Bre Kennedy has been taking things slow. You can’t really blame her. After releasing her full length debut Twenty Something earlier this year, the entire world shut down nearly two months later after the coronavirus pandemic hit. On lockdown, Kennedy decided to revisit some others tracks she’s been working and start recording with her band again—remotely, of course.
Videos by American Songwriter
Using her time wisely during the COVID-19 quarantine, she wanted to explore the makings of the song from demo, recordings and is releasing a video on the making of her new pop single “Feel It All.”
Co-written last year with Petey Martin, “Feel It All” isn’t featured on Twenty Something but was a track the Nashville-based songwriter wanted to use as part of an artistic project. She just didn’t know when.
“I had a dream a few weeks before quarantine happened, that my band and I recorded the song, more piano-driven and obviously, the next few weeks would turn into the nightmare that is COVID-19,” Kennedy tells American Songwriter. “I would be in lockdown in my apartment, away from my band, away from my friends with nothing else to do but create from home.”
Kennedy, who has already written for Nina Nesbitt and Echosmith, decided to focus more on her own solo material several years ago and has already pulled in nearly three million streams from her 2019 EP Jealous of Birds and Twenty Something.
For “Feel It All,” Kennedy called her band and asked them to pass the session around and create the track from our own homes during the lockdown and use the footage to remember this crazy time.
The band recorded all of their parts separately and filmed the process as a “Behind the Song” video of how a song can be made and produced during quarantine.
“We made a whole song, demoed, produced, and mixed it all from our own home studios,” says Kennedy. “It was a cool experiment and ultimately gave me hope and something to work towards in this dark time.”
Ultimately, Kennedy says the track is about realizing that she’d rather feel something, even if it’s heavy, hurts, or hard to feel, than nothing at all. “Life is hard sometimes,” she says. “Sometimes it feels like the world is on fire and there’s nothing I can do but feel that—and that’s okay.”
