John Carroll Kirby Comes to His Center

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If John Carroll Kirby could see any performance in time, the producer, composer, and keyboardist’s wish would be to witness the first musical event in history: “Like people banging on bones,” he tells CR MEN. “kind of like the beginning of 2001 [A Space Odyssey].”

Arguably the most popular art form in the world, the strange power of music is as mystifying today as it is sure to have been then. To this day, it refuses to be contained and defies every rule its alleged masters have tried to enforce throughout history. In fact, if there’s one thing Kirby knows from his work with some of our time’s most popular musicians (among them Solange and Frank Ocean) it’s that “you can come at things in completely unorthodox ways,” he says. “I’ve had some formal training in music, but the more I work with so many great people I realize that there actually are no rules. People are just following their intuition, which is really the best thing you can do.”

It’s also what the artist is tuning into with his new album My Garden, which just released last week on Stones Throw. After his debut, Travel, which primarily concerned itself with faraway places rather than his own interior world, its follow-up is an invitation into Kirby’s imagination. My Garden draws on mythology and mysteries, from The Ayahuasca Visions of Pablo Amaringo to a curious late night encounter with a pet alligator, who Kirby came across in the dark backyard of a restaurant in Mexico. But rather than its seemingly disparate parts, the album is about the way Kirby’s playful nature weaves them into a cohesive thread of whimsical piano arrangements. It is a lighthearted record, but meditative in a jazzy manner. As a native Angeleno and son of a late-in-life Satanist, he resists publicly labelling himself “spiritual,” but his influences, ranging from his guru Sri Dharma Mittra, who he discovered through a fellow yogi, to the Russian fighter Khabib Nurmagomedov, are dead giveaways.

Rather than developing a woo-woo susceptibility for conspiracy theories though, Kirby blends different ideas on music and ways of being into a kind of applied philosophy. In this way, his teachers also include his latest collaborator, Eddie Chacon, of Charles & Eddie fame. “I forget who he stole this quote from, Rockefeller or someone,” says Kirby of Chacon’s mantra, “but it’s ‘You should always be the dumbest person in the room.’ Eddie really lives by that, always asking questions and not trying to force his will on everybody.”

Of all his accomplishments, his commitment to the “Beginner’s Mind” especially impresses Kirby: “Eddie’s kind of seen everything. He’s had a No. 1 hit, seen the world, subsequently wrote hit songs for other people, but then also had multiple albums get shelved by the record label. He’s seen all the ups and downs of music and subsequently became a successful fashion photographer, so now that he’s getting back into music, he’s really just doing it for fun. It’s really cool to work with someone who’s so good, so talented, such a great singer and songwriter, who also has the enthusiasm of a young child when he’s making music.”

A child is also how Friedrich Nietzsche describes a truly mature person in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. His three metamorphoses analogize an individual’s evolution: from a camel soaking up the world’s wisdom into a lion who has to fight a dragon whose scales all read “Thou Shalt,” into, finally, a child. This quest for contentment as well as a profound and humble sense of curiosity, fueled by wisdoms kept and discarded along the way, according to nothing but one’s own disposition, holds another, greater promise: The possibility of actual self-actualization, or what C.G. Jung called “the privilege of a lifetime.” Pairing psychology, philosophy, and spirituality with his own experiences of yearning and satisfaction, fear and beauty, Kirby’s songs pay ethereal testament to the musician’s journey towards his own center. How lucky then, that with My Garden, we’re all invited to come along.

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