Episode 30: Katy Kirby
Texas born and raised and now Nashville based musician/songwriter Katy Kirby joins us to talk about her excellent debut album Cool Dry Place and her approach to songwriting and music making. Cool Dry Place is an intriguing and marvelously put together collection of musical gems, songs that combine catchy pop melodies with poetically askew, thought provoking lyrics, all wrapped in complex and sometimes surprising arrangements and productions. We talk about how Katy’s early exposure to the melodic hooks of Christian contemporary music has worked its way into her creative process; the mystery of how or why a song is never actually finished; and how, on one of her songs, the swirl of the song is contained within itself. Also, I finally get to talk about autotune.
Katy Kirby is a songwriter and indie rock practitioner with a writerly focus on unspoken rules, misunderstandings of all kinds, and boredom. Kirby was born, raised, and homeschooled by two ex-cheerleaders in small-town Texas, where she started singing in church amidst the soaring, pasteurized-pop choruses of evangelical worship services. After high school, Kirby moved to Nashville, where she managed to graduate college with a rapidly expanding circle of artistic allies, an amorphous collection of leftist beliefs, and a few handfuls of songs. After a series of painful failures to complete a record that reflected the temperament of those songs, Kirby finally turned to dear friends and co-conspirators to form a band capable of constructing a satisfying full length.
