Katy Kirby’s version of folk music is made heavy with observations and made light with orchestral flourishes and dry champagne wit. Born and bred in the South with a heavy-handed (and heavy-hearted) church upbringing, Kirby’s pull nowadays is using music to figure out the reverberations of a life spent in a microcosm.
Her second album seeks to find her truth by examining the fakery amongst us, the first example of which you’ll find right in the title, Blue Raspberry. The record also nods to cubic zirconias, souvenirs, trinkets and romantic fantasies as it encapsulates and evaluates: Is this real, or is this fake?
Ahead of her show this Thursday at Cactus Club, Kirby attempted to explain it to me thusly: “I’m thinking about those categories between real and fake, artificial and organic, and I do think that authenticity is given this position of virtue. We tend to accept that — and I think there are good reasons for that — but it seems sort of over virtue-coded to me, like it's regarded as more virtuous than it actually is.”
She continued, “In defining the category of authenticity, whenever people feel led to do that, it seems like they're usually up to something. Does that make sense?”
She asked me that personally, trying to make good on explaining an idea still shifting, even though mostly formed — like she wanted me to know she didn’t label herself as some sort of authority, but rather a fresh traveler along new paths.
“They're usually drawing some line between good and bad, actually, whenever they're talking about authenticity versus fakeness,” she added. “Like there's never any neutral morality imposed to the word ‘authenticity.’ Usually, you're talking about something else.”
Kirby’s newer romantic relationships with women are a huge part of her new album’s weight and its poetry. Caught up in that, Kirby dives even heavier into her (she put it) “bad habit” of painting it on thick with similes. Lines such as “your eyes like a pair of angry pearls” light up the dark spots and pair prettily with the album’s orchestral moments, going introspective with hushed-but-clear vocals, piano, cello and guitar.
One moment from the album that underlines Kirby’s revelation, metamorphosis and motion forward is “Alexandria” — a slow-rolling journey led by cello and percussion, and recorded in a moment of inspiration at Figure Eight Studios in Brooklyn (one of several spots the songs on the album were laid out).
“We spent a really long time, maybe like 10 minutes of everyone just like playing that chord that opens the song, like kind of over again. It's not a drone; it's like a bong!” Kirby recalled, doing her best “bong” sound for good measure. “They just kind of bonged in there. Or zhonged? They zhonged in there for like 10 minutes, and I ran downstairs to get lunch, came back upstairs and they were still zhonging.
“And I set the food down and went and recorded the vocal with them, and it was amazing. It just sounded so good in the room. It was such a surreal moment. I was just singing this song that I had written with this live band that also felt like an orchestra. I also had pictures of the person I was singing about pulled up on my phone, maybe ‘cause I felt a little bored with it, and I was like, ‘Maybe I'll just self-harm emotionally and see where that gets me.
“And, uh, it did work. I had to lay down on the floor for like 30 minutes after because I was just tired. But, yeah. That was a good time.”
Revelatorily and metaphorically so, Kirby has landed on her ultimate feelings about authenticity, post-Blue Raspberry’s genesis and completion. “I was thinking about the choices that we make, whether they’re organic or inorganic or a part of our body that we're born with or not. In those modifications and in those choices that may lean towards the inorganic technically, according to someone, those choices reflect a reality of what we're feeling inside and other things about our world. They can tell the truth in really powerful ways.”
You can hear our full conversation using the player at the top of the page, catch Kirby at Milwaukee’s Cactus Club this Thursday, Aug. 1, and find Blue Raspberry on Anti- Records now.
