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Description
Recorded in the quiet solitude of Kansas City, *A Night At The Little Los Angeles* emerges as Kevin Morby's intimate companion piece to his 2020 studio masterpiece *Sundowner*. Far from mere cutout scraps, this four-track demo collection-released October 8, 2021-presents ten distilled vignettes of Morby's creative genesis, captured before the polish of producer Brad Cook's studio magic was applied. The result is a warm, fulsome window into the songwriter's process, lo-fi and languid, capturing the very moments when the lightbulb flickers on.
The title references not the city it describes but rather the retreat from it-a deliberate abandonment of urban soundstages in favor of a Midwestern home with garden and hot tub. If Bob Dylan's *The Basement Tapes* serves as the canonical touchstone, *Little Los Angeles* is its quieter cousin: a largely solo affair, spartan in sound and provenance, where the meandering guitar on "Campfire" beckons like a campfire call and "Don't Underestimate the Midwest American Sun" transitions from pleading to defiance without the safety net of drum machines anticipating its build.
Yet perfection is hardly the aim here, and some tracks-the lethargic "Sundowner," the overly earnest "Brother, Sister"-reveal themselves as less compelling than their polished counterparts. Still, the hissing tape and abrupt cut-offs grant the material a certain authenticity, trading spacious production for the immediacy of creation. These are postcards from a particular place and time, magnifying the ephemeral with the same posthumous tenderness that marks City Music and Oh My God. A worthy artifact of a particular moment in the songmaker's orbit, *Little Los Angeles* invites us into the room alongside Morby, pen to paper, before the music was ever meant to be heard.
<sup>1</sup> <a href="https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kevin-morby-a-night-at-the-little-los-angeles/">Pitchfork Review</a>
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