Kevin Morby

“Anytime I'm locked out of somewhere with another person, I can usually pick the lock successfully. And then I feel like James Bond.”

“I'm very impressionable: I get very taken away by stories and certain feelings. With writing, sometimes I want to feel like a character.”

“I grew up in the Midwest and never really felt at home there, and when I got to New York, I was really fearless. I feel like I really fell in love with the the place. But then, it's a place where your world is really big at first and then becomes really small. I found myself hardly leaving my neighborhood, like I made it into a small town.”

“'Reign' is probably the oldest one on the record. I wrote that when I was 19. 'The Dead They Don't Come Back,' which is the last song on the album, I wrote when I was 20, and 'Harlem River' I just wrote last year. It spans from 2007 to 2012.”

“A lot of what I've written that's made its way onto my records I've written in Kansas, which is interesting because I've never written about Kansas. But I go have these experiences. and I'll be back at my parents house, and it's like I'm in a safe incubator.”

“I write all the time, and I write a lot of songs, but before I started putting out records, those songs always just ended up on stuff that I did with The Babies.”

“I remember my mom telling me that when John Belushi died, my dad cried. I remember thinking that was strange as a child, but today, I kind of get it.”

“My favorite songwriters are all solo artists.”

“I feel like 'Harlem River' was me putting one foot out the door of New York, and 'Still Life' is between Point A and Point B. It's the grey area.”

“I had a lot of jobs in New York. I worked in a cafe, and I did bike delivery, and I was a mover. And I babysat, which was really cool in some cases and really insane in others.”

“I love Baltimore. It is a city with a giant heart and has remained one of my favorite places to keep returning to on tour. It is unique and beautiful, and you can't mistake it for anywhere else in the world - Baltimore is one hundred percent Baltimore.”

“My dad grew up in western Nebraska. I'd visit all the time as a kid, and it's very much like the Wild West. It felt to me like a cowboy movie. Stuff like that made me become this dreamer at a young age.”

“When I'm out having the experiences, that's exactly what I'm doing: having the experiences. Then I can later reflect and write.”

“I always considered myself a songwriter, but I didn't move to New York with plans of doing that; it just sort of happened. Everyone thinks that I moved to New York strictly to play music, but I totally just happened to fall into playing with Woods, and it all got started from there. I just went to New York to hang out.”

“My hair - it's baby thin and feathery and drives me crazy no matter what I do with it. It's weird because you see people with thicker hair that just kind of stays put, but if I'm in any sort of weather, I look like Bill Murray in 'Kingpin' when it starts to all come unleashed.”

“On 'City Music', I wanted there to be grit, and I wanted it to be loose, and I wanted there to be mistakes.”

“'Rock Bottom Riser' by Smog - I was just in Europe, and my jet lag never really went away. I wasn't sleeping very much. Then one night, my girlfriend saw a Bill Callahan show in L.A. and took a video of that song and sent it to me. I was just listening to it over and over - it was comforting.”

“On my first European solo tour, I was selling maybe 50 tickets a city until I showed up in Paris and heard the show was already at 150 tickets, which, at the time, really blew my mind and took me by complete surprise.”

“To be alive at all is so crazy, to experience the wide spectrum of feelings and emotions is so wild, but we have nothing else to compare it to, so it becomes normal.”

“I wanted to write a song called '#1234' that would act as a homage to The Ramones.”