The Story Behind "All Was Born Anew", or, How To Stay Sane During a Rough Pregnancy

This is the story of how the Alright Alright song, "All Was Born Anew" came about...you can listen to it HERE!

It was a dark and stormy night.  Well, dark at least. 

I was super duper preggo with my firstborn, an unexpected bend in my musical path, and it was a rough one.  By the time the holidays rolled around, I was DONE. 

Sitting at my piano that night, in my delicate condition, I started messing around with voicings and melodies and the words “a babe born to the winter cold” just sprang right out of my mouth. 

And then it hit me.
Mary, the mother of Jesus, had been PREGNANT.

Whether you believe in it or not, you gotta admit, that story is pretty great.  Suspense, scandal, betrayal, miracles, rich people, rednecks…it’s got it all, and because I’ve been interacting with it since my early childhood, it’s a central piece of my psyche.

I sat there at my piano, pregnant as all get out, heartburn getting the best of me, surprised by my shortness of breath as I climbed stairs, fatigued and hungry beyond anything I had ever experienced, and I realized that in this story, Mary was me. I was Mary. 

Some years earlier, I had been told by a super flippant OBGYN that I would have a hard time getting pregnant, so, like you do when you kind-of-sort-of want kids and you’re newly married, I went off of birth control thinking I would rather take my (very slim) chances.  Then BOOM! A year later, I was knocked up and on tour with a band, sleeping on floors and driving around in a school bus powered by veggie oil.  Our world turned upside down by a surprise in the form of a plus sign on a plastic stick. 

I began thinking about how Mary’s world would have been turned upside down and how vulnerable she must have felt.  Pregnancy can be incredibly empowering, especially when you realize that your body is supporting, hosting, nurturing into existence, another life.  But pregnancy can also suck.  It can be fraught with insecurities, emotional rampages, physical discomforts, and life-threatening twists of fate, and don’t even get me started on postpartum depression.  Being a woman in 2016 can be hard enough, just imagine it, like, 2016 years ago. 

That pregnancy for me was cut a bit short, as I went into labor five weeks early.  My baby boy was a preemie with a goth rockstar hairstyle and Seth and I were smitten beyond all recognition.  That little creature, the alien-looking being with an IV the size of a wallet sticking out of his little cone-head, immediately burst into our hearts like the choruses of a million unsung songs, and as soon as we could, we finished the song I started that winter. 

We recorded it, too, that winter, with our baby, Fender, lying across my lap as I played the piano parts.  His little baby cry is in the outro of that super lo-fi version of the song.  We packaged it up and sent it out to a few friends and family as a christmas present. 

I know it is not traditional to re-make a song, but that’s what we did this month for our Song-O-The-Month.  I just wasn’t finished with it for some reason, so we recorded it again, this time with much wider sonic palette, (string sections! boy’s choir! trombone!) And, oh my, how delighted we are!

This song puts Mary’s experience in the spotlight. I couldn’t help but make her vulnerability mine. Her need for human touch, her crazy love for the little critter she had had sprung on her…all of it became my own, and hers became mine, which, I suppose, is a definition of incarnation. 

This song was originally called “Ave Maria,” but we changed the name because we didn’t want it to accidentally get categorized in the classical opera department and forever live in obscurity.  “All Was Born Anew” sounded pretty Christmas-y and kind of sparkly, like it was covered in tinsel and twinkle lights. 

Happy Holidays to you all.  May peace reign in your world, in our world, and may your Chanukah, your Christmas, your Kwanzaa be filled with love. 


