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

Starting Over

Seth got "let go" six and a half weeks ago. It was one of those ugly incidents full of bewilderment and betrayal that ends up feeling like someone took a blow torch to one of your appendages. An arm, a foot. When he told me I was driving, leaving a long day of killing time at the mall behind me. I was good at that whole how-to-fill-a-day-with-enough-to-help-you-forget-your-loneliness thing. I guess you could say his job was prestigious, important. Not in a white-collar sense, but he worked for important people, and was on the road to his dream. And as a result, I spent a large part of this last year as a single, albeit, married mother of two.

It was a slow descent, that loneliness. Like a long dreamy Southern Belle descending a spiral staircase on a torpid Georgia afternoon. It was full of valor and idealism. I was such a good wife, so committed to my husband's dream that I thought the emptiness almost charming. I had found so many creative ways to entertain the kids that my life felt like one long succession of play dates and trips to the zoo.

So, when he got fired, I felt like I had gotten fired too. And I was mad. Mad at his employers, mad at the company, mad at the industry, and mad at his employers again. My sense of outrage was heroic, fueled by my loss of identity and that ugly feeling of being victimized, of being scorned.

But immediately Seth and I were a team again, and that felt amazing. My typically non communicative husband had suddenly begun to talk to me constantly about how he was feeling, and I was over the moon! Conversations would just start up at all times of the day and night. Most of them revolved around his ex-job, but some were the beginnings of forward thinking for our family. And suddenly, in the midst of this great tragedy, I started to feel alive again, for the first time in a year.

Which means I was dying before and hadn't realized it.

I guess I had been like the toads my mom always warned me about.

"Don't you be like those toads, " she'd say, and I would roll my eyes.

"You put them in a pot of cold water, put the pot on the stove and then wait while the water heats

up. Those frogs don't know they're in hot water until it's too late 'cause they're cold blooded and

their bodies just adjust to the heat 'till they die!"

I think secretly she's always wanted to try to actually boil a frog, she's just that curious.

But, Mom, you have a point.

I guess I believed so blindly in my life that I thought loneliness, emptiness and lackluster were just par for the course, and as the water "heated up" I absorbed it, thinking I was somehow being righteous or a good wife. Yeah, good and miserable.

Blech. I want to scratch and re-write. I want to crumple that sorry acceptance of mediocrity, of a life of chosen unhappiness, of voluntary aloneness and toss it baseball style into the deepest darkest trash bin I can think of. To think that I was beginning to sacrifice my own soul for the comforts of steady income, a husband with a high-profile job, and *maintaining* said comforts!

We are leaving this town for a while to go re-write our story. Our dream right now is to buy an old bus that's been converted to an RV that runs on Waste Vegetable Oil (WVO) and drive it across the country to a few weddings, a family reunion, and some good old-fashioned family vacation time. We leave Monday, actually, and, um, honestly, we still do not own a vehicle that will transport our family across the country. I have said many times that I feel like Noah, only for me, the flood has already occurred, I'm just herding and packing and praying like crazy that the boat is going to appear!

And, dude, I know that I sound utterly insane.

Stay tuned for more news. I promise I will blog more.

good ol' regular

It's Wednesday night. I'm overfull from dinner - breakfast for dinner, to be exact. Seth made old fashioned waffles topped off with blackberries, I made a chorizo-sweetpotato-greenchili-corn-onion hash. It was damn nice. Now we are both on our respective computers clicking away with the dishwasher in the background. It's cozy. It's home.

I wrote a new song last week, or maybe it was the week before. I can't keep track of the weeks. Seth says this song is the home to my best lyrics yet. I can't help but be, in the vein of Marilla Cuthbert, "real proud" of it. I can't stop playing it. I've now played it for two of my best friends here and I just want to keep playing it for anyone who will listen. Last night, I almost asked my little preschool music class if they wanted to hear it. I'm shameless.

It, my new little ditty, is called "the scent of honeysuckle". At least for now.

It's not a happy song, but it's not a sad song, unless you know that I wrote the second verse while I was at my Dad's deathbed. What a funny thing, a deathbed. A bed on which you know you are going to die. Deathbed.

These subjects keep coming back to me. I'm ok with that.