Katy Kirby soothes Toronto with intimate tunes

toronto, canada - july 31, 2024

Katy Kirby started her tour last month supporting her newest album, Blue Raspberry all across North America. The Texas native graced the stage at Toronto's iconic Velvet Underground with softness and intimacy that mirrors the 2024 record. Kicking off the set with “Redemption Arc”, a fan favorite from the album. The lyrical content of Blue Raspberry focuses on Kirby's relationships to her queerness and the lack of binary necessity in romantic endeavors of life. While the record swells with orchestral accompaniment, the live show contrasts in an equally cinematic way...simply more intimate. With yellow-lensed glasses and a white bandana covering her hair, Katy Kirby joked with the crowd with a sincere feeling of closeness, as if reuniting with a best friend. The overall sense of the set was a lifecycle of melancholic meetings and devastating goodbyes to whichever hypothetical lover in the audience's lives--a meaningful exchange that touched on universal themes of love and longing.

Kirby's storytelling and heartfelt delivery turned personal experiences into shared moments of introspection and connection to create a setting that was profoundly personal and intimate. In the third track of the night, “Cubic Zirconia”, Kirby questions "Why wouldn't that be enough? / For what more could I want", a dichotic inquiry of a lover and a lingering question to the audience. Had the soundtrack of Kirby's not been setting the tone, in the silence the sound of heart strings tearing would be palpable. 

Katy Kirby is an expert in metaphorical writing in a growing blunt era of music, so evident in lines from her debut album, Cool Dry Place. From the later played track Traffic!, "Winning in a landslide, a high tide, running out of room / Nobody got there faster than you" Kirby retells the moment of falling hard and fast. 

The final song of the night, “Portals”, was played as a solo set with the singer. Detailing the ambiguity and fluidity of loving another and its often internalized, emotionally violent outcomes. Left with the lines "We had formed ourselves together / In a temporary whole? / And if we reunite, will we still know / The things that we had learned before?" reverbing into bloodstreams. A delaying silence fell on the crowd as if almost too stunned to applaud Kirby on time.

It's hard not to leave a Katy Kirby show without feeling a lump in the back of your throat, and maybe the urge to reach out to those of your past. While advised against by the singer-songwriter, that lingering desire of love and closure remains...in the best way possible.