#dead oceans

The album opens with “Badlands” and its “big disaster we call home.” The challenge of sorting a big, beautiful life out of a demanding world runs throughout the album. Morby sings, “I can't tell if I'm in heaven or if I'm in the badlands.” He sounds puzzled, but he knows the truth: he's in both. He feels gratitude even for survival (“Die Young”), largely because he's found a way to fulfilling domesticity even as he's pursued his art, fully aware of the hurt around him, but persisting in the knowledge that “to live is to fly” (even if death offers a similar liftoff).

Morby gets help here from producer Aaron Dessner, who's rich pop sensibilities bring a new tone to the artist's typically midtempo music. The tone wouldn't have worked on 2016's haunted Singing Saw or 2022's Memphis-based This Is a Photograph; now, it's a perfect fit. Little Wide Open is middle America indie rock reaching outward, expanding without losing its groundedness. Likewise, the guest musicians (Meg Duffy, Justin Vernon, and others) make the album bigger without distracting from its specificity, even if it’s hard not to notice Lucinda Williams' vocals.

That specificity turns out to have a universal urgency, frequently based in the idea that time passes quickly and “takes its toll.” There's “a void” as wide as the Midwestern skies that gets us all. One option is to try to escape where we are. That's the sentiment on “Cowtown,” and when Morby wants to fly away, it's hard to be sure he means it in a life-affirming way. There are better options, though, mainly in recognizing the paradox of Heaven and the badlands being the same place, and digging into the life that we find there, grasping it in its fleeting time.

It's the sort of question that motivates closing track “Field Guide for the Butterflies.” Morby sings, “Is it suicide if I die out chasing thrills / Or is it just me trying to grow wings?” It's part of living large in your small space, a big life in the little wide open. It takes some poetry, some friends, some prayer. It's “a world that kills,” but it's also one full of breezes and partnership and tiny bits of bliss that outgrow everything else. Morby sounds at peace in his restlessness and wondering, and he's captured that feeling, even as it comes in all sizes.