Nashville musician Katy Kirby uncovers the meaning in ‘Blue Raspberry’

When Nashville musician Katy Kirby started work on the tunes that would become Blue Raspberry, released in January, she initially viewed it as a songwriting exercise, penning a series of intimate verses centered on what was then a fictional female romantic partner. 

“I was just writing using she/her pronouns as an experiment,” Kirby told Tastemakers Magazine in December 2023.

But as the musician neared the end of the writing process for the album, she entered into her first queer relationship – an occurrence that lent a new, unexpected weight to the recordings. “And with that weight shifting, my orientation to the songs changed, too. And they certainly felt more special,” Kirby said by phone from Chicago in the midst of her current tour, which stops in Columbus at Ace of Cups on Wednesday, Aug. 7. “And, yeah, I was enjoying singing them to myself around the house at that time, too.”

When the relationship dissolved, however, so did the sense of joy Kirby had attached to the music. And in the months since, the musician has worked to build up the scar tissue needed to perform songs from Blue Raspberry to an audience on a nightly basis. “It’s not easy to play songs from that record every night … because it’s all relatively fresh and I don’t enjoy thinking about it,” she said. “It doesn’t feel as fun now to sing ‘Hand to Hand.’ But I’m learning to accept that and to separate myself from it a little bit.”

Kirby traced the narrative threads that exist within her new album to a long-held interest in human interaction and “the alchemy between two people that can change with every combination.” But the songs also surfaced organically, sometimes inspired by the shape and feel of the words and the puzzle-like ways consonants can fit together. “It wasn’t necessarily like I was writing in my diary with every line,” she said. “Sometimes I was just putting something down [on the page] because it sounded nice. And now, looking back, I realize all the words I put down because they sounded nice, they were almost comically connected to what was going on in my head at the time, even if I didn’t know it.”

In that way, Kirby shares an approach to songwriting with Andrew Bird, who in a past interview told me he’s often drawn to the sounds of words (see: recalcitrant, palindrome, radiolarian) and the untread paths this language can then lead him down as songs unfold. 

Around the time Kirby started writing songs as a teenager, she discovered a video of Bird performing his song “A Nervous Tic Motion of the Head to the Left” live in concert, struck by the way his words conjured deep emotional resonance absent any linear narrative or easily discernible meaning. “The lyrical content was so clearly secondary to the way the song feels,” she said. “And in that, my conception of a song as something that had to make sense was nicely broken.”

Throughout Blue Raspberry, Kirby similarly returns to particular words and phrases, such as “cubic zirconia,” first pulled in by the way the consonants formed in her mouth and later struck by the emotional weight the terms evolved to carry. On “Salt Crystal,” for instance, a reference to the lab-made diamond alternative resonates as the musician taking a more considered look at something commonly dismissed out of hand.

Kirby’s fascination with language exhibited itself from early in childhood, with the musician recalling how one year for her birthday she asked for (and received) an etymological dictionary. It’s a trait she shares with her parents, including her father, who will routinely convene the family on group Facetime calls to solve the New York Times crossword puzzle. “He’ll pull it up on screen share, which is a tricky setup to really manage it properly,” Kirby said, and laughed. “I don’t think we’ve ever actually finished one.”

At age 15, Kirby began to experiment with translating this love of language into song, initially drawn in by the form’s adaptability and the belief that it was subject to fewer rules than other disciplines to which she had been exposed, including poetry and short stories. 

“Various forms of writing can show up in a song and no one will get upset with you for messing with the form,” said Kirby, who was further galvanized in her pursuits by a college professor’s offhand dismissal of lyricists. “In passing, he was like, ‘I will never respect songwriting all that much because you can take a mediocre line or lyric and make it something moving by putting music behind it.’ And I remember thinking, ‘Yeah, that’s awesome. I want to cheat in that way.’”