Singer/songwriter Bre Kennedy made two major releases in 2023 via Nettwerk. The first, an EP titled Clarity, got to grips with the sense of increasing changes in the artist’s life and captured a few realizations in a haunting, approachable way. The second is a full album that arrived this November, titled Scream Over Everything, and for this collection we find her working with Producer Davis Naish (Joshua Bassett and Katelyn Tarver), a co-writing friend of Kennedy’s for some years. The collaboration seemed destined, since a song they wrote together in their early days, “The Vase” was finally recorded as one of the key ideas for the album, and from it stemmed its follow-up title track.
The songs on the new album form an intentional grouping, and one in which heady confrontations emerge, confrontations with one’s past self, confrontations with one’s hopes for the future, and fruitful outcomes in terms of lessons learned taking a bold approach to life’s contradictions. In terms of sound, each song takes a different tack in exploring motifs, but there is a sensitive adjustment of vocal approach and an intuitive structuring of layers to convey very different moods each time around. I spoke with Bre Kennedy about her real-time journey through grappling with some of these ideas and feelings, all while acknowledging them through the work of songwriting and recording.
Hannah Means-Shannon: I realize that you had an EP not too long ago titled Clarity, and when I heard you had an album coming up, I was pleasantly surprised to see that Scream Over Everything was entirely made up of new songs rather than incorporating the EP. That’s a lot of songwriting!
Bre Kennedy: Yes. I really popped songs out this past year. The EP came right after I signed with my label, Nettwerk, and they were just songs that I’d written that I really loved, but I didn’t feel like they were meant to be a part of a bigger album. I also didn’t know what kind of album I wanted to write yet. After I put that EP out, I went out on the road for nearly a year. But then it was time to write an album even thought I didn’t know what I wanted to say. I was going through a lot of shifts and life changes. It took about a year, last year, when I wasn’t on the road, to carve a whole new thing. To be present with where I’m at right now. That’s how this album came to be. The songs on this album feel like they are supposed to live together.
HMS: It’s a daunting thing to create an album starting from zero. It’s been a hard thing even since the 1970s. It’s a steep hill starting from scratch.
BK: I definitely had so much help, also, from so many earth-angels, including my Producer, my label, and I’ve got to thank my therapist, really. There was a lot of patience involved. I’m so thankful because this album helped me, really, in real time to heal through things I was going through. I was writing about them in real-time rather than being nostalgic about my past. I was kind of growing up with this album.
HMS: I was wondering about this idea of changing a realization that one might have about oneself into a written or spoken form and the impact that has. I feel like I can have a needed realization in my life, but the impact is bigger if I actually translate it into a more fixed form, too. Is that true for you?
BK: That’s a great way to put it. Giving something a name, or even just acknowledging it in that way makes it real. What I was going through was leaving my 20s and entering a new decade as a young women and I had to give a name to the things that weren’t serving me anymore, and to the things that I wanted but almost wouldn’t allow myself to want. Because that would mean that you’d have to say goodbye to something else. At the time, it was leaving a relationship, some friendships, getting rid of some habits and patterns that I was holding onto. I was asking, “How can I be the best version of myself in this new decade?” To do that, I had to write out the things that were hurting. I was being held accountable to sit in a room in a studio with my feelings and thoughts, pulling them out, and it was definitely super-cathartic.
HMS: I noticed in a few of these songs something that I didn’t see as much of on the previous EP, and that’s talking about the future. There’s an aspirational aspect where you vocalize something that you want or are heading towards. I can see how that links with what you’re talking about. To get to that point where you can say what you want from the future, you have to really know where you are. That’s the hard part, I think.
BK: It makes me so happy that you heard that because I am such a nostalgic, sentimental hoarder. [Laughs] That’s beautiful and I love reflecting on the past, but I want to be so present in my life. Maybe it’s thinking about having a family one day, or being a mom one day, or even just thinking about what kind of legacy I want to leave. It’s exciting thinking about that.
HMS: It’s definitely a hopeful thing to have something to look forward to. Did you work with Davis before or was this a new collaboration?
BK: This was a new collaboration. I’ve written a lot with Davis for other artists, and we met in Nashville on a songwriting basis, but I never made my own music with him. We wrote “The Vase” together six years when we were little Nashville. We weren’t really writing for anybody, but were just writing a song. I said that I had wanted so badly to fit into a vase that I didn’t realize that I was in a garden. I remember feeling that that idea was “future me” telling me that, but I wasn’t really ready to receive that. I was in a perfection-chasing version of myself.
