"City Music" is the new album by Kevin Morby. Full of listless wanderlust, it's a collection inspired by and devoted to the metropolitan experience across America and beyond by a songwriter cast from his own mould.

As he puts it: "It is a mix-tape, a fever dream, a love letter dedicated to those cities that I cannot get rid of, to those cities that are all inside of me." His fourth album, "City Music" works as a counterpart to Morby's acclaimed 2016 release "Singing Saw", an autobiographical set that reflected the solitude and landscape in which it was recorded.

"Singing Saw" was imagined as "an old bookshelf with a young Bob and Joni staring back at me, blank and timeless.

They live here, in this left side of my brain, smoking cigarettes and playing acoustic guitars while lying on an unmade bed." And now follows "City Music", the yang to its yin, the heads to its tails.

It is a collection crafted using the other side of its creator's brain, the jumping off point perhaps best once again encapsulated by an image.

"Here, Lou Reed and Patti Smith stare out at the listener," explains Morby. "Stretched out on a living room floor they are somewhere in mid-70s Manhattan, also smoking cigarettes." Recording at Panoramic Studios, a central Californian home-turned-recording studio, "City Music" saw Morby joined by Megan Duffy (guitar) and former The Babies cohort Justin Sullivan (drums).

Here the vocals were recorded at night, in darkness, overlooking a Pacific Ocean illuminated only by the stars, the wash and whisper of the ebbing tidal a distant soundtrack.

Six weeks of European touring had left the trio speaking a secret language that only a band can speak.

The record was completed with Richard Swift in Oregon (producer of Foxygen, sometime member of The Black Keys).