On Kevin Morby's private heaven

"A desire to be unanchored and in a state of constant movement has plagued me my whole life and yet is manifest within me alongside a paradoxical but equally profound desire for ‘home’. The two seem to need each other like demanding co-dependent siblings," Joanna Pocock writes in her beautiful memoir from last year, Greyhound.

It's a book I've been reading this winter, held in place by the stasis of the season, and by other things too. So much motion between pages that sit on my distinctly motionless lap, as these days of winter fold into one another with endless blurred edges.

Written in 2023, Greyhound finds Joanna retracing a journey she herself took back in 2006, on a greyhound bus, across American from Detroit to Los Angeles. It's a beautiful document, filled with fleeting sentiments and considered thoughts, photographs too that offer a physical glimpse of the journey. Following in the footsteps of the handful of women who have gone before her, Joanna touches upon grief and the landscape, stark inequality, and the many people she encounters within the frayed edges of our increasingly fractured society. She rolls across the country and finds an America already drastically changed in the time since she first made the same journey.

The above quote leapt out of the book at me. It gets at something I'm often looking for in the books, films and songs that I resonate most strongly with. I've spent most of my life trying to find a home, or seek out a feeling like it. The result of that search has often led to an "unanchoring", a constant desire to leave somewhere as soon as arriving, a dizzying, nomadic desire that often takes place without you even realising it. It took a long time to realise that without an anchor you're just as likely to get lost at sea than to chance upon a new shore. In many ways I'm still trying to come to terms with that.

For those and many other reasons, I've always been fascinated by the road; the idea of what it could hold, the often-told magic of it. All that possibility, all of that loneliness. A thread between homes, a means to disappear. I've been lucky enough to have had the chance to travel on many roads around America in the past decade or so, putting myself inside a map that I conjured images from for many years before that dream was realised.

A decade or so ago, S and I took a Megabus from Chicago to Nashville. A full 12 hours or more, almost entirely overnight. A culture-flip that saw us step through a door in the blustery, steely-eyed north and then depart once again into the warm morning air of a Nashville already alive in its glittery, bombastic extremes. I don't remember much of the journey itself. Miles and miles passed in the dark, but the endless motion of it was thrilling. It felt like the road went on forever.

I do remember we made the inexplicable decision to take the remains of our Chicago deep-base pizza as a travel snack, a pastry-bowl of sauce and cheese that congealed before we even left the State. I remember, too, opening heavy eyes in the grey, early half-light of morning, my forehead to the window as we rolled through the centre St Louis. In that moment I couldn't fathom that my life had, despite it all, led me to Missouri. When I woke again we'd already left it behind, so that it might as well have all been a dream.

During a different trip, I traveled east in a van with new friends, all the way from New Orleans to Austin, Texas. Across the raised-roads that run through the swamps, over giant bridges that looked down upon factories that were even bigger than I ever dreamed they could be, their hundreds of metallic arms raised to the sky churning out never ending smoke from the fingertips. As the day opened up and we rolled on, my eyes barely left the window. I read road signs that held the names of towns I'd only ever heard in songs; watched quiet lives in strange rural towns pass us as my stomach lurched.

We played songs on the stereo. Dozed and read and chatted. Stopped for coffee and piss breaks. I felt so far from every version of home I'd ever known. Here, even the trees smelled differently, even the light was changed. Maybe this is where I belong, I remember thinking as the country passed by in a blur. Maybe the blur is a place to belong. It can be both thrilling and draining to constantly feel like you can belong everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

*

Last week, Kevin Morby announced that Little Wide Open, his eighth studio album, will be released this side of summer 2026.

I've always enjoyed and respected Morby's music more than I've truly loved it, been able to appreciate his beautiful playing and honeyed voice, without ever finding that one piece of music that burrowed right into my chest and get caught there.

On the album's first taste, Javelin, and in the words Morby has shared to accompany his announcement, I feel perhaps closer than ever to making that leap. Recorded with Aaron Dessner, the album is a communal offering that gathers together a host of notable friends who helped bring it to life. Lucinda Williams, Justin Vernon, Meg Duffy (Hand Habits), Katie Gavin of MUNA, Amelia Meath of Sylvan Esso, all feature, as do even more., and that sense of kinship, of wide open arms and hearts, shines through.

In writing Little Wide Open, Morby took snapshots of his time on the road touring, but also cites a number of solo roadtrips he took as being key to the album's world-building: journeys through Arkansas, Kansas, Tenneessee, Oklahama, Texas and Missouri. "My own private America," he labels it, "my own private heaven". The new album, he goes on to say in his Instagram post, is "set to a backdrop of tangled highways...roadside crosses, a rock and roll romance, coupling butterflies" and is "without doubt the most personal and vulnerable album" he's ever made.

If 'Javelin' is any indication of the album's overall feel, that vulnerability comes through the wistful, almost breezy shape of its heart. A little under four-minutes, the track is lush and vibrant on the surface, but it offers glimpses of something darker beneath the surface. "Don't be concerned babe, at least not yet. I am still happy to be breathing in," he sings in the opening few lines. But it also throws itself open to love, tying up its romanticism in snapshots of the sun and moon, dancing boots left upon the shelf, collecting dust in light that fades, but grows again.

It reminds me of the road too, but then most things do. It smells of spring, and of renewal. It shines with a half-smile that tells us, at its curved edges, that some things pass on, and that new things arrive to take their place.

It's beautiful for that reminder, if nothing else.

Little Wide Open is released May 15th, via Dead Oceans