The day she discovered she was pregnant, Morris wrote “Hummingbird” with help from songwriting doulas the Love Junkies: Liz Rose, Hillary Lindsay, and Lori McKenna, mothers all. If darkness colors the set, so does motherhood’s rapture. She’s living the answer daily, playing his piano in her basement. Busbee’s absence caps the album, too: The modest, aching piano ballad “What Would This World Do,” penned by Morris after his diagnosis but before his death, asks what the world would do without him. Referencing those early hits and echoing their car conceits, it focuses on the struggle to arrive: It’s got “a Montero with the AC busted,” a couple of “bad demos on a burned CD,” slammed doors, and the “couple hundred songs” she had to exorcize to land her breakthroughs, which she invokes just as the music drops out and the chorus surges. His absence, and his knack for supersizing country rock for the 21st century, shadow the album, starting with the lead track and first single “Circles Around This Town,” a triumphant autobiographical plaint about life as an aspiring Nashville songwriter. It’s all shaped with the help of Greg Kurstin, a master of pop-rock-soul triangulation who produced Morris’ hit “The Bones” along with projects by Adele, Sia, and Beck (whose Sea Change and Morning Phase might prove West Coast touchstones as significant for a new generation of country acts as the Eagles’ Greatest Hits has been for the past one).įoundationally, this is Morris’ first LP without polymath producer Busbee-co-writer of her signatures “My Church” and “80s Mercedes”-who died of glioblastoma in 2019 at age 43. Humble Quest may be filigreed with pedal steel, dobro, and mandolin, but it runs on guitars, synth washes, big drums, and bigger choruses. That said, the album is a near-perfect expression of country-pop post- Golden Hour, the high-water mark by Morris’ Lone Star pal Kacey Musgraves: music channeling the ’70s California rock that channeled classic country songcraft. To say Humble Quest is a re-embrace of country is misleading insofar as it suggests Morris, who can conjure a Texan Amy Winehouse, was ever a neat fit for the genre, or that she ever aspired to be.
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