Kevin Morby Announces New Album ‘This Is A Photograph’ & Shares Single

Kevin Morby will release a new studio album, This Is A Photograph, through Dead Oceans on May 13. The singer-songwriter shared the album’s title track and confirmed tour dates in support of the pending release.

Morby recorded the follow-up to 2020’s Sundowner with producer and frequent collaborator Sam Cohen, who also produced Morby’s previous albums, Oh My God and Singing Saw. Recording sessions began with drummer Nick Kinsey at Cohen’s upstate New York studio.

Contributions came from Morby’s recent touring band mates, saxophonist Cochemea Gastelum, keyboardist Jared Samuel and Tedeschi Trucks Band vocalist/trombonist Alecia Chakour, with banjo supplied by Eric Johnson. String parts were performed by Morby’s former touring pianist Oliver Hill and his mother Meg Hill and sister Charlotte Hill. Others who appear on the 12-track album include drummers Josh Jaeger and Makaya McCraven, vocalist Cassandra Jenkins and harpist Brandee Younger. Tim Heidecker and Alia Shawkat also appear on the track “Rock Bottom.”

This Is A Photograph traces its beginnings to January 2020 when Morby was at his childhood family home looking through old family photos shortly after his father was sent to the hospital after collapsing. While his father eventually recovered, a photo of Morby’s dad caught the singer-songwriter’s attention.

“In the photo he looks young and full of confidence, puffing his chest out at the camera as if he were looking for a fight,” Morby stated. “It was not lost on me that this was the same chest, just hours before, I had seen the ambulance put a stethoscope against as he lay on the kitchen floor of my sister’s house.”

Following that experience, according to press materials, Morby:

[H]eaded to Memphis. He moved into the Peabody Hotel and spent his days paying tribute and genuflecting to the dreamers he admired; he’d head down to the banks of the Mississippi River, to the spot where Jeff Buckley met his end. He’d wander around the neighborhood where Jay Reatard spent his last day then drive by the Stax marquee for a brief lift in his spirits. Then cruise out past Graceland, before traversing Highway 61, letting the ghosts call to him and shape his own dreams. In the evening, he would return to his room and document his ideas on a makeshift recording set-up, with just his guitar and a microphone. The songs, elegiac in nature, befitting all he had seen, poured out of him.

Morby completed This Is A Photograph with live sessions held at the historic Sam Philip’s Recording Co. in Memphis with the facility’s namesake son, Jerry Philips engineering. The title track emerged from that session which included Stax Academy of Music alumni providing vocal harmonies.

“Sam Cohen and I wanted to throw everything at the wall with this one,” Morby said of the title track. “It’s about the battle every family faces, that of chasing the clock, to live our lives and hold onto one another for as long as possible. That, and, the dreams that come with being a young family in America and where those dreams eventually end up.”

Morby will spend late May through early September touring in Europe. Tour dates in North America begin in late September and continue through the middle of November.

Watch the video for the “This Is A Photograph” below:

This Is A Photograph Tracklist

1. Intro
2. This Is A Photograph
3. A Random Act Of Kindness
4. Bittersweet, TN
5. Disappearing
6. A Coat Of Butterflies
7. Rock Bottom
8. Forever Inside A Picture
9. Five Easy Pieces
10. Stop Before I Cry
11. It’s Over
12. Goodbye To Good Times