Kevin Morby: This Is a Photograph review – exemplary songwriter wrings light from darkness

The story of Kevin Morby’s superb seventh album begins in January 2020. After his father collapsed at dinner one night and was rushed to hospital, the Kansas-based singer-songwriter found himself leafing through old family photos of his dad in his youthful prime. The older man was in recovery by the time his son moved into the Peabody Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee to pour out songs about mortality, family and the relentlessness of time.

Morby maps all this out in the first track of This Is a Photograph: “This is a photograph, a window to the past,” he begins, concluding: “This is what I’ll miss about being alive.” The album’s Dylanesque take on Americana is teased with blues, jazz, deep soul and Afrobeat, and sprinkled with field recordings ranging from children playing to birdsong. References abound: Morby includes snatches of Led Zeppelin and John Lennon lyrics and alludes to Jeff Buckley’s drowning in the Mississippi River, obliquely on Disappearing and directly on A Coat of Butterflies. Morby is such an exemplary songwriter that everything hangs together wonderfully.

On It’s Over, Morby ruminates on former bandmates, youthful idealism and the onset of adulthood and responsibility; Stop Before I Cry addresses his partner, Katie Crutchfield of Waxahatchee, while A Random Act of Kindness finds light in the darkness and vice versa. These are beautifully elegiac songs, celebrating life’s transient joy, struggle, laughter and heartbreak, reflecting the fact that “sometimes the good die young, and sometimes they survive”.