John Carroll Kirby

From the closing years of the 2000s decade onward through the 2020s, keyboardist, composer, and producer John Carroll Kirby assembled a substantial and shifting catalog both as a versatile session player and as a solo artist. His keyboard work appears regularly across Sébastien Tellier’s various studio recordings while also gracing projects by Norah Jones, Solange, Bat for Lashes, and Harry Styles, among many additional artists. Beyond his occasional involvement in the groups Drool and Mind Gamers, Kirby maintains a growing roster of solo releases. Almost entirely instrumental, these pieces blend melodic and atmospheric qualities drawn from new age, jazz, and R&B yet remain resistant to straightforward categorization. He began with several understated recordings for small independent labels near the end of the 2010s and later placed Conflict (2020), My Garden (also 2020), and Septet (2021) with Stones Throw. In 2022 he issued Dance Ancestral, a primarily electronic solo album created with producer Yu Su, and followed it in 2023 with Blowout, material he composed in Costa Rica two years prior.

A lifelong resident of Los Angeles, John Carroll Kirby—frequently listed simply as John Kirby—built his career first as a session and touring musician. His initial prominent credits arrived in 2007 on will.i.am’s Songs About Girls, Jully Black’s Revival, and Raya Yarbrough’s self-titled LP, an assortment that already signaled his range. Over the following years his contributions surfaced on albums by Mike Doughty, Norah Jones, David Holmes, and Madeleine Peyroux, most notably including synthesizer and tack piano on Jones’ Grammy-nominated “Chasing Pirates.” During this period he also established a sustained partnership with Sébastien Tellier, supplying electric piano for two tracks on My God Is Blue, all keyboards on L’Aventura, and keyboards plus co-arrangement and co-production on Marie et les Naufragés. In between those projects Kirby teamed with Cara Stricker as Drool for a self-titled album of moody avant-pop issued by Terrible Records. Soon afterward he appeared on Blood Orange’s Freetown Sound and Solange’s Billboard 200-topping A Seat at the Table, the latter featuring his co-production of three tracks and synthesizer on the Grammy-nominated “Cranes in the Sky.”

Kirby issued his first material under his own name in 2017. Following the INGA collaboration “The Shrek Orchid,” the two-track Mind Gamers release Power of Power (recorded with Tellier and Daniel Stricker and featuring Karl Lagerfeld on the B-side), and an association with Shabazz Palaces, he delivered the lush solo debut Travel. The comparatively austere Meditations in Music, performed solely on a Minimoog and a Yamaha DX7, appeared in 2018, the same year Kirby contributed extensively to Martin Johnson’s the Night Game self-titled album.

Throughout 2019 Kirby participated on Solange’s When I Get Home, Bat for Lashes’ Lost Girls, and Mark Ronson’s Late Night Feelings, in addition to Frank Ocean’s “DHL” and Harry Styles’ “Canyon Moon.” He also found time to release “Lazzara,” his debut single for Stones Throw, and the Patience label LP Tuscany, which comprises two extended piano pieces. An even busier 2020 included his performance on the Avalanches’ Blood Orange collaboration “We Will Always Love You.” Two Stones Throw albums arrived in April: the shorter piano compositions of Conflict, issued in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the more expansive My Garden, originally planned as his first Stones Throw full-length. That July he joined Eddie Chacon for the meditative soul set Pleasure, Joy and Happiness. Further keyboard and synthesizer work appeared on Miley Cyrus’ Plastic Hearts and the Avalanches’ We Will Always Love You before year’s end.

In June 2021 Kirby resumed his leadership role on Stones Throw with the energetic Septet, an album that received uniformly favorable notices and earned global airplay after Gilles Peterson’s Worldwide FM began featuring it daily. In 2022 he released the more heavily electronic Dance Ancestral; the nine-track album centers on the “intuitive dance” performed by sentient beings across their lifetimes, was recorded with Canadian producer Yu Su, and includes a guest appearance by new age legend Laraaji on the opening single “Dawn of New Day.”

During a 2021 visit to Puerto Viejo, Costa Rica, Kirby filmed an episode of his travelogue series Kirby’s Gold alongside the Kawe Calypso Band. Each morning the songs of oropendola birds greeted him, prompting him to begin composing in their honor. After sunset he joined local calypso musicians—several of them regional legends—for informal sessions and occasionally performed Bob Marley covers and standards in Puerto Viejo bars. Immersed in this setting, he wrote an album that he later tracked with a small core band at 64 Sound Studios upon returning to Los Angeles. Released by Stones Throw in June 2023, the resulting record is titled Blowout.