Bre Kennedy Embraces Imperfection and Connection on Her Latest Album, ‘The Alchemist’

Days after the biggest winter storm in a decade swept through Music City, Bre Kennedy sold out The Blue Room. The venue’s curved walls held an even denser press of bodies than usual; it remained too cold to set up the merch table outdoors. Everyone who could fit inside was inside. 

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Onstage, the singer-songwriter radiated joy and warmth, visibly ecstatic to have ushered her latest collection of songs into the world. Despite the fact that the show was taking place on Bre’s birthday weekend, the night unfolded in somewhat atypical album release fashion. Rather than keeping the focus on the person at the center of the project, the evening was a parade of collaborators, including Tenille Townes and Jason Singer of Michigander. When trio Brother Elsey crowded onto the stage for a performance of still-unreleased track “Proof of Living,” Kennedy told the crowd that the arrangement wasn’t totally polished yet. 

With guest-after-guest singing her songs and singing her praises, the overall effect of the night was that Bre Kennedy epitomizes Nashville’s tight-knit songwriter community at its best.

A few weeks later, while sitting with American Songwriter in the East Nashville location of Dose, she reflected on the release evening. “Even when we mess up—like that moment onstage with Brother Elsey where we were off—it’s human. It reminds us we’re not robots. This is happening live. Life is happening live.”

Kennedy originally moved to Nashville to write for other artists, inspired after attending a songwriter’s round. She remembers watching the songwriters onstage and feeling her lifelong creative instincts clicking into place, realizing it was what she wanted to do with her life. But over four albums and more than a decade in Nashville, things gradually shifted as it became clear that releasing music herself was working.

“When The Alchemist came out, I wasn’t stressed about numbers,” she says. “I wasn’t chasing metrics. I was just grateful. I trusted that I worked as hard as I could to be as authentic as I could. So when I walked onstage, it felt like I got to enjoy the fruit of that work. It felt divine.”

2025 was tumultuous for Kennedy; she describes it as her Eat, Pray, Love year. She stopped drinking. She lost her grandmother, with whom she was particularly close and spoke of fondly throughout The Alchemist release show. 

She describes her transformative year leading up to The Alchemist release as one spent strengthening her internal muscles. “That was my biggest lesson last year,” she says. “I couldn’t change that my grandma was dying. I can’t control what happens in the music industry. I can’t control the world, which feels like it’s literally on fire sometimes. But I can control my small part of the universe and how I show up. That’s enough.”

One song on The Alchemist, “Right City Right Time,” offers a fresh take on the “10-year town” adage that both haunts and motivates many of Nashville’s creatives. Big city in a small town / So here’s to a heart that pounds for the love of what we’re doing, she sings. 

All Kennedy wants, she insists, is to make music with her friends for the rest of her life. Adjacent to that is a growing desire to be a “songwriting big sister” to writers starting down the same path. When asked what she would tell a young songwriter coming up now, she warns against distraction. 

“There are so many voices telling you who you should be,” she says. “Some of them mean well. But if you chase what works for someone else, you’ll lose yourself.”

She recalls receiving mixed messaging in the earlier days of her career. Following a 2020 release, some people wanted more of the same; others, at different junctures, wanted her to make genre shifts, to color inside the lines and move towards a mainstream country sound. She gave it a try, intermittently adjusting to the varied expectations others had for her career, but would leave sessions feeling drained rather than hopeful.   

Now, she’s never been more grounded in her voice and vision, something viscerally clear in conversation. “I think the biggest thing is to build your own table; don’t wait to be invited to someone else’s,” she says. “When you build your own, you get to decide who sits there, and it becomes about community instead of hierarchy. There’s this idea of the ‘cool table.’ I used to want to sit there so badly, but the real magic happens when you’re surrounded by people who want to rise together. That’s Nashville at its best.”

There’s something freeing, she explains, about worrying less about viral moments or radio success and instead focusing on building a world that feels honest.

“That’s why nights like the album release felt so special,” she says. “It wasn’t about proving anything. It was just joy.”

Photos by Sam Wiseman