When I listen to music, I have at least one of a few goals:
- (1) to get lost
- (2) to get found
- (3) to get transported
When I go to shows, I have at least one of a few goals:
- (1) to lose myself in the many
- (2) to find myself in the music
- (3) to move
With Kevin Morby, I get all of them.
Some years ago, under the thrall of my given religion, I shuffled behind my family into churches at midnight twice a year. The stained glass blackened by night, candles flickering by the pews’ edges, above the holy water, and around the altar, those nights passed in a fevered fugue. The organ reverberated, the floor shook, we sang together, prayed together. The priest became something new, too, his homilies louder, his vestments brighter, and he shimmered enough to keep the audience rapt.
It was a true devotion.
Before Morby and his band sauntered onto the stage, that sense of fervor buzzed through the audience, all there because they wanted to get lost and found together. Sometimes, a crowd moves because it’s told to; this one moved because it needed to.
I stood stage-side, sliding into the pit as Morby came onstage, brightly lit from the overhead lights and shimmering in a golden fringed jacket, his face sparkling and eyes intense. He settled into the night’s first groove, stepped into the mic, and sang, “this is a photograph / a window to the past”, gradually carrying the song into a conflagration.
It was that kind of show, the one that burns to the edge of apocalypse.
They played mostly songs from This Is a Photograph, with all of them being highlights for different reasons. “Random Act of Kindness” struck me hard, “This Is a Photograph” announced the show, and “Bittersweet, TN” resonated with a tension between placeness and placelessness. But I think it was “Coat of Butterflies” that pulled me in its wake, its slowly churning homage to Buckley torn with pretty images of living and dying. It’s the centerpiece of the album, one that announces Memphis as the muse, the inspiration, the setting. It’s pretty, it’s murky, it’s beautiful, it’s muddy, it’s hot, and it’s unknowable.
They played the songs we could’ve asked for. “Piss River”, “No Halo”, “Campfire”, “Wander”. A transcendent rendition of “City Music” that stomped with a wild beauty. And the encore, a disco ball spinning for “Beautiful Strangers” before a world-ending “Harlem River”.
If I had my way, I’d follow this band up and down the coast. I’d bring my grandfather’s camera, film from the fridge, and keep my promise to him. I’d carry my own camera, too, and I’d have my notebook in my pocket. I’d keep my phone away. I’d sing the songs. I’d dance a little groove into the ground.
It is hard to express what a thing feels like; the way this band settles into a groove together, finding some collective pocket, is rendered comprehensible only by the experiencing. At the end of the night, when we left in the early morning moonlight, I sputtered for a metaphor as I talked to my friends in the car, and I said, “they’re like a wolfpack loping through the woodland meadows of a reclaimed city”. I don’t know what it means.
I still think it might be right.
