Me Now
- Crybaby
- 1234
- Aboard My Train
- Dry Your Eyes
- Flannery
- City Music
- Tin Can
- Caught In My Eye
- Night Time
- Pearly Gates
- Downtown’s Lights
PRAISE FOR KEVIN MORBY & SINGING SAW
“Kevin Morby speaks the language of records… His music comes from another place, one where you try and piece together meaning by tapping into a kind of collective unconscious, using whatever tools you have at your disposal.” – Pitchfork [Best New Music]
“Morby has a certain kind of light about him that touches even his darkest despair” – NPR Music
“The indie rocker punctuates the timely politics of his lyrical message—a manifesto about modern police brutality and racism that references a Martin Luther King Jr. quote—with fiery guitars and a huge choir.” – Entertainment Weekly on “I Have Been to the Mountain” [Best Songs of 2016]
“The former Woods bassist and Babies frontman reaches a new high on his beautifully arranged third solo effort, which merges Dylan-esque folk rock with a distinctly modern sensibility.” – Consequence of Sound
“Singing Saw is a force of a listen, and the most complete body of work of his career to date.” – Noisey
Kevin Morby Online:
https://twitter.com/kevinmorby
https://instagram.com/kevin__morby/
https://www.facebook.com/kevinrobertmorby
