Photo: Press
Once New York City buries its teeth, you can never shake it loose. It gets in your blood, harries the memory, binds you tighter. “You can never go back to New York/’Cause it changes as quick as the weather” sing The Magnetic Fields on new album ’50 Song Memoir’, but for most it’s NYC’s mesmeric human carousel that draws them inexorably back.
“You know they say when a baby bird opens its eyes, the first thing it sees it thinks is its mother?” says Kevin Morby, the rising indie songwriter who left an important part of his brain somewhere in a slum flat in Brooklyn. “New York is like that for me because I lived in the Midwest until I was eighteen and the moment I turned eighteen I moved to New York, so it’s kind of like my mother in its way.”
And its apron strings tug at him still. When, around 2012, Morby left NYC and the punk and noise-folk bands he was a member of there – The Babies and Woods – and followed the indie rock heritage trail to Los Angeles because “I wanted to have my own rules, I wanted to make my own schedules and do my own thing… it’s nice to call the shots”, the first solo album he made there was a tribute to NYC called Harlem River. In his new, more tranquil hillside environs in the Mount Washington neighbourhood of LA, he rambled into the brush and communed with the coyotes seeking inspiration for his indie folk journeyman third album Singing Saw, recording in rural Woodstock. But within months of its highly acclaimed release in 2016, like the poltergeist that won’t leave a possessed child alone no matter how far they run, NYC began murmuring to him once again.
“After making ‘Singing Saw’, which was Americana, more rootsy, I wanted to come out with something that displayed another side of my interest and song-writing style,” he explains. “I wrote [the new album] around the same time I wrote ‘Singing Saw’. It’s like I have two different muscles in my brain and one is good at one thing, which is what ‘Singing Saw’ is, and the other is good at this other thing, which is what I did a lot in The Babies, a more punk influence – 70s and 80s influenced rather than the 60s. I wanted to shine a light on that a little bit and revisit that.”
You were missing the city? “For sure, absolutely, big time. It was being in LA and in this new phase of my life and I was writing an album that reflected that. While that was happening it made me nostalgic for New York and I looked at my situation for ‘Singing Saw’ where I was ‘I’m sorta reclusive and alone writing a record’, so I came up with a situation in my head, ‘I’m gonna write a record from someone’s perspective who’s reclusive but in New York and have that as the landscape and sonically make it sound like my favourite New York bands’. The whole theme of the album is trying to write from a person who for whatever reason feels very reclusive even though they’re physically surrounded by a lot.”
The result is City Music, a dislocated observer’s overview of the New York state of mind, written from the point of view of “someone who’s alone, maybe half drunk, it’s a Friday night and the city’s going on below them and something about that energy comforts them - they’re close to it but they’re not a part of it.” So ‘Aboard My Train’ makes Morby’s ode to his childhood best friend sound like one of Warhol’s Factory superstars being documented by The Velvets. ‘Night Time’ resembles John Cale or Leonard Cohen watching the weekend whirl by from some lonesome penthouse while, similarly, ‘Tin Can’ is a tenement-bound Bobby-Dylan-no-mates. The more punkish rock’n’roll ‘1234’ find Morby name-checking The Ramones and quoting Jim Carroll, and ‘Pearly Gates’ is a West Village anthem about whistling your way into an early grave.
“That’s like in Mexican culture, death is a celebrated thing,” Kevin says. “I wanted to make a song that was a light take on it, kind of like when you play that game of what your last meal would be or the last song you’d listen to. It kind of makes it seem fun, ‘what song will I be humming at the pearly gates?’” And what song will you be humming? “It’ll be Nina Simone covering ‘Suzanne’ by Leonard Cohen or covering ‘I Shall Be Released’ by Bob Dylan, to kill two birds with one stone.”
Morby is, as regular listeners will be aware, naturally morbid. “I had a friend die very young in New York from drugs and that put a seed in my head,” he explains. “It’s probably something I should see a therapist about at this point, it’s been nine years, but he was my best friend. I was twenty, we were very young and at that age, when you haven’t had anyone close to you die yet, you think you’re sorta immortal. You know it can happen but it’s not gonna happen to you, and then it does and for better or worse that instilled this fascination that death can be around the corner at any time. It’s just my way of dealing with it - I like putting the conversation into the air, it’s like addressing the elephant in the room for me.”
Is that why you left New York, to escape the drug scene? “I was never involved with it, it was just happening to people around me. That was during my earlier years in Brooklyn. I didn’t feel that I needed to escape it and drugs obviously happen everywhere. Those sorts of things go in waves through crowds of people and social circles. When I was first living in New York a lot of people were unfortunately on a lot of hard drugs, but I didn’t need to get away from it.”
No, if anything keeps Kevin laying low in LA it’s the hope that Hurricane Donald will pass over. “I think he’s a horrible psychopath and it makes a lot of sense that he became president,” he says. “You try to remain optimistic. My only hope with him being President is that it’s really woken people up. It’s exposing politics – the Syrian strikes that happened yesterday are a good example. Obama did that too but no-one cared because it was Obama. Now that Trump is doing it people are paying attention because he’s such a clown and everyone has their eyes on the clown. So at last that’s coming out of it but I hope that because of that we can take the right next step. I feel like it’s either gonna be the end of the world or the start of a new world and a new way of thinking and going about things. I’m hoping for that.”
