“The first song I learned was The Beatles’ Blackbird. I’m still a pretty good fingerpicker, if nothing else!” Katy Kirby on jumping into guitar at the deep end – and why she made new album Blue Raspberry as uncool as possible

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Songwriting pair Katy Kirby and Logan Chung are in their friend’s Nashville apartment on a cold winter afternoon when they dial into our call. It’s in this sunlit space where Kirby wrote a lot of her new record, Blue Raspberry, making the journey down on the Amtrack from upstate New York where her girlfriend lives.

Skeletons of the songs bared their bones on fellow Southerner Waxahatchee’s 2021 tour, where Kirby would steal away after her opening slot. “We would do our set, then there would be an hour and a half where Waxahatchee was playing,” she says. “We would watch their set a lot, but a bunch of times I would go to our little van and work. It became productive to use that adrenaline boost.”