I knew that when we wrote that song, it was something that I was going to put out later in my life. It just sat in a folder on my desktop. When Davis was suggested to Produce my album, I said, “We have to cut this. It’s time.” Because I have quite literally been going into my garden that I had been neglecting and weeding. There’s no perfection in that process. That’s when you realize what you want to keep in there and what seeds you want to plant. That was, essentially, the first song that we ever wrote together, and then “Scream Over Everything” was the first song we wrote when we came back together six years later.
HMS: Wow. I am familiar with “The Vase” and I love that song. That’s an amazing origin story. I agree that we sometimes catch glimpses of our future selves and then have to catch up with them in time. What were you feeling when writing “Scream Over Everything”?
BK: I said, “I’m freaking out. My life is changing. The rug’s being pulled out from under me. I just can’t even hear myself, everything’s so loud.” So then we wrote, “Scream Over Everything.” Then the rest of the songs just flew out.
HMS: Do you think there’s a time or stage with your songwriting that is more like the naturalness of the garden, but then it has to become more like something presented in a vase for other people to receive it? It’s often a creative complication.
BK: Yes, I think that’s a beautiful way of putting that. Inevitably, we live in a world where you have to package everything and sell it. So the irony of me writing about the fact that I want to get out of the vase and back into the garden is that I’ve made this very raw, ever-growing thing inside of me, but I have to inevitably put it in a vase to show people. Hopefully, that plants a seed in them later if they witness that.
It’s hard to take a very big feeling, and a very big life story and offer it into the ears of other people. You have to find a way to present it to them. That’s what you hope to do in a song, in three minutes of someone’s time, is give them a larger-than-life point of view.
HMS: I love the video for that song, too, which juxtaposes the eeriness of social grace combined with gardens growing inside a house.
BK: I think wild things are supposed to grow past the ceiling, so that is the visual that I wanted to get for the song. My friend, Hannah Greyhall, who filmed the videos for “Keep Going Back” and “Ahead of Myself”, as well as “Hello”, found this house in LA that was just covered in these artificial flowers, which I thought was interesting. She sent me this address and said, “Meet me in an hour.” It just looked like a normal, beaten-down house in LA off Sunset, and when we walked in, it just looked like that. We had a fog machine, and we just sang the song a few times through. It’s always interesting for me to see what the person on the other side of the camera sees of me. The fact that she was inspired enough by the song to see that was so beautiful.
HMS: I can’t believe that was a real place that already existed! I assumed that you’d have to build that. How perfect. You mentioned, “Ahead of Myself”. That’s another one of the singles, which has a video, as you said. That’s another song that talks about the future in an interesting way because it shows multiple time periods. It’s a very wise song. There is wisdom across multiple time periods and perspectives that is used for navigation.
BK: Yes, but in my grand attempts to do that, I literally get ahead of myself! [Laughs] It’s like the antithesis of what I want. I wanted the song to feel like being pulled into the past in an effort to get to the front, and being pulled into the front in my effort to try to balance it all out. Ultimately, it’s made me end up here, in this picture, where I can’t be present in my life.
HMS: And that, of course, is important, because the real value in life is to live now. Without that, you have no future and no past.
BK: Exactly.
HMS: I think the song is actually quite inspiring, though it admits that struggle, because you are articulating the goal. I think it’s also kind-hearted because it shows an awareness of other people. You’re saying that you don’t want to be someone who damages others. I think a lot of us are afraid of being that person because we’ve experienced it from others.
BK: Yes, that’s part of me being in this very honest place with myself. I don’t want to hurt others the way that I’ve been hurt. In the time before I left my relationship, I knew that I needed to do some self-work because things weren’t allowing me to grow.
HMS: That song has a different sound to it. I like the rhythmic strings leading into it. The vocals actually feel kind of restrained. Did you have to give that a lot of thought?
BK: Me too, I love it so much. Davis did such an amazing job. I gave vocals a lot of thought because for something like “The Vase” was something that I wanted to feel timeless. I really wanted the whole record to feel atmospheric, so I had fun with the harmonies. I wanted it to feel like a 3D experience in my head. I wanted for people to be able to jump in and swim in all the feelings I was feeling. Each song was treated very differently, whether it was in the vocals, or just in trying to capture an intimate performance. “Faultline”, on the album, was just built around me and a guitar.
HMS: I just realized that a lot of your videos for the EP had water related to them, but with this album, like with the garden in “The Vase” and in the video for “Ahead of Myself”, we have the desert, the dust, the wind, the sunlight, even the ground.
BK: It definitely feels gritty, and I wanted a sense of dirt, earth, and grit in it.
