Bridget Kearney

Bridget Kearney (kə́ːnɪj, car'-nee) is an American musician and songwriter.

She listened to her parents' rock and roll records from the 1960s and gained an appreciation of the Beatles' music.

In high school, she played in the school orchestras and jazz bands and was in a number of extracurricular rock and roll bands.

At age 13, Kearney and her band, Metro Pilot, won a songwriting contest for a song called "Live" (verb) about the dangers of tobacco, where the prize was to perform the song in front of a live audience including keynote speaker and former United States Surgeon General C. Everett Koop.

Bridget fronted the band playing electric bass and singing lead vocals.

Recalling playing bass in the fourth grade, Kearney said, "I just thought I would go with the bass that year and switch instruments the next year, but after I started playing bass and got to know it, I decided to stay with it. The cool thing is that if you’re a bass player, there’s always demand. There were points at which I was in 12 different bands."

In interviews she recalls how her jazz band director in high school, Rich Medd, always made class fun saying, "I was always excited to go to jazz band rehearsal and that is one of the reasons I’m still playing music."

Lake Street Dive's early 2023 "Gather Round Sounds" concert tour found Kearney returning to Iowa City for a sold-out show at the University of Iowa Hancher Auditorium on January 24, 2023 with Mr. Medd and other local music educators joining as the horn section.

Already an accomplished and devoted bass player at a young age, Kearney played electric bass through junior high school, after which her interest in jazz music and the sounds she wanted to create guided her toward playing more upright or double bass until about age 35 when Kearney began to acquire a number of electric bass guitars and other gear to expanded her sound and versatility.

Kearney's knowledge, skills and innate capacity for creativity took her to a much higher musical level while studying with Mark Urness, a versatile bassist, composer, and educator in Iowa City at the time who later moved to teaching at Lawrence University in Wisconsin.

Her early bass influences were Paul Chambers, Charles Mingus and Charlie Haden.

In college Kearney double-majored.

She earned a Bachelors of Music from the New England Conservatory of Music in Jazz Studies (bass) and a Bachelors of Arts from Tufts University in English.

As a sophomore, she was a member of two bands she helped found: Joy Kills Sorrow and Lake Street Dive.

Kearney likes to play tennis and run to stay fit and raise money for her favorite charities.

She often seeks adventure on the road, like surfing in Mexico and bungee jumping in New Zealand, and is a master of chipology.

Her first job, during college, was selling souvenirs at Fenway Park.

She once held the one-game record for selling the most (105) foam fingers during a Boston Red Sox game and humorously refers to this early career as her "fall-back, in case the music thing doesn't work out."

As a songwriter/composer she has registered over 85 songs as a member of Broadcast Music, Inc. Of those, at least 25 are held solely by her, and the rest with different songwriters/composers and artists including Lake Street Dive, Cuddle Magic, Joy Kills Sorrow, Benjamin Lazar Davis and Margaret Glaspy.

She credits some of her song writing acumen to authors such as Ernest Hemingway, having once been quoted as saying "A lot of my ideals as a songwriter come from novelists and poets, like Hemingway's idea that to start writing a story, all you have to do is write one true sentence. A song works that way too. You just need to find one seed, the rest will grow from there."

Kearney is a skilled songwriting and instrumental instructor who taught private lessons online for charity and also taught songwriting to larger classes online with "School of Song", a community-concept based songwriting school with rotating instructors where she was also a student.

She co-taught a songwriting class with Paul Muldoon at Princeton University.

Of her love for teaching she once wrote about her students, "...a joy to witness how practicing a creative act can bring the world around us into sharper focus, drawing our attention to little wonderful things that may have otherwise gone unnoticed, while simultaneously softening some of life’s rougher edges and making the big things that dominate our attention seem less daunting. What an insanely powerful force!!"

She is a founding member of the band Lake Street Dive and winner of the 2005 John Lennon Songwriting Contest in the Jazz category.

Kearney is a founding member of Lake Street Dive, which started touring in 2007.

She has appeared with Lake Street Dive on many national shows: The Colbert Report, The Late Show with David Letterman, Conan, The Ellen DeGeneres Show, National Public Radio, Prairie Home Companion with Garrison Keillor and on Live From Here hosted by Chris Thile.

The band has uploaded numerous videos, including their annual, humorous Halloween covers, and T Bone Burnett asked them to perform on the Another Day, Another Time: Celebrating the Music of "Inside Llewyn Davis".

The band has traveled and performed in almost every state and over a dozen foreign countries.

Originally with Signature Sounds Recordings, in 2016 the band signed with Nonesuch Records and subsequently released their "Fun Machine: The Sequel EP" on Fantasy Records in September 2022.

Kearney has appeared as a solo performer and also worked with a varying array of other musicians, producers and performers to create her own recordings, videos, and, tours, at times solely performing her own music under her own name.

Other performances and tours were designed as collaborations with varying musicians each taking the lead role in arranging and performing their own songs with the other members backing and exchanging instruments.

These appearances were sometimes referred to under the name of each, or all, performers.

Kearney's solo recording work began with her debut solo album, Won't Let You Down, which recordings took place over three years, largely encouraged and supported by drummer/engineer/producer Robin MacMillan in his Brooklyn Studio, and released by Signature Sounds Recordings in 2017.

A number of singles followed, some of which found their way onto Kearney's second solo album, Snakes of Paradise released in 2023.

Similarly, singles from her third album,Comeback Kid were also released in advance of the April 12, 2024 release date for that album on an expanding number of streaming platforms and social media sites such as Apple Music, Spotify, YouTube and Instagram.

Kearney was born and grew up in Iowa City, Iowa.

Her mother played flute.

Her grandmothers, Ellen and Vickey, were both musicians; Ellen Kearney, to whom she credits her preternatural love of low tones, played the upright bass, while Vickey, a vocalist, was a touring musician with the "Tangen Sisters".

Bridget started her journey with music in the Lutheran Church's Cherub choir.

Kearney took piano lessons at the age of 5 and began playing bass in the 4th grade.