Kirstie Lynn’s new album Blazing Prairie Star grapples with burning up and burning out

Kirstie Lynn. // Courtesy the artist

Burning up and burning out. Ephemeral moments. Cigarettes stamped out. Flashes. Shimmers.

Kirstie Lynn, like so many of us, grapples with these concepts, but uses her art as a way to understand them. As a folk singer and songwriter, she is opening the window into what burning up and burning out means to her in the modern age with her forthcoming album, Blazing Prairie Star.

“I wrote all these songs when I was kind of shifting from late twenties, into thirties,” Lynn says over a coffee and pastry at Oddly Correct on Troost. A spring thunderstorm started to release showers outside. “I was going through a crisis essentially like, what am I doing? Where am I going?”

All the songs feature lyrics about flames, burning, feeling hazy, blazing in the sense of being bright but also in the sense of smoking a joint at the end of the day.

“I’m just really excited to get these songs out. I feel really proud of the lyricism in them.”

The title track, “Blazing Prairie Star,” is out now and weaves folksy guitar with lyrics inspired from the natural world. Lynn’s voice comes in sharp and crisp over the music, the way birds rise and fall in the summer over a prairie as the sun is beginning to set.

A noticeable duality of the lyricism of “blazing prairie star you think you’re going far, filling up all your nights singing to an empty bar” conjures up similarities drawn between a vibrant prairie plant and the vision that Lynn may have for herself.

The Blazing Prairie Star, Liatris pycnostachya, stand as tall pillars of purple against green grass in the summer. Its beauty, like all flowering grassland plants, is fleeting, showing off with or without an audience.

Many Missouri and Kansas musicians may resonate with feeling like a blazing prairie star, getting stage lights caught in your eyes even if there is only an empty bar to listen, also showing off with or without an audience. The lyrics embrace this, though, going on to say that she “might just make a habit of burning up.”

Lynn blends observations from working on an urban prairie with reactions to the state of the world, leading to lyrics like “this administration’s got me feeling pretty damn bad” and “sometimes the things you love don’t love you back.” The creative act of noticing is a key component for the well where Lynn draws inspiration from.

“I’m a deeply feeling person. So when I have a reaction, it is very intense. And so it’s very hard not to notice that.”

Inspiration for her music comes largely from the natural world, but sometimes from surprising places too. For one of the songs on the upcoming album, it was a video that captured her while scrolling TikTok of a young woman facing mortality.

“She was on her deathbed, and she was smelling the roses from her garden for the last time. And she knew it was the last time. I just sobbed. I literally cried so hard.”

Lynn sat down with her guitar and began to write. From that experience, “Yellow Roses” was born.

“Art is from your life,” she says.

Originally from upstate New York, Lynn has been singing her entire life. Her origin story includes singing along to a Hunchback of Notre Dame tune when she was two and being fortunate to have a kindergarten teacher who took her under her wing and had her perform her first solo at five. From there, it was choir, band and theatre that were her formal introduction to music and performing.

Classically trained, she once rebuked the idea of performing contemporary music.

“I’m going to be on stage in a costume singing roles, this is what I want to do,” she says.

Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Lynn began writing and posting snippets of songs on Instagram while sheltering from the outside world when her friend and now other half of her duo, Galen Clark, nudged her to record an album. The album Tears and Medicine was released on her birthday in 2021.

The distinct sound that accompanies all of her writing is hard to describe without drawing comparisons. Comparisons that flood her comment sections when she posts clips of songs on social media. Joni Mitchell and Joan Baez are the most common names, two artists that Lynn had not heard of until she was in her twenties.

“I grew up listening to a lot of early 2000s music like punk, punk pop and musicals. There weren’t really a lot of people that sounded like me,” she explains. When she was recommended “Big Yellow Taxi” by Joni Mitchell on her Spotify Discover Weekly, she finally felt like she was hearing her voice in contemporary music, and realized Counting Crows weren’t the original artists behind the song.

“The first time I heard Joan Baez, I was like, ‘Whoa, wait, I actually do really sound like Joan Baez,’” Lynn reflects. She gets asked frequently if she grew up idolizing Baez but she had not heard the artist with the crystal clear soprano range like hers until she was making the move into the genre she is in today.

Lynn has leaned into writing that focuses on the natural world and human emotions, human experiences. In recent years, she has leaned more into political writing as well. Something that she wants to keep delving more into.

“For centuries, folk music has been political. And I do think that out of all the genres, folk music is a loose term. I think folk music is for the people. And so you got to sing for the people,” Lynn said.

The current administration gets a thumbs-down nod in Blazing Prairie Star, and some of her previous music also tackles writing for the people. In her 2025 release with Galen Clark, “Pray the Snow Melts”, everything from the death of the Pope to higher tariffs get mentioned.

“Big fear blowing in the winds again,” the song starts off with a hopeful confidence, weaving a story that tackles the things in headlines with a hopeful lens of how to handle the anxieties. Nods of humor come in flashes with lyrics such as “everyone in Greenland hates JD Vance and damn I hate him too.”

Kirstie Lynn. // photo courtesy the artist

What seems to work best when Lynn writes politically is that she isn’t just singing the news. Her distinct sound and nods to the natural world create metaphors and surrogates through smart writing. To pray that the snow melts soon feels like a naturalist’s way of saying “this too shall pass.” Winter, and certain political moments and agendas, can’t last forever.

“Pray the Snow Melts” will be featured on the B side of the vinyl version of Blazing Prairie Star alongside other recently released singles. The album was recorded in Boston by Plaid Dog Music with a slew of musicians that helped bring the songs on Blazing Prairie Star fully to life. Album musicians include Eva Walsh on the fiddle, Daniel Yoong playing the guitar, bass and keys, Colin Dinnie on bass, Russ Sternglass and Stephen Sifflard on drums, and Chris Haley playing pedal steel.

If you have ever grappled with the concepts of being in transition, mortality, or the fact that some things that are blazing now won’t be blazing forever, this album may be one for you to keep your eye on, especially if you are looking for original music from a folk musician situated under the Americana umbrella that may throw a surprise or two your way.

Blazing Prairie Star releases Friday, July 24, and the title track is out now. There is not a release show planned yet, but you can catch Kirstie Lynn and the Lucky Strikes on Tuesday, July 21, at North Side Social in Lawrence.