Kennedy Family Music

I'm finally doing this...because I just now took the time to figure out how. It's amazing what you can learn when you try (and when it's a snow day = day off!). Here's the backstory:

My family sings/plays music together. Always. My Dad was in a rockin' rock band when I was a baby, Orion. My mom has their 8-tracks. Yikes. It's doubtful I'll ever figure out how to get those online, haha!

We really have no recordings of ourselves, other than homemade videos. Cause we never did anything professionally, like paid a studio. After I got married, in the summer of 2003, we coerced a friend and sound guy at our church to record us from the mics. It worked! Never done it before or since, I'm sure our friend put some effort into making that work for us. It was a 'shotgun' type session. I was in town for the weekend, and we did 26 songs in only a few hours. No retakes, no practicing. Just what we've done a thousand times over the years.

The results were great! But not without their mistakes. I will post a few of my faves from the Kennedy Family recording session. If you beg me, I'll post more. I just don't want to force you to hear stuff you don't like. Instrumentation throughout is done by my Dad, and brothers, Brent & Jared.

This is the Doxology, by Lauryn and Darla. I need my sister, she makes me sound better. Sound balance is a little off, sorry. You get the idea. Lauryn does the harmony, I do the melody. It's gospel/regular church music.

Infamous Brian-foot-in-mouth incident. He comes home from work (we still lived in NY, so the CD was still new), this song is playing on my mp3 player. He walks in the door and immediately says, "What is this crap?, Shut it off". He's not the biggest country music fan ever to roam the planet, that's for sure. "uhh, honey, that's me" - ooooh was he ever sorry. His excuse was, it sounded SO GOOD, that he thought it was Faith Hill or some other *horrible* singer. A feeble attempt at redemption. I don't let him forget that one. (I really thought it was funny actually).

This is Thanks to You, originally by Emmylou Harris I believe. It's more blue-sy, or something. Darla, melody, Dave (Dad), and Lauryn on harmonies

This is He Stopped Loving Her Today, originally by George Jones. It's arguably the greatest country love song of all time, and my Dad does a great job with it. Lauryn and I were being silly with the ooo's and aaaa's in the background.

This is Through It All. Gospel/church sound to it I guess. Lauryn does the first verse, me the second, my Dad the third. It is sort of a testimony song - the words have a lot of meaning to them in light of my mom's brain aneurysm in 2001. We sang it a lot after that.

This is Traveling Soldier. Likely my fave we did that day, only because...we had NEVER done it before, ever. And it turned out. My bros, sis and I loved it (a Dixie Chicks song), my dad didn't know it, so we just said, "it goes like this" and we did it, and it worked. Me on melody, Lauryn with harmony. She is so good at harmonies y'all. Incredible, really.