Katy Kirby’s ‘Cool Dry Place’

Katy Kirby opened for Waxahatchee during stretches of her triumphant 2022 Saint Cloud tour—the album that soundtracked my early pandemic lockdown (and likely yours). I caught them both that spring at the Haw River Ballroom in Saxapahaw, North Carolina. Wax was the shining star, but Kirby earned a good bit of sparkle. I drove home listening to her 2021 album Cool Dry Place, which she’d largely played from. Her songwriting, all whimsical observation and rose-colored cheeks, reveled in production closer to a playground: rippling time signatures, winking autotune, smirking pauses, and the occasional brass flourish.

Yet after that drive, I didn’t return to the album. Life. Something about it getting in the way. You know how it goes. Luckily, the other evening—some two plus years later—I was out walking the track at the town football stadium, and her song “Peppermint” came up on shuffle as something the algorithm thought I’d like. With a thunderclap of memory, I was transported back to that concert (pre-long-covid, pre-Toronto, pre-small town move), and I quickly fell back into Cool Dry Place. This time on repeat.

The album reminds me so much of the expansive and lively soundscape I found in the Midwestern band Phox. (Their debut album—the only full-length they ever released—is up there among my favorites.) Except where lead singer Monica Martin’s voice is all soaked whisky bravado, Kirby’s is a daintier hush. But what she says is no less powerful.

Take “Traffic.” The music is practically plucky, beginning in the singer-songwriter tradition with rhythmic electric guitar, a sand shaker, and Kirby’s voice. But slowly, over that first verse, subtle touches of auto-tune grow more obvious, as though Kirby were stretching her instrument to touch new dimensions. The song catches up around the chorus when the backing bass accelerates into a runway and the track leaps in tempo. All this for a song about a lover’s childhood trauma: “You know it wasn’t your fault then/ There’s so much we can’t hold/ Oh, you know you were just a little boy.”

The only time Kirby really matches mood to meaning might be on “So Much Wine, Merry Christmas,” a somber piano-driven cover of Andrew Bird, which appears (alongside Alex G’s “Bad Man”) on the album’s extended version. When Kirby sings the chorus, “Listen to me, butterfly/ There’s only so much wine/ That you can drink in one life/ But it will never be enough/ To save you from the bottom of your glass,” it sounds more like a prayer than any kind of admonition.

The playful rhythmic instinct informing “Traffic” appears throughout the album, put to endearing use on “Peppermint,” which sounds like Kirby’s voice is jumping rope with the band. The lyrics, too, match that buoyant spirit. “I lost my best friend/ I never had him/ He’s disappearing off a ledge/ I guess he left the way he came in,” she sings almost shruggingly. On the chorus, muted trumps thicken the overall sound like double dutch.

What a happy accident of the algorithm to come across Kirby once more. Second chances are a rare thing in this world, and I’ll happily cash one in to get a do-over with this gem.