There’s a question I’ve been circling for a while now, maybe since I started this podcast, maybe longer. It has to do with the engine that drives a person to stand up in front of strangers and share something they made. I don’t mean the professional engine — the bookings and the strategy and the grind. I mean the thing underneath. The need.
I asked Bre Kennedy about it. She’d just played a sold-out album release show in Nashville during the ice storm — no power at home, full house anyway — and she had the kind of confidence that comes when the world meets you in your moment. But what came out of her mouth over the next hour wasn’t confidence talk. It was something more ... vulnerable. She told me about her grandmother, who grew up in foster care in Idaho and built a life covered in wildflowers and Roses of Sharon. About her mother, who struggled with addiction for most of Bre’s life and who Bre chose — after writing a song with Lori McKenna that wouldn’t let her look away — to sit across from and actually see. Not judge. See.
Bre’s record The Alchemist isn’t really a love album in the way Nashville means it. It’s closer to a set of instructions for surviving yourself. The title track, which she thought was about her own resilience, turned out to also be about her mother — a woman just doing her best, making something out of what she got. That double meaning cracked something open, and the whole record followed.
Near the end I said something I’ve never said on this show. I told her I was driven by a need to be wonderful — and that I was embarrassed to admit it. She looked at me and said, “But what if you’re already wonderful?” I don’t have a tidy answer for that. I’m still sitting with it.
🎸 Watch Bre perform “Before I Have a Daughter” (written with Lori McKenna)]
AFTER THE CONVERSATION
After the Conversation is my paid essay series where I keep thinking after the microphones are off. This week: a childhood memory I hadn’t thought about in 35 years, a man in a prison cell writing something he’d never tell anyone, and the sentence I typed and deleted because it was too sore to leave on the page.
