In the 13 years she has toured the world as a member of the band Lake Street Dive, Bridget Kearney has gotten good at a lot of things: adjusting to jet lag, sleeping in moving vehicles, hauling her acoustic bass up and down stairs, keeping her cool in front of cameras, thousands of people and personal heroes. But the skill she has honed most obsessively is songwriting. “For me it’s the best part of music,” says Kearney. “That’s the best feeling: after those few hours that you spend working on the song, and you have this thing that you’ve made, and you think, ‘Wow. This didn’t exist before. I’m so excited about what just happened.’” Last year, Kearney finally stepped into the spotlight with her first solo effort; a wry, big-hearted pop album entitled Won’t Let You Down.
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 won the 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.
Kearney has been a super fan of Theo Katzman’s for years. She is thrilled to join him and collaborate with him and his band on tour this winter.