Kevin Morby - Dorothy

Music 4 years ago

Kevin Morby - Dorothy

By most accounts, classic rock had a good year in 2016. Beyoncé sampled Led Zeppelin. Frank Ocean sampled the Beatles. The Oldchella Festival found the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, and Neil Young uniting for a block of music that previously existed only on classic rock radio.

And then, on a more modest scale, there was Kevin Morby’s Singing Saw: an album steeped in this tradition with ideas so ingrained in our collective conscious as to feel idiomatic. But the most striking thing about Morby’s music is less his set of influences and more his ability to locate the internal geography that has informed them all.

The album, tellingly named after an instrument whose eerie warble sounds like wind howling against a window, finds wisdom in the natural world. Morby lets his songs unfold with an organic sense of inevitability.

When he asks for trumpets in “Destroyer,” they appear. In the title track, he wanders behind the house as percussion chirps around him like crickets. And in “I Have Been to the Mountain,” the album’s most momentous anthem—one that eulogizes Eric Garner, giving Singing Saw its deepest sense of urgency—Morby gazes heavenward to find he’s become a part of his surroundings, and that they are as attuned to him as he is to them. “A sky that mirrors,” he muses. “A sky that stares as I sing.”