Produced by China Kent and Seth Kent
String parts written by China Kent
Mixed by Eric Tate
Mastered by Alan Douches

China Kent: Lead Vocals, Piano, percussion
Seth Kent: all Guitars, BGV’s, percussion
Katelin Champion: Drums, BGV’s
Tom Hagerman: Violins, Viola
Brett Harrison: Bass
Steve Gehring: Trombone
Harper Kent: 1/10 size violin
Fender Kent: boy’s choir BGV section

Upon Announcing our DIY House-Concert Tour, I Got Hit By A Giant Ball of Fear

As you may well know, we are planning a tour of house concerts for the middle of August.  That idea has been in my mind since at least January, but I lacked the confidence and vision to start planning it then.  So it’s July and I am nailing it down. Which is fine, really, except that I need to keep a rigid schedule to make sure that I am actually doing everything that I need to be doing (and honestly, I feel like I am inventing a wheel here and I sort of don’t know all that I should be doing).  Oh yeah, also, the kids are home for the summer, and my sister is getting married in 2 weeks. So, you know, real life is all around me every day in the midst of planning this trek across the country.  Everyone keeps saying, “I am so excited for you to go on tour! “ or “Wow! Fun! Tour!” And, honestly, I don’t know what they are talking about, because, and I just realized this a minute ago, it's as if an entire family of critics, nay-sayers, fear-mongers, and work-a-holics moved into my mind and set up shop as soon as I wrote that last blog and announced our tour to the world.

Yeah, you know who I'm talking about.

Finally, yesterday, I paused long enough to realize that this is absolutely not the way I want to approach our maiden voyage.  I want to approach my life, my art, my endeavors from a position of JOY, not FEAR, and I have been holding a fear-ball in the pit of my stomach since I wrote an email asking people if they wanted to host house concerts.  And this fear-ball sucks all the life and all the excitement and all the joy out of this whole process for me.  And I really want to figure out how to start bouncing it and playing with it and getting it out of my stomach.

So, I figured it would be a good idea to catalog all of my deep-seated terrors about tour, and see if any of them hold water.  so here they are:

That I am not good enough.
That I am going to be a disappointment.
That this is going to feel like so much work and no fun.
That I will feel awkward about money with my hosts and their friends.
That I will somehow damage friendships in the process of playing at friend’s houses.
That I will irreparably damage my children and they will grow up to hate me/us and blame all of their social anxiety on their parents who took them along on tour.
That we won’t eat well and all get heartburn or food poisoning or giardia
That the whole endeavor will be a bust and a huge waste of money and time.

So there you go.  There is my full-blown tour anxiety in black and white.

Now that I have written that I am like, “What the hell am I doing?”

And then I think, “Why do I even want to do this? Any of it? Why do I even want to continue playing music and trying to share it with others?”

Then I remember yesterday in church.  I remember singing the hymns with my whole body, because, honestly, if you are going to go to a church that still sings hymns from a hymnal, why not just go all out and sing the alto part at full volume?  And when they choose one of your favorite hymns that you knew all the verses to back in your evangelical days, you just belt it out, not worrying what the lawyer in front of you is thinking.  Because that’s what you were made to do.  Literally.

My body was made to sing loud.  I guess I was made with a volume level that (sorry, guys) "goes to eleven."  So when I actually stop feeling embarrassed about this fun little fact about myself and I actually start playing with it, something wonderful inside me starts to happen.  I get really really happy.  I guess that’s what joy feels like.  It feels like a lump in my throat that automatically travels up my face and into my cheeks.  It makes me feel full, like post-brunch full, except I won’t have heartburn.  It makes me feel soft and a little sappy, and I know it makes me feel a whole-hearted satisfaction that, for some reason, only happens when I do music.  The piano kind or the singing kind. 

So how can I figure out how to apply that kind of joy to this scary and arduous tour-planning process?

I think I start with playing.  There must be a reason we call it “playing the piano”.  We don’t say, “working the piano”.  Somehow, in all that music training and in the process of figuring out how to make money doing music, I forgot how to play. 

A quick etymological search tells me that the word “play” finds its roots in the West Germanic word “plegen” which means “to occupy oneself about” and can also be traced to another word, “pflegen” that means “to take care of, cultivate”.

BAM

Cultivate.  Play is cultivation.  Playing music, for me, cultivates joy. 

So I am going to head to my piano now.  I am going to see if I can play my way out of my tour anxiety.  I’ll let you know how it goes.  Hopefully, after some time at the piano I will start feeling more like this: