Musician Kevin Morby doesn’t consider himself to be a great actor, but the role he plays in his new short film, Oh My God, was a pretty familiar one. “I felt like I was playing a character for sure, the character being myself. It’s a weird thing. I’m sort of in the ‘Kevin Morby’ role,” he said in a recent phone interview. “I’m kind of the same way I would be on stage, where I’m not 100% my natural self.”

The film, which you can see below, is a companion piece to his album Oh My God, and it follows that Kevin Morby character through a few especially intense days of fear, questioning his faith, and rocking out. It’s the result of a collaboration between him and a friend, director Christopher Good, whose last short film, Crude Oil, was an official selection at Sundance this year. “I think we’re able to be on each other’s wavelengths without really talking about what we’re doing,” Good said in a recent interview. “We were able to come up with our own things that combined, hopefully, into a cohesive whole.”

At 31, Morby has already had a long and varied career. At 17, he dropped out of high school and moved from Kansas City to Brooklyn. The story has become a part of his legend largely because it worked out pretty well for him—he joined a band, Woods, that taught him about making a living in the music industry, and made friends who would become musical collaborators.

Oh My God is Morby’s fifth solo album, and the first he wrote while living in Kansas City, where he returned after about 12 years away. Early on in the process of making the record, he knew he wanted to do something a little different from what he had done in the past when it came to its presentation. “Since the record was so much of a concept, I wanted everything to reflect that,” he said. So instead of a suite of music videos by different directors, like he had done in the past, he wanted something more cohesive.

It just so happened that Morby had a director friend kicking around his hometown. The two had worked together on music videos before, and Good even lived in the house Morby owned in Kansas City for a while. “Living back in the city, I really wanted to involve Kansas City, when it came to the artists,” Morby said. “And I wanted to do something I hadn’t really done before…. It just seemed like a natural thing, because [Chris and I] were already doing so much together, why don’t we just push it a little bit more and write some dialogue?”