Bridget Kearney

Bridget Kearney at the LBJ Presidential Library in 2022

Kearney was born and grew up in Iowa City, Iowa. Her mother played flute. She 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. 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 rock and roll band. At 13, Kearney and her band, Metro Pilot, won a songwriting contest for a song called "Live" 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.[3]

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."[4] 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.[5]

Already an accomplished and devoted bass player at a young age, Kearney played electric bass through junior high school, after which she moved to jazz music and switched to an upright or double bass until age 35 when Kearney began to acquire a number of electric bass guitars and other gear which expanded her sound.[6]

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.[7]

In college Kearney double majored, studying jazz bass at the New England Conservatory of Music and English at Tufts University.[8] As a sophomore, she played with two bands she helped found: Joy Kills Sorrow and Lake Street Dive.[4]

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 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."[9]

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.[10] 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!!"[11]

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