Little Wide Open Essay - "Field Guide to the North American Troubadour" by Rachel Kushner

Written by Rachel Kushner

You want to shine for friends when they’re shining—for you or maybe not for you, either way shine is shine—and you can equalize the levels by bringing a bit of your own recent glow, and that other light-filled person can enjoy it instead of worry.

That’s how it is with some people. Two auras, touching, as you each bring your way of worlding into the bar or the diner or the movies, the car, like so. See Morby, Kevin, in the Encyclopedia Britannica of Glow, or Who’s Who in America and Outside of It That Moves Me, published by No One Ever, but indelibly print-on-demand.

Last time I saw Morby there was a gash on the driver’s side rear quarter-panel of his big blue truck. “What’s up with that?” A happy shrug. “Looks like I use it.” He does use it. I was in the cab practically yesterday in Kansas City and now we’re West. He parks on my street. We go down a secret stairwell and along a brutal stretch of Sunset. “This will never gentrify,” I say, “because the cars here go seventy.” “It already is,” he replies, as we pass a natural wine shop or whatever they’re selling, spare shelves and a tote bag logo. But it’s mostly nuclear fall-out, the underside of a rich city, trash and weeds and plundered copper, before we turn left up to what I call Peacock Park. Kevin’s never been. It’s dusk. We sit like kings, like Mickey in the Night Kitchen, perched over the storybook up-close downtown skyline. I’m ready to practically camp out when Kevin says, Let’s go.  Next is Astro Family. Him, a burger and fries. Me, omelet. Pacifico; Stella. Kevin poses with the Heinz bottle, and we agree that “I like ketchup on my ketchup” is a T-shirt in the category of Pop sublime. “Haruki Murakami wears one,” he says. (I can hear a baby crying on this part of the tape. Next over orange vinyl booth. I like ketchup on my ketchup. I like babies in the booths.)

Our beers come in chilled steins. “I’d be into having a fridge full of these,” Kevin says. But he does not strike me as someone who lives for beer, and he seems to be leaving behind the midwestern concept of the den, the wet bar, the basement pool table, Miller Lite pendant lamp. Or maybe not. But he’s leaving Kansas, is the point, and this record is about it. Before our hangout I googled “little wide open” to see if there’s something besides my sense of this phrase, which is that if once the future was legible, it’s now a bit less predictable. It’s a little wide open. But to some this phrase means lit, as in drunk. News to Kevin. For him, the LWO is the big sky, the small lives—it’s his origins in the Midwest and every duty and modesty and familiarity and isolation: the land, the people, and the parts of that inside him.  “I love the little wide open,” he tells me, “and I hate the little wide open.” Cities of a hundred thousand people. Places where girls twirl batons. Hearing those lines, “pretty girls, pretty sisters, twirling batons, blowing penny whistles,” I think immediately—as would you—about the story of Terrance Malick asking Sissy Spacek if she had any special talents. Baton, she said, and twirled one in the movie. But Kevin’s song Badlands isn’t exactly about the Malick. “Kansas City is not the badlands but it’s my badlands. It’s not the bible belt but it’s my bible belt.” The song “Bible Belt” alludes to something that happened in 2021, when Kevin was on tour and got word that a couple, a boy and a girl who were on their way to see him play in Denver had a car wreck and the boy died. The girl lived, and while she was in the hospital, Kevin sent her a message. A year later he played at the Bataclan, in Paris, which naturally made him think of what had happened there, ninety shot dead in a terrorist attack. Onstage, he looked down, and there was the girl who had survived the car wreck in Denver. She was with the mother of her boyfriend who died. They had come all this way to see Kevin play. He recognized them immediately. “Do you have priestly instincts to rise to the moment and be what people need?” “Sure. But everyone goes into a show with a preconceived idea of how it’s gonna go. Whether it’s, I want to drink beer and rock out. Or …. That. It broke the ice for me. The Bataclan felt like hallowed ground. It was very very sweet to see them.” We shift to talking about time. The record isn’t just about leaving. It isn’t just about Katie (there are more love songs here than usual, I tell him, and he concurs). It’s about time, about feeling like he has shifted from nostalgia, and the losing game—losing but beautiful—of holding onto the past. He has accepted that time is ceaselessly flowing, and you can’t stop it. Instead, he feels like he’s riding it. He’s riding passenger with time. They’re doing it together, shooting forward in tandem, Bonnie and Clyde.  I ask him about that line, “I’ll ride passenger in a burlap sack,” it’s more than at peace, and passive. It’s, I’ll risk everything, and could end up dead. That’s what I hear. I started rambling about a memoir I just read by a musician I once knew, a guitar player who was in the band Tuxedomoon. Every story in his book was about how fate intervened. Fate did this fate did that. He was riding passenger to the extreme. It was all excuses. It was sad. In Kevin’s case, he conjures death but it feels more fictional, speculative, it’s reality, but he has no death wish that I can sense.

Our food arrives.

“A side of ranch dressing with the fries, without even asking? This is very midwestern.” He can access the comforts of his origins without living there any longer. Without the isolation, the big sky, the small lives. You can sing about the ugly brothers with the muscle cars in the front yard but that doesn’t mean you have to stay.  In the song they are characters, and listening to, as he imagines it, Metallica. “In reality, it’s probably trip-hop,” he says. But Kevin is burnishing his lyric-fictions to something more timeless and poetic, than now and tomorrow. I assure him there are ugly brothers out here, too, with muscles cars in the yard. I know them. And he’s like, Yeah, Rach, you would.

After dinner I want another beer and Kevin says let’s have it elsewhere, someplace dark. That’s when I see something about him that I never have before: he’s restless! I like that I can see it, because I would not have guessed. We walk under the freeway to Zebulon. It’s closed. On its locked door is a flyer for a show next week by a former member of Tuxedomoon. “Weird!” we say in unison, checking the box that we are following destiny’s map, the one that is presented to the human mind as “chance.”

We go to the Red Lion, with its quiet local Oktoberfest vibe. I ask Kevin what sign he is. I know nothing about astrology, and so any answer is good. “Aries,” he says, “the most fire of the fire signs. The most intense. The type who leaps before they look.” Is that you, I wonder. And he nods. “Most definitely.” I tell him I kind of see him leaping and looking. “Yeah, maybe. But remember, I dropped out of high school. Moved to NYC. Joined a band. Then started a band.”

I come back to little wide open. The song by that name. “Sometimes the myth grows bigger than the dream” I read out loud from a lyrics sheet. “It’s about the two of us being songwriters. The pros and cons. The complications. A crazy lifestyle of us each crisscrossing the world.”

Could it be, I ask him, that he and Katie created something together that partly takes place in the Midwest, Kevin’s “little wide open,” but his dissatisfaction with that place isn’t a dissatisfaction with her, or her with him, and instead, maybe they are lifting off, together? “One thousand percent,” he replies. Since moving to LA, he’s been so happy. I remind him that I’d accidentally left a “Los Angeles” sweatshirt at their house in Kansas City and was hoping Katie would find it and wear it. “It’s in the valley of the lost,” Kevin says. The way he says it, it’s like even losing things is wholesome to this dude. They go to the happy valley of the lost. 

Morby, those golden-brown curls, the jacket with fringe, different versions, like a paper doll whose variations, gold or white or American flag, only reconfirm a consistent core, editions of one. Heartlander but no, not a rube. The broad, open face, and yes he throws flowers to his public but he’s marked by death like you and me. The way of standing, feet a little out, what anatomy declares a slight external rotation. I could recognize Kevin’s gait on grainy security footage, I mean if I needed to. If they asked, and if it mattered. A flood of people walking past CCTV? Border control, 7-11, truck stop, or even Joe Paranoid’s Ring camera? I could ID him no problem.  

If I needed to guess what his music would contour toward, or away from, that would be harder. He thinks in the unit of the album, album-sized steps into the future, each one a concept that ripples through, song by song, to the end.

“Field Guide for the Butterflies says everything this record’s about,” he tells me. “It’s all in there. I was on this drive through Arkansas by myself. I noticed that butterflies kept hitting my truck, as they were trying to cross the highway. I went to Dickson Street Books in Fayetteville, and looked at this book, Field Guide to the North American Butterfly. It was this moment where I was like, what does it mean that there are butterflies crossing the highway, what do they mean as a symbol? The people who died going to my show, it means that. It means me and Katie meeting on the road and touring together and falling in love. It’s like, we’re floating around. Flying over the highway like we are not butterflies. Like we are not fragile.”

But they are. We are.