Katy Kirby is a musician originally from Houston and now based in Nashville. Her latest release, the three-song EP Juniper, was released a little while back on Keeled Scales, and is what Kirby describes as “a slow, bitter enunciation of growing up and finding one’s blind spots.” The EP shares a similar feeling to the great Sun June album that Keeled Scales released earlier in the year, folk-suffused indie pop songs that are equal parts positive and melancholy, rich with the evocative scent of the past like a warm breeze off the desert.
Opening track ‘Tap Twice’ is the perfect introduction, opening like a quiet sunny morning, just Kirby’s vocals and gentle guitar. The song soon blooms into rich folk-pop, although the golden atmosphere belies the narrative of the lyrics, particular the final verse which paints a picture of a pretty desperate scene.
“when I almost broke my wrists trying to bring you back
and you thrashed around like goldfish in a garbage bag
it seems like you’re only high when you’re holding your breath
you’re only bright when you’re broken in half”
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The duality between surface-level joviality or tenderness and and the underlying pain and darkness is a motif of the Katy Kirby sound. The gentle grooviness of ‘Peppermint’ masks what is a kind of idiosyncratic lovesong, the lyrics of loss and longing opaqued by the foggy head of our narrator, and the EP closes with the smooth, sauntering title track that is equally nuanced. Not unlike the Haley Heynderickx album from earlier this year, the song uses imagery of plants and gardens to get at something left unspoken. Here happiness and sadness is not some stark binary but more the various shades of a rich emotional environment, one so diverse and fertile that the taxonomic differences between each fade into obscurity.
true blue juniper
never got around to asking her
the difference between weeds and herbs and flowers
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You can get Juniper now on cassette via Keeled Scales, or as a download from the Katy Kirby Bandcamp page.
