Katy Kirby is a singer-songwriter based in Brooklyn. Her latest record, Blue Raspberry, is out now on ANTI-.
Katy Kirby is a singer-songwriter based in Brooklyn. Earlier this year, for the Talkhouse Reader’s Food Issue — out now digitally and in print — Katy spoke with us about her love for the movie Babette’s Feast, and how food relates to her own creativity. You can read her thoughts on Babette’s Feast exclusively in the issue, but the rest of our conversation is below. Katy’s latest record, Blue Raspberry, is out now.
— Annie Fell, Editor-in-chief, Talkhouse Music
Food is one of the mediums that I feel least intimidated by being creative in. I’m not an amazing cook — I can kind of figure something out just by looking into the fridge — but I really like making food when I feel creatively stuck, because it makes me feel like I can make aesthetic choices on the fly and they’ll pay off. It’s a great way to remind myself that I know how to make creative choices, and that the stakes of making creative choices are actually not as high as I think they are. Like, you’re just making something, dude, you’re not gonna die.
I do have a slightly unusual amount of taste-oriented adjectives in my lyrics, I’ve noticed. Flavor gets brought up a lot — especially on this record, for obvious reasons. What I have noticed is that the sensory experience of food is so universal that it’s sort of always been a short cut for me when I’m trying to explain something musically or aesthetically to someone, when I don’t have the actual appropriate language for it. For instance, my producer, Alberto Sewald, is a brilliant engineer, and I can’t explain to him what I’m asking for in the technical words that I should be using, because I simply don’t know them. But he’s been very patient with me in trying to figure out what I mean when I say certain things. Using food words to describe what I’m looking for in a sound is a weirdly helpful way to talk about music and arrangement and production. It’s sort of a shared aesthetic language.
For example, I would always call something “sparkly” or “shimmery” when I was trying to get across a texture I was looking for when I was talking to my band. That kind of works, but a lot of those words are actually not that useful. “Sparkly,” “shimmery,” “airy” — all of these words are a little more open to interpretation, more abstract. So we started calling things “spicy,” or “smooth.” “Sugar” would be a concept that was invoked a lot, or like if something needed a little more “sweetness.” Or “tangy” — “tangy” is a great word! I feel like that maps for a lot of people. Like Alex G — that’s a tangy band. There’s some fermentation to it that’s not in, like, Tears For Fears. There’s no tanginess there, it’s a very straightforwardly sweet band…
I think food also modifies how I think about art, and how it becomes part of us whether we remember it or not. Food goes away — it’s eaten — but we do absorb nutrients that become our bones and blood. Literally, we’re just little guys made of food, ultimately. I think in the same way, the idea that “you are what you eat” made me worry less about remembering or retaining what about certain pieces of art I think is good. Because now we consume so much media, and no matter how good it is, there’s just too much to consciously remember for most people. But I do believe if I’ve read or heard or seen something beautiful, even if I don’t remember it, I do think it’s still in there. It certainly must go somewhere, into the fabric of your subconscious or wherever — just in the way that I ate some cranberry sauce and pistachio ice cream over Thanksgiving, and there’s still some molecules in me somewhere that are the direct byproduct of that.
The ordinariness of food is a good way to think about art as well. Art’s not inherently a special thing to do — but it can be. I heard someone once say that they try to think about their sexual encounters the way that they think about how they eat food: There’s nothing wrong with eating a meal that you know isn’t very nutritious for you, but it’s kind of fun. Experiencing the sexual equivalent of drunk McDonalds at 2 AM is a perfectly fine thing to do. Not every meal needs to be an elaborate meal, and you’re not morally objectionable because you had some drunk McDonalds at 2 AM. But maybe that only being the way that you consume food would be bad for you long term. So many different things can be a meal, and so many different things can be art. It’s so shocking, sometimes, the breadth of what a medium can cover, and I think food is a nice reminder of that. There are some songs floating around my head that no one else will ever hear, and they’re functionally like a popcorn dinner I made for myself. It’s important to just cook for yourself sometimes, in an art way.
As told to Annie Fell.
