Interview: Kaitlin Sweeney is Turning Delaware Around, One Concert at a Time

Kaitlin Sweeney was meant for the stage; born for it. "I first began singing and dancing when I was really young, there wasn't a night in my house that I wasn't putting on a show. I'm sure it got quite annoying after a while" she says, laughing. "I was always writing songs when I was a kid. So my parents started me on piano lessons when I was very young. It didn't last long, however, because I never practiced what my teacher gave me. I always just wrote my own songs instead." Although Kaitlin knew from a very early age that she was destined for rockstardum, it wasn't until high school that people actually took her seriously about it. "In high school, I wrote a lot of songs, but I never really performed them. I sang in the high school show choirs, and did some musical plays. But other than that, I really stuck to cheerleading - at that point, that was sort of my life. But once I got to college I knew that performing--singing and dancing--was what I really wanted to do."

Kaitlin graduated from the University of Delaware in 2004, where she majored in English. She designed the choreography for several dance teams, was a sister in the Sigma Kappa sorority and, most importantly, sang with the Deltones, UDel's premiere women's a capella group. "Singing with the Deltones definitely changed my whole perspective on things," Kaitlin explains, "I realized I got a good response from the crowd, and people were always telling me that they enjoyed my performances and wanted them recorded." Shortly after joining the Deltones, Kaitlin was approached by DJ Tyas, who lived on Long Island at the time. "He started producing techno music that I wrote to and sang to", Kaitlin says. The songs were getting airtime in clubs around NYC, Philly and Delaware, and "that's I think when I decided that's what I needed to do. Not techno, but just recording in general."

After graduation, Kaitlin moved briefly to New York City to pursue her solo career. She began recording with a number of producers in the city, but really wanted to get out and start playing with a live band. "So that's when I decided to get people together", Kaitlin recalls. "I tried in NYC, but I knew that in Del/Philly there were great friends of mine who were also awesome musicians looking to do the same thing. So I came back down to Delaware, and put a band together." That lineup worked out for a few months, but "musical differences" forced a change in the line up of the band; a change that would prove quite beneficial in the coming months.

In September of 2006, Kaitlin's new backing band, The Law, was fully operational, and things just started to take off. "Delaware is a little rough for the original music scene, but we've been really well received", Kaitlin explains. "We won the Spark Summer Music Series last summer, and winning that really put us on the map." Kaitlin Sweeney and The Law were up against sixteen other bands from the Delaware/Philly area, and were voted the winners by fans and the public. "After that, the gigs just started to roll in. we started working our butts off. Practicing a few nights a week, and then also playing a few gigs a week. And pretty soon we had a great fan base going here. So we started to branch out, now we play a lot in NYC, Baltimore, and Philly. It's been awesome."

Kaitlin's newfound success certainly keeps her busy, "My days are actually way busier than people might think. I do this full time and it s a lot of work!" Its not all fun and games, "dealing with money can be the worst and the toughest part", Kaitlin says. "And then I do a lot of driving as well. I practice in Philly a few nights a week so that's 45 minutes to rehearsal and then recording right now is Baltimore so other nights, that's another hour south, so I definitely keep myself busy."

Kaitlin describes her least favorite moment in her still young career, which occurred, "when we had a certain booking agent tell us that our music was just not going to be accepted in Delaware - he tried to completely discourage us. And you sometimes get a lot of that - people trying to bring you down, or telling you what you're doing is not gunna work. But if you believe in it yourself and know that its gunna work, you keep up at it, and eventually people notice. And it does work. And that booking agent now gets to watch us book much bigger venues. And read our articles in the paper and to some degree, it makes us happy to know we got past him and his negativity."

Her positive moments so far, though, far outweigh the negative. "My favorite moment might have been getting the phone call that I won the Spark Summer Series. That was huge for us. But my favorite show would have to be the night we played The World Cafe Live in Philly - we played to a sold out crowd, and the energy was just unreal. That was the first night I really noticed people singing along to our songs, dancing. And it was just so great!"

So, where are Kaitlin Sweeney and The Law headed? "Right now things are going in a great direction", Kaitlin says. "We've been approached about labels, and management, and we're definitely excited about it. It's a lot of work, and I think we are starting to understand now how much it will take to really make it, but I am confident that we can do it, and we luckily have a lot of people that really believe in us."