Kevin Morby has shared a video for his new single, “A Random Act of Kindness.” It is the latest release from his album, “This Is a Photograph“, which will be out on May 13th via Dead Oceans. View the Christopher Good-directed video below.
In a press release, Morby states: “In ‘A Random Act Of Kindness’ I set out to write a song where each line could be interpreted in two completely different ways. For example; when I sing the words ’out of trust…’ it could be heard as either I have lost my sense of trust in something or that I am committing an act with trust as my motive. It’s a song about the menacing nature of the sun rising during a dark time in one’s life only to further illuminate their pain and suffering—and how during these periods it is often the selfless acts of strangers that keeps a person going.
“Sonically I am so proud and surprised by where we ended up with this one. Producer Sam Cohen and I had set out to make a sort of windows-down-mid-tempo-cruiser and somehow, with weeks of exploration, made a sonic rocket ship that shoots you out into outer space over the course of four minutes. Enjoy!”
Upon announcement of the new album last month, Morby shared the song “This Is a Photograph,” which was one of our Songs of the Week. He later shared the album track “Rock Bottom.”
Another young, white rock songwriter pilgrimages to Memphis, mining the river city’s heritage of tragedy, triumph and soul-baring music that maps the route between the two? Stop the presses. But sequestered in a Peabody suite as the pandemic raged outside, Kevin Morby used Memphis’ legacy as a lens to look inward, to ask incisive questions about family, love, fame, careerism and what he wants from life itself over nuanced soul, folk and chamber ballads that unspool like a deep eddy. “The living took forever,” he offers during one such slow beauty, “but the dying went quick.” It’s a fitting existential mantra for these times, dispatched from a place accustomed to transmuting loss.
Morby’s previous studio album, Sundowner, came out in 2020 via Dead Oceans. “A Random Act Of Kindness” by Kevin Morby from the forthcoming album ‘This Is A Photograph’, out May 13th on Dead Oceans.
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