That line gets repeated and builds to being shouted, which felt like a big shift after the more restrained Sundowner. “This is what I’ll miss about being alive.” And it’ll be true in the moment. One of my favorite things about being alive is performing music for people, and I’ll get to sing this lyric. I’m speaking for my parents in these photographs, but I was also like, This is going to be a song that I’m going to take out into the world. When at the climax of the song, where I’m saying, “This is what I’ll miss about being alive,” I wanted that to be twofold. But this was a song where I was very conscious that if I’m going to sing about death, I want to come to it from an angle of also celebrating life. Music is my own therapy for working those thoughts out. Your recent albums have touched on death a lot, and this album mentions death, but that song twists it into being really life-affirming. It’s almost like this passing the torch: Okay, you can help me out now. It felt like this very cinematic, sort of serendipitous moment. I was in the role that he’s lived my whole life - my whole life I’ve been falling down and he’s been picking me back up. There was something to the fact that when my dad fell ill earlier that evening, I was kind of the adult in the room. And I did the math, where I was like, Wait, my dad would be the same age that I am right now. I’d just seen him shirtless because the ambulance had removed his shirt to take his vitals, and I almost had this A/B contrast of how my dad’s body has changed over the years. They lived there for a very short period, and I was born there. I came across this one of my dad that really stuck out to me because he’s shirtless in this photo, and he’s on the front lawn of this house that they would’ve been living in in Lubbock, Texas. We ended up having this tender evening after that, where I went to my parents’ house, and for some reason, we unveiled this old box of family photos, most of which I had never seen before. It was obviously a scary night, but he was okay in the end. He passed out at this family dinner and was taken away in an ambulance. Tell me about specifically putting yourself in his shoes at that moment in the photo. This song was inspired by a photo you found of your dad after a health scare. Morby spoke to Vulture about some of the standout lyrics that make up the new record. “There’s a bravery there that I was really feeling.” On top of it all, Photograph features Morby’s richest songwriting - with songs inspired by not only the city he visited but the 1970 film Five Easy Pieces, some of his favorite celebrities, and his girlfriend, Waxahatchee performer Katie Crutchfield. “I always describe Memphis, especially through the pandemic, as a resilient city,” Morby tells me on a video call. Though Photograph is another of Morby’s album’s fascinated with death - from that of singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley’s to a scare with his own father that prompted the title track - it’s also the 34-year-old songwriter’s most life-affirming record. He was first drawn to the city years ago for its deep musical history and eventually felt “some sort of siren going off inside of me that’s like, You got to explore this place.” The pandemic gave him the time and space to do that. Unlike New York, L.A., or Kansas City, he’s never actually lived in Memphis. (He said 2019’s Oh My God is set in the heavens because of the amount of time he was spending on airplanes on tour.)īut This Is a Photograph is also a shift for Morby. Photograph is another album inspired by a specific place (Memphis) after Morby plumbed his stints in New York City for 2016’s Singing Saw, Los Angeles for 2017’s City Music, and his current home of Kansas City for Sundowner. The new record carries over some major themes from Sundowner - and really, much of Morby’s solo career before that, which he began in 2013 after playing in the bands Woods and Babies. When I met the singer-songwriter in fall 2020, just after the release of his sixth album, Sundowner, he was riding the high of a trip to Memphis to write new songs that he would eventually shape into his next project, This Is a Photograph (out now).
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