Kevin Morby has teamed up with super-producer du jour, Aaron Dessner, for his eighth studio album. Fortunately, Dessner knows not to interfere much with a winning formula and Little Wide Open sounds like a culmination of all of Morby’s laconic, meandering tendencies writ large. There is a level of studio polish that sharpens up these dusty arrangements, but the album lives or dies on your tolerance of Morby’s modern Americana lyricism and his Dylan-esque vocal phrasing.

There are two lengthy outliers (on an album that’s already hovering around the hour mark) in the title track and ‘Natural Disaster’. The former is a peaceful, nice-enough grower that plods on for eight minutes or so but the latter is the real standout, pairing Morby’s penchant for cliched nonsense with the bare essentials of his strings. At one point he rhymes consecutive lines with ‘laughters, Stratocasters, rafters, chapters, afters, disasters’ like he’s country-scatting, but his endearing style draws it all together beautifully.

There are a number of guests across the album (Justin Vernon, Lucinda Williams, Dessner himself and more) and a few cuts that dive more deeply into country; the quaint banjo/fiddle of ‘I Ride Passenger’ and the Fust-y group vocals of ‘Die Young’, but the idiosyncrasies of Morby’s writing style set him apart. Despite the abundant(!) middle American touchstones (highways, dusk, religion, endless horizons etc.), he manages to imbue these worn-out images with a fresh lick of paint, a slightly skewed perspective or choice lyrical detail. Lines like “Muscle cars / in the front yard / Master of Puppets / and Kill ’em All” evoke a certain feeling, a specificity that makes up for the generalised wisdom of a couplet like “Sometimes we golden / sometimes we rust.” There are numerous references to rust, furthering Morby’s Neil Young worship, but it’s the Dylan influence (especially around the Nashville Skyline era) that feels the most prominent. The emotion Morby can wring from a rote cliché like “Welcome to the Midwest / where the sky knows best” is testament to his unique and impressive abilities.

Little Wide Open is probably a little long – there’s a couple of forgettable numbers on the second half – but Morby sounds so comfortable in his own skin here, so confident in the obvious skill in his writing and with Dessner producing no-one need worry about the quality of the mix. The album may not sparkle with originality, but it’s a wonderful listen to relax into; to get lost in these superbly crafted mini-worlds.