In her landmark 1977 book On Photography, Susan Sontag calls photographs a testament to “time’s relentless melt.” For the influential essayist and cultural critic, the captured image was a sort of memento mori — a reminder that each of us, one day, will be dead.
Sontag’s sentiment comes home to roost on This Is a Photograph, the seventh LP by celebrated singer-songwriter Kevin Morby. The latest from the prolific, Kansas City-based indie rock musician begins with a rumination on a photo of his dad as a young man, shirtless on the front lawn under the West Texas sun, staring down the barrel of the camera with the defiant stare of a prizefighter.
“Got a glimmer in his eye,” Morby sings over the effervescent guitar jam, blooming with groove-forward organ stabs and backing vocals from the Stax Music Academy student chorus. “Seems to say: ‘This is what I’ll miss about being alive / this is what I’ll miss after I die.’”
This particular image of Morby’s father took on a searing significance after he collapsed one night during family dinner. His dad was rushed to the hospital, where he eventually recovered from the scare, as Morby and the rest of his family pored through old photos of the loved one they nearly lost.
“He would have been the same age I was looking at that photograph, and it also would have been the same year I was born, looking at the camera with this sort of overconfident gaze on his face,” Morby says. “It just seemed like that photo was having this direct conversation with the incident that had taken place a couple hours before.”
This conversation between life and death drives the remaining 10 tracks on This Is a Photograph, which finds Morby contemplating mortality with his trademark disarming poeticism. Heartbreakers like the banjo-forward Erin Rae duet “Bittersweet, TN,” mingle with winking pop-rock gems like “Rock Bottom” and moody mid-tempo bops like “Disappearing,” before returning to the interior worlds of Morby’s parents in the bookend album closer — bringing it all back home to “a family growing old, inside the boxing ring of time.”
Despite the heaviness of his subject, Morby manages to keep his buoyant new full-length from sinking beneath the weight of its themes throughout the course of its 45-minute runtime. The grim specter of death never quite dissolves from the frame, but it never quite overcomes the album’s tender celebration of life either.
“One of the main goals was to look at the tragedy of death, which is the subject matter of the record, from a different angle,” Morby says. “To be alive at all is such a pleasure and a privilege. So let’s celebrate that, instead of mourning.”
Southern soul
But death isn’t the only spirit haunting This Is a Photograph. The historic southern city of Memphis, where Morby finished writing the album, looms large throughout. From late influential singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley to slain civil rights hero Martin Luther King Jr. and the soul-and-funk heritage of the city’s legendary Stax Records, disparate figures from the Home of the Blues left their mark on the 34-year-old artist as he completed his life-affirming new LP.
“A lot of these stories have this thing in common: They were dreamers who, in pursuit of their dream, got taken too early,” Morby says. “It didn’t feel like a coincidence that there was a through line to so many people there, and I just found it fascinating.”
To mine this place-specific inspiration, Morby holed up in a suite at the historic Peabody Hotel downtown while the world was still largely shuttered in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. He describes this time as a sort of creative oasis among the chaos of the moment, his only visitors being the hotel’s celebrity North American mallards who dutifully completed their red-carpet “Duck March” to the fountain in the main lobby each day.
“It was still a very scary time, though — it was pre-vaccine, and Trump was still in office. It was insane,” Morby says. “But I spent a lot of time alone in the company of all these stories. It’s the most I’ve ever tried to get inside of my songs and do the research for them. And I do feel like it paid off in this big way.”
While the resulting This Is a Photograph takes listeners on a journey through the beating heart of southern soul, it never strays far from the animating force of its opening salvo: that haunting front-lawn image of Morby’s father — “a window to the past.” Memento mori.
“We open with that song every night, and watching people sing along really resonates with the sentiment: ‘This is what I’ll miss about being alive,’” Morby says. “I think a lot of people feel that way about seeing live music and being at a show. So it’s really doing what I hoped it would do. It’s bringing people together for this nice moment.”
ON THE BILL: Kevin Morby with Coco. 8 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 5, Gothic Theatre, 3263 S. Broadway, Englewood. Tickets here. | Sunday, Nov. 6, Washington’s, 132 Laporte Ave., Fort Collins. Tickets here.
