Internet Connection—Kate & Brendan Discovered Their Musical Compatibility Over Zoom 

By David Templeton | From the January/February 2026 issue of Strings

It was right around a year ago that fiddler-composer Kate Gregory and cellist Brendan Hearn went into a studio to record their first album as a duo. Named for one of the project’s songs (the dangerously catchy “One Year Since”), the album’s fiddle and cello parts were laid down in December of 2024. Other musical elements—electric guitar, acoustic guitar, bass, mandolin, and piano—were recorded little by little over the spring of 2025. 

“We kind of made the album up as we went, listening to it and thinking, ‘Maybe it could use a little bass under the cello, or maybe some electric guitar to bring out something in Kate’s fiddle,’” says Hearn, who grew up playing music with his siblings, including his younger brother Conor, a member of the folk band Rakish, and his sister Caitlin. “I’ve done a few other little recording projects here and there, so I’m pretty comfortable in a studio, but this was definitely the biggest project I’ve worked on so far. It’s been a lot of fun.”

The album, a compact gem with just six tracks, was released in November 2025, and will be supported by an East Coast tour in 2026. “I’m just incredibly excited,” says Gregory of the finished album. “This music has been with us for a while. Now we finally get to send it out into the world.”

Gregory and Hearn originally met in 2016, at Alasdair Fraser’s Valley of the Moon Fiddle Camp, where Hearn basically grew up, and at which he currently teaches as a staff member. “My whole family went to fiddle camp,” Hearn says, “and then when Kate started going about ten years ago, we became good buds.”

“We had a lot of the same friends at fiddle camp,” Gregory adds, “and we’d sort of play together in bigger jams. But I think it wasn’t until 2019 that I suddenly realized, ‘Oh, my goodness, I love playing with Brendan! What an awesome cello player!’”

In fact, it took the pandemic to turn Gregory and Hearn from occasional group-jam players into an actual musical duo.

“During Covid, we were part of this thing called the Ministry of Folk, a group of fiddle-camp folks using the internet to try and keep getting virtual gigs and [play in] camp-like sessions during the shutdown,” Hearn explains. “Through that, Kate and I started playing together a whole lot more, and then we just kept it going once live gigs started up again.”

“The vibe we discovered was so much fun,” Gregory agrees. “We work really well together, both musically and as friends. It just kind of clicked. I like to think, no matter what the chain of global events was, that I would have found my way to writing music and playing with Brendan. But I do think the pandemic was a very special incubator—though it was also terrible—and it did bring opportunities.”

The experience that Gregory and Hearn gained from playing so much music together over Zoom—a circumstance forced upon so many musicians during the pandemic—has certainly proven valuable, since Hearn lives in New York City and Gregory lives in Portland, Oregon. “Living on opposite sides of the country, we’ve had to solve a lot of problems just to rehearse and work things out musically,” Gregory says.

“We figured out early on, while on Zoom, that if Kate plays the tune, and I’m working out the chords to back her up on cello, she just mutes me and I play along with her in my headphones,” Hearn says. “That way, I hear her, but I’m not interrupting her playing, and for me there’s no time delay, no latency. It took a little while, but we got it down eventually.”

“So many musicians were so starved for opportunities to play together during the shutdowns,” Gregory says, “that a lot of us became much more comfortable with technology just so we could share this thing we all love so much.”

It was during that time that Gregory began to emerge as a composer, writing a tune early on titled “One Hundred Years of March,” named after the sense that the pandemic was stretching on and on. “So, I wrote this Irish reel in D minor,” Gregory says. “It was spooky and sad, and just sounded the way the pandemic felt. That was one of the first new music collaborations we worked on together.”

From there, with the encouragement of other players of Celtic fiddle music, Gregory continued to explore her compositional side, writing more tunes in the traditional style. “Before that, I never felt like I had permission to write new music in such an established style,” she says. “But something about having so much time to myself really helped me feel more able to try stuff out, and I ended up really liking a lot of what I was writing.”

Initially the two played instrumental pieces, only occasionally singing. Now that they’ve been performing for audiences for a while, they’ve begun to introduce more songs to their set list. “We started out really instrumental-heavy, as far as our repertoire goes,” Hearn says, “but more and more, our set is shifting to include more singing. We’re not quite at 50/50 yet, but we’re getting there.”

While they play a large number of traditional old reels and Celtic melodies, they’ve been covering other people’s songs since the beginning. It’s their original pieces, most of them composed by Gregory, where the duo really struts its stuff. “Kate is a prolific tune writer,” Hearn says. “Her tunes are so cool, and she can just crank them out.”

Two of those original instrumentals, “Goodbye Ruby” and “Fiddle in the Attic,” have become fan favorites when Gregory and Hearