Lo-fi and languid, these 4-track demos for 2020’s Sundowner offer an illuminating window into the songwriter’s creative process.
ANight at the Little Los Angeles is more than a series of sketches. This collection of 4-track demos recorded at Kevin Morby’s home in Kansas City offers a warm, fulsome window into the genesis of the music he would later sculpt with producer Brad Cook on 2020’s Sundowner. These aren’t dregs from the cutting room floor but rather distillations, 10 pared-back recordings that often outshine the later iterations. It’s a well-suited format for such inward-facing folk music, twilight ballads that focus on loss and longing.
Morby isn’t the first troubadour to escape the city and dig up roots, abandoning the metropolises that colored past releases like 2013’s Harlem River (New York) and 2016’s Singing Saw (Los Angeles) in favor of a Midwestern home with a hot tub and garden. An easy comparison is Bob Dylan and the Band’s classic The Basement Tapes, recorded in Saugerties, New York, and released at a similar remove after years on the road. But where their retreat felt like a rollicking group hang, Little Los Angeles is a largely solo affair, spartan in sound and provenance. Still, both records share a melancholy evocation of geography (Dylan’s “Goin’ to Acapulco,” Morby’s “U.S. Mail”), and they demonstrate the pleasure in the artistic process, as close as you can get to being in the room when the lightbulb goes off.
Lo-fi and languid, Little Los Angeles feels like being taken into someone’s confidence, although that intimacy works best when considered alongside the fuller renditions on Sundowner. This album forgoes any noodling or experiments and gets straight to the essence, so that several songs feel more arresting than their polished, studio counterparts. The meandering guitar on opener “Campfire” is warm and beckoning, and Morby’s unadorned vocals have never sounded so winsome. “Don’t Underestimate the Midwest American Sun” is another standout, with its peripatetic piano keys and unexpected shifts: The lyrics transition from a pleading tone to a more defiant one, like we are alongside Morby, mustering our conviction in real time. The album version, which was accompanied by a drum machine, anticipated the build, whereas the Little Los Angeles version maintains the illusion of spontaneity, recalling the moments of tension-and-release that he and his collaborators build so well onstage.
This release invites us closer to Morby’s performances, trading spacious production for the immediacy of creation, so that we can almost hear him putting pen to paper. Perfection is hardly the goal, but there are moments that drag no matter how interested you are in the craft. “Sundowner” feels lethargic without the honeyed thrum of bass and melodic trills, and “Brother, Sister” is corny by nature, trying desperately to evoke the mood of a Morricone Western. Still, no matter the disruptions, the hissing tape and abrupt cut-offs, Little Los Angeles illuminates the same pursuit that Morby sought on more fleshed-out albums like 2017’s City Music and 2019’s Oh My God: These are postcards that magnify the ephemeral, loving transmissions from a particular place and time.
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