You're listening to Song Exploder where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishikesh, your way.

Kevin Morby is a singer and songwriter based in Kansas City. He's put out 7 albums since 2013, including his most recent one.

This is a photograph, which just came out this May.

For this episode, I talked to Kevin about the title track from this is a photograph.

It's a story about his family, the pandemic, and memories of times that have happened and times that haven't happened yet.

My name is Kevin Morby.

I was getting ready to leave for a long tour and we'd gotten together at a family dinner that we were having at my sister's house

with her kids and my parents. We were just having to sort of see them before a big trip dinner.

At some point in the middle of eating dinner, my sister was telling a story.

While she was telling this story, my dad just got up and started to walk away.

When we all looked over at him, he just sort of fell over. He hit his head against the wall and it was the sort of terrifying chaotic moment.

I jumped up from the table and I went over to my dad and I held his head and my mom was calling the ambulance.

Eventually, the ambulance came and they took him away and he went to the hospital and he ended up being okay.

But at the end of the night, we were all still a little shook from this and we went to my parents' house.

And for some reason, we all ended up going through this old box of family photographs that I had never seen before.

But I was really struck by this one photo where my father is standing on the front lawn and this would have been in Lubbock, Texas.

And in the photograph, he sort of had this stoic, almost overconfident look as if he was almost challenging the camera.

And he wasn't wearing a shirt and just earlier that evening, the ambulance had taken my dad shirt off in front of all of us to take his vitals when they first showed up.

It really did feel like that photograph was having a conversation with the event that just took place.

In the photograph, that would have been the year that I was born.

And that night was sort of the first moment that I ever really felt that the role sort of got reversed where I was helping my father up.

I didn't write the song right away, but this whole thing happened and it definitely sort of burrowed inside of me somewhere and later came out.

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