On the eve of fatherhood, Kevin Morby is celebrating a life less haunted. We visit the singer-songwriter at his home outside Kansas City to drink some beers, talk about his sprawlingly intimate new album, Little Wide Open, and bask in the beauty of the heartland. On the afternoon of Kevin Morby ’s 38th birthday, we’re drinking three-dollar Bud Lights at a patio table outside the American Legion Post Bar #318 in Parkville, Missouri—population 8,000—cutting to the chase. A freight train horn blares in the distance, birds chirp loudly, and Morby, a preternaturally warm person, is telling me how he got so comfortable with death. For his entire adult life, he’s found solace in singing songs honoring his friends who died young. Even still, I’m trying to understand how the second half of Morby’s eighth album, Little Wide Open , came to feel so enlightened by ghosts. The train screams again. As signs on the highways remind us, we’re in “the heart of America,” and there’s no one around.…