John Carroll Kirby announces new solo album Blowout

Kirby explains the song’s title: “The oropendola is a very cool bird that lives in a sac-like hanging nest. There was a tree full of them outside where I stayed that woke me up every morning at 5am, so I had to write a song about them.”

Blowout is inspired by a period in Costa Rica spent playing with local musicians and imagining “failed utopias”. The album follows on from 2021 jazz-fusion release Septet – marking his return to ensemble playing – and 2022's Dance Ancestral – which came with additional production from Canadian artist YuSu, turning the album into a more electronic-forward approach.

In 2021, Kirby visited Puerto Viejo, Costa Rica to film an episode of his travelogue series Kirby’s Gold with the Kawe Calypso Band. Between wake-up calls from oropendola birds and psychedelic sunsets, Kirby wrote Blowout. After the sun went down, he’d jam with local Calypso legends and sneak in the occasional gig playing Bob Marley covers and standards at Puerto Viejo’s bars. He finished Blowout with a stripped-down band at 64 Sound Studios, Los Angeles.

As he wrote the album, Kirby contemplated episodes of collective madness or delusion, such as Fyre Festival and the Heaven's Gate cult, imagining “a festival where everyone gets beamed up to utopia or heaven instead of starving or dying unfulfilled.” Blowout is less explicitly spiritual than Kirby’s earlier records; instead, it considers the mysteries of the universe via an irreverent path – think Haruomi Hosono, Sun Ra, or Laraaji. Kirby says, “I'm trying to use imagination in music to create my own myths, and keep things playful and funny and not too sanctimonious.”

Kirby recently received a Grammy nod for his work on Steve Lacy’s hit “Bad Habit”, and last month he released Sundown, the album-length collaboration with Eddie Chacon.