Nashville native Katy Kirby initiated her second album as a songwriting experiment—directing swooningly lovely country songs to an imagined female lover. Funny the things music can tell us about ourselves. Shortly after writing Blue Raspberry’s title track, Kirby entered her first queer relationship. The finished album is a thoroughly lived-in document of a complicated romance: no longer genre exercise in yearning but a philosophical inquiry into it.
On Blue Raspberry—which takes its name from an artificially flavored gas-station drink—Kirby positions her songs in between artifice and reality, dissecting the ruses, contrivances, and willful hallucinations that sustain romantic fantasy. She studs the album with suitably unsubtle metaphors: fake diamonds, glitter, candy. At first, the songs sound as unthinkingly lovely as anything within the “sapphic yearning” strain of indie pop (think Clairo or girl in red). Repeat listens reveal a more jagged and complex version of intimacy, one replete with well-navigated confusion and contradictions.
As a lyricist, Kirby is inventive and exhilarating, though she occasionally overwrites. Though each line on Blue Raspberry overflows with excellent, original ideas, she tends to pile them high rather than give them the breathing room they deserve. “You’re the prettiest mermaid in the souvenir shop/But if you’re coming home this late, you know you’d better be drunk,” she sings on “Cubic Zirconia,” allowing what should have been a hard-hitting rejoinder to fall flat.
The songs themselves are soft and sauntering, built around close-mic’d guitar and piano and occasionally offset with strange, barely perceptible flourishes that evoke subtle unease. On “Hand to Hand,” a high, quiet chirp rings out like a fire alarm in heaven. On “Fences,” Kirby plays guitar as though she’s gently chucking it for wood. Throughout, she sustains a near-whisper, like she’s singing to a lover underneath a quilt. Her light-as-air melodicism helps take the weight off the more verbose lyrics.
Kirby’s best writing shows off her talent for contracting abstract ideas into the kinds of pithy lines that inspire furious underlining. She describes romance as “diminutive contrition”; falling in love “a carpet bomb of estrogen.” Her ability to give clarity to chaotic, contradictory forces sets her apart. She holds a poetic fascination with metaphorical fences, for instance; the ways in which they both excite and evade intimacy. “Good neighbors make good fences,” she sings on “Wait Listen.” It’s a heady reversal, rendered so tersely as to obscure the brainwork behind it. Blue Raspberry proves that Kirby is particularly dialed in on these vicissitudes of intimacy. With a little fine-tuning, she could transcend.
