Bridget Kearney
4/8/17
Southgate House Revival, 111 E 6th St, Newport, KY
7:30pm doors, 8:30pm show, Buy Tickets
PASTE MAGAZINE PREMIERES OFFICIAL VIDEO FOR “WASH UP”
Kearney grew up in Iowa City and went to college in Boston, where she double-majored in jazz bass at the New England Conservatory of Music and English at Tufts University. While still a student, she wonthe grand prize in the John Lennon Songwriting Contest, a harbinger of things to come. It was during this time, too, that Kearney and three of her fellow conservatory students founded Lake Street Dive. But Kearney has always been voraciously collaborative, dabbling in chamber pop with the Brooklyn group Cuddle Magic, bluegrass with the now-defunct Boston outfit Joy Kills Sorrow, and Ghanian music as part of a duo with fellow songwriter Benjamin Lazar Davis.
With Lake Street Dive, Kearney has experienced a steady trajectory that became a modern-day music biz success story after the release of 2014’s Bad Self Portraits. Rolling Stone deemed them “The year’s best new band” and the album debuted at #18 on the Billboard Top 200 chart. Their television performances have included The Late Show With David Letterman, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, The Ellen DeGeneres Show and the Today show. In 2016, the band was invited to perform at The White House and played sold-out shows at the Wang Theatre in Boston and Radio City Music Hall in New York.
The recording process for Won’t Let You Down began when drummer/engineer/producer Robin MacMillan invited Kearney to record a few songs at his Brooklyn studio. The sessions, which took place over the course of three years, were leisurely and experimental, free of a label-imposed deadline or a rental fee. “The answer to everything was ‘Yes. Let’s try it,'” Kearney remembers.
“One of the things I like about Robin as a producer is he seems to be able to disassociate an instrument with its stylistic history and just kind of hear it for the sound it’s creating,” says Kearney, who played electric bass, piano, synthesizers, organ, electric guitar and acoustic guitar on Won’t Let YouDown. The album abounds with peculiar noises: an unidentifiable yelp, something distinctly kazoo-like, the distant whistle of a steaming kettle. Shades of The Beatles, Wilco, Fleetwood Mac and even Nick Cave can be detected, as the album swerves from ‘60s pop to ‘80s soft rock to Gothic Americana.
Won’t Let You Down is the first project in which Kearney has appeared as the primary vocalist. “I’ve always had this affinity for singers and songs that are kind of vulnerable-sounding and flawed,” she says. “I’m not a trained singer or a really powerful singer, so that’s something that you can kind of use as an advantage in your writing. You can say some things that are vulnerable and personal, and I think it can come across more powerfully with a voice that’s imperfect.”
Kearney’s lyrical talent stems from her ability to unlock the profundity in details both small and strange. She jokingly describes the song “Daniel” as being “about when you have a sexy dream about someone, and how weird that is.” But in Kearney’s hands the concept transforms into something at once aching and exquisite, an earnest pop concoction with a conflicted soul.
Tasked with naming her favorite song, Kearney chooses “Wash Up,” a dreamy soft rock jam about running into an old lover. “It’s one of my favorite kinds of songs,” she says. “These crying on-the-dance-floor kinds of things, where the track is kind of bumpin’, but when you listen to the lyrics you realize it’s actually a sad song.” “Wash Up” is classic Kearney: a light touch undergirded by dark self-awareness, and endlessly hummable.
On Won’t Let You Down, buoyancy is always tempered by melancholy. But just as often, wistfulness is undercut by a twinkle in the eye. It’s “this cross section of sadness and humor,” says Kearney. “When you’re getting over crying, and you just start to laugh.”
