Little Wide Open

For Kevin Morby, the “little wide open” is the big sky, the small lives, it’s his origins in the Midwest, and every duty and modesty and familiarity and isolation: the land, the people, and the parts of that inside him. “There’s something unintentionally musical about the Midwest; cicadas chirping in the trees, a train passing, a tornado siren going off,” explains Morby. “If you listen, there are these almost ominous sounds taking place beneath the wide-open sky—its ugliness and its beauty and how the two are often working together simultaneously. And while the Midwest isn’t technically the badlands, it’s my badlands.”

Little Wide Open is the title of Kevin Morby’s eighth studio album, produced by Aaron Dessner. In the summer of 2024, Dessner had asked Morby to support The National at their London show in Crystal Palace Park. Shortly after, Dessner—who was on a hot streak, having produced albums for Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran, and Gracie Abrams—reached out to Morby to say he’d love to produce his next album. They began recording at Aaron’s Long Pond Studio in Stuyvesant, NY, early in 2025 and finished in September of that year.

Now primarily living in LA, the atmosphere that runs through Little Wide Open has changed somewhat from its predecessors. As Rachel Kushner writes of Morby in the album’s accompanying essay: “It’s about time, about feeling like he has shifted from nostalgia and the losing game, losing but beautiful, of holding onto the past. He has accepted that time is ceaselessly flowing, and you can’t stop it. Instead, he feels like he’s riding it. He’s riding passenger with time.”

Released: May 2026
Cat: DOC391LP-C1
Label: Dead Oceans

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