Live in Hanoi (bootleg)

and a very happy new year.

Happy New Year everyone,

I hope everybody is doing great. Apologies for the lack of updates recently. My body and mind have been all over the place, but at long last, I am home for almost a whole month in Kansas City. This hasn’t happened since, believe it or not, 2021. And here we are in 2024, hallelujah!

Back in October I took a vacation to Hanoi with my bandmates Cochemea and Liam after an Australian tour. We hadn’t intended on playing music while in Vietnam but a friend of mine put us in touch with her friend who happens to be the promoter of an experimental music space called Anatolia and he offered to host an intimate performance on our last night in town. Despite being on vacation, we accepted his offer. You can take a musician off tour, but you can’t take the tour outta the musician, as they say…

It had been almost ten years since I had played a small show inside of any kind of living space. At one point in my life these were the only types of venues I could play but as the years have gone on I’ve of course graduated to larger venues - but this fateful night in Hanoi was an incredible reminder as to how special and important these spaces and performances are.

Around sunset we each rode a rented motor bike through rush hour from downtown Hanoi to the Long Bien district, where the venue lives, on the other side of the Red River. We foolishly thought that the three of us could stick together amongst the thousands of much more experienced riders but we all immediately got separated from one another into a river of chaos and were left to our own devices to hopefully make it to the gig.

It would be a fools errand to try and explain the horrifying, exhilarating, thrilling and very cinematic experience that was motor biking, for one of the first times in my life, through Hanoi at rush hour - words can’t come close to capturing it, but please believe me when I say that getting there was equal parts terrifying and amazing.

I was the last to make it to the show. My GPS was freaking out, I was freaking out, but at long last I found the correct exit after missing it three…four…maybe five times. Once I was in the proximity of the show space though, I noticed a woman with her own motorbike, looking as confused as I was. We wandered through a maze of alleyways in between apartment buildings together in silence sensing that the venue must be near, until at last we heard Cochemea playing piano, the notes drifting out into the humid night air through an open window of the venue.

Once inside, a half hour late to my own gig, the show had all the wonderful makings of a diy show space. It was hot, the microphone shocked me if I touched it, the piano was slightly out of tune, a beetle fell on me while I was singing a song and the mic stand broke at one point and a good samaritan in the audience had to hold it in place. All of these things may sound like the performance was a nightmare, but quite the opposite, as they all only added to the magic of the evening.

My favorite moment during the evening, though, was when one of our hosts, Emma - right before Beautiful Strangers - grabbed her violin and sat in with us. I had never thought to have violin on Beautiful Strangers before her doing so but it was beautiful. Her performance kept choking me up as I sang.

After the set we mingled with the crowd a bit before hopping back on our motorbikes, back over the bridge, and back to downtown Hanoi. This time though, we managed to stick together.

So what I offer you now, in front of the pay wall, is a little bootleg of that beautiful night.  The recording is a little rough, but all the better for it if you ask me. I time stamped the songs if you want to skip around.

Thank you to Anatolia for having us and to Liam and Cochemea who, on the spot, played different instruments then they usually do given our limitations of what we could carry on the motorbikes but even still brought the songs to life in a completely new way. Love you guys, you are so talented.

xo km

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Kevin Morby LIVE IN HANOI 10-17-2023

1. INTRO: 0:00

2. OH MY GOD: 1:17

3. BALLAD OF FAYE: 5:10

4. DESTROYER: 7:58

5. FIVE EASY PIECES: 13:34

6. BITTERSWEET, TN: 20:16

7. I HAVE BEEN TO THE MOUNTAIN: 26:14

8. THIS IS A PHOTOGRAPH II: 29:50

9. BEAUTIFUL STRANGERS: 33:48

10. ROCK BOTTOM: 42:14

    KM - VOCALS, PIANO, GUITAR

    COCHEMEA GASTELUM - FLUTE, PIANO, VOCALS, PERCUSSION

    LIAM KAZAR - PIANO, GUITAR, VOCALS

    EMMA - VIOLIN

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