T he first track on Kevin Morby’s eighth album is called Badlands. It refers to the unforgiving terrain of the American midwest and also comes freighted with pop cultural references: the title of Terrence Malick’s bleak 1973 neo-noir movie loosely based on the spree killings of Charles Starkweather; the ferocious track from Bruce Springsteen’s 1978 album Darkness on the Edge of Town that depicts the lot of a frustrated blue-collar worker “smashing in my guts” in a nowhere town. Unforgiving terrain, violence fuelled by nihilistic rage, frustration: the listener is thus primed for a song on which Morby, who was raised between the farmland of Missouri and the suburbs of Kansas City, paints a stark picture of the America from which he hails. But Badlands isn’t so straightforward.…