Bridget Kearney
Over the course of her kaleidoscopic career, Bridget Kearney has followed her voracious creativity to a wildly eclectic series of musical projects. Along with touring the world and releasing a growing number of critically praised albums as a founding member of Lake Street Dive, the Brooklyn-based singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist has brought her sophisticated musicality to such varied collaborations as indie-folk/chamber-pop outfit Cuddle Magic and bluegrass band Joy Kills Sorrow, joined forces with fellow musical polymath Benjamin Lazar Davis for a culture-bending album made in Ghana with such acclaimed West African musicians as Stevo Atambire, and shown her more idiosyncratic and introspective side on her 2017 solo debut Won’t Let You Down. At the heart of every effort is Kearney’s distinct gift as a songwriter: a profound capacity to capture complex emotional truths with empathy and humor and unfettered imagination, each song revealing her rare power to endlessly surprise both the audience and herself.
Growing up Iowa City, Iowa, Kearney first immersed herself in songwriting at the young age of five. “I was a little kid learning piano, and right from the get-go I was most excited about finding sounds I liked and making up words to go with them,” she recalls. After taking up bass in fourth grade she began studying jazz and classical music, and later double-majored in jazz bass at the New England Conservatory of Music and English at Tufts University. In 2004 she formed Lake Street Dive with several fellow conservatory students, taking the role of bassist and contributing original songs to the band’s elegant collision of alt-rock and soul and R&B and folk. As Lake Street Dive grew to global fame, Kearney continued exploring her more left-of-center sensibilities with projects like Still Flying, the 2020 album she created with Davis in Ghana. “It was so amazing to get to play with people who come from a completely different musical vocabulary, and then work together to build these soundscapes like nothing we’d ever heard before,” she notes. Meanwhile, Kearney’s solo work finds her collaborating with producer Robin MacMillan to dream up a lavishly detailed yet deliberately untethered sonic backdrop to her exacting self-reflection. “One of the things that makes me fall in love with a song is when it expresses a familiar feeling or idea in a way that’s so fresh and new or just very blunt, so that’s definitely something I try to bring to my songwriting,” she says.
With her next solo project due out soon, Kearney recently began teaching a songwriting class at Princeton University alongside Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon. “It’s been so fascinating to try to analyze all the different elements at play when you’re writing a song, like how the narrative arc or the harmonies or the song form itself each affect the way the listener will absorb it,” she says. “It’s also great to work with students in that early stage when they’re maybe not so precious about their writing, and just figuring out how to say what they need to say with a melody on top.” And despite her own depth of musical experience, Kearney remains wholly attuned to the strange magic of creation. “The process itself is what keeps me making music all the time,” she says. “I’ve always found so much meaning in working with other people, and sharing in the delight of having created something that you never could have expected.”
