Liz Kennedy Celebrates Friendship With “Everyone Knows How It Goes” featuring Taj Mahal (premiere)

Travel can be a muse of its own as singer-songwriter Liz Kennedy found after trekking to 2016’s Desert Trip, the concert dubbed Oldchella for its bill featuring the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, and other legacy acts. It became the inspiration for her new single, “Everyone Knows How It Goes”, culled from the LP Hike Up Your Socks. “I went to the festival with some old friends. Is there any other way to hear music from your past? I always say that you’ve gotta take your past with you. I remember when there was no irony in Neil Young’s name,” she continues. “Anyway, at the concert, when Neil first began to sing, my best friend erupted into sobs. They came from a deep place and laughably uncontrollable. We all felt it. It was a shocking pulse of nostalgia. That set had the most immediate and longest last effecting on me of the whole festival.”

The sense of nostalgia wasn’t the only thing Kennedy felt. “The thing that I felt most strongly was the blinding joy of everyone knowing the same song. You’re taken back to those moments when you’re huddled in your dorm room, listening to the same album that someone just brought back from the record store”, Kennedy says. “It’s when everyone knows how it goes.”

Once she’d completed the song she invited Taj Mahal to add banjo and vocals to the tune. “Singing and playing with Taj was both a circling back and a jumping forward. His voice next to mine combined both the past and the future,” she adds. “He hears what most of us can’t quite get. He’s magical.”

The video for “Everyone Knows How It Goes” was directed by Eric Peltier. Hike Up Your Socks is released through Clean White Shirt Music.