The opening bars of Hello, I’m Irrelevant suggest that the making of Kacy Lee Anderson’s first album has been a liberating experience. Over a muted piano and waltzing shuffle, the Canadian sounds like she’s out to settle a score. “If you wanna burn me”, she sings, syllables sliding softly, “I’ll light the flame/It don’t concern me/If you go out and slander my name.”
“Outdated Songs” only grows more acidic as it goes on. By the end of its three-plus minutes, Anderson is firmly applying the boot to an unnamed singer who was once a mentor of sorts back in her younger days: “You’re a living and breathing karaoke machine/I saw your CD at the Salvation Army/And honey, all of your songs sound the same.” It’s hard to equate this kick-ass Kacy with the artist better known as one half of Kacy & Clayton, the Saskatchewan cousins who’ve spent much of the past 15 years reverently attuned to rural folk tradition.
A better analogue might be The Waverley Pickers, the cosmic country sisterhood, fronted by Anderson, that appear more concerned with flipping convention. In 2024, the self-styled “Pioneers of the Polka Protest Movement” released Early Hits, a barbed, lively takedown of male conceit and casual misogyny that also functioned as a wider celebration of female independence. Musically, the album drew from the unbowed vigour of key totems like Iris DeMent, Neko Case and Tammy Wynette, all of whom also inform the sound and attitude of Hello, I’m Irrelevant.
Anderson’s latest might never have been made at all had Kacy & Clayton been in alignment. But after a run of enthralling albums that skilfully spliced old-time folk and country with psychedelia and classic pop – including two produced by superfan Jeff Tweedy – the pair found themselves in different places. “Clayton was in a phase of wanting to slow down with the band for a while, and I wasn’t,” Anderson explains to Uncut. “I had a lot of songs piling up and wanted to get them out into the world.”
Embracing the freedom of going solo, Anderson chose to record in the intimate surrounds of a converted Anglican church in Quyon, Quebec, during a freezing winter. Along for company were her musician partner Micah Erenberg and producer/composer (and studio owner) Michael John Dubue, most recently a member of Timber Timbre. The sub-zero temperatures meant that the trio didn’t hang about, recording mostly live in just a few days.
The upshot is that Hello, I’m Irrelevant feels like a cluster of sturdily structured songs forged in the spirit of an improvised trio. Guitars enter and exit like gatecrashers, organs chink at the back of the mix, steady-ish rhythms are punctured by tics and thumps. Studio hum adds a faintly apparitional quality. Central to all this, of course, is Anderson’s endlessly supple voice – swooping, dipping and rising in a manner that implies a sense of musical discovery unfurling in real time, players feeling their way into these pieces.
If “Outdated Songs” makes Anderson’s combative stance clear from the off, then “Keep Quiet” – with its murky groove and hissing percussion – aims to exact some kind of terrible retribution: “Don’t wait for me to come alive/I’ll look for you in the dead of night.” Targeting an industry that she’s seen enough of to dodge its many hazards, Anderson trains her eye on celebrity culture and clickbaiting on the title track and “Giving In”. “Won’t you listen to my song,” pleads the former’s desperate narrator, “I’ve included the captions/Won’t you please read along.”
The joy of all this is that Anderson and co sound totally divorced from any such concerns, creating music answerable to no-one, merrily slipping between acoustic folk and classic country warble, bony rock’n’roll and soulful ’60s pop. There’s humour too, from “Giving In”’s illusionary superstar (“Just like Tom Jones in Wales/They think he’s the king”) to the pining protagonist of “Burning Garbage Alone”, reminded of her lover’s absence during even the most banal tasks, namely his talent for lighting a toilet roll.
The gently swinging “How To Deal” outlines a bad run of luck – “Two nights in Reno, all I got was a one-night stand/Now I’m left sipping brandy, talking shop to the wall in Spokane” – that may or may not be autobiographical. But the implication is that Anderson’s gift of perspective, and a healthy measure of self-deprecation, has been crucial to her ability to thrive as wonderfully as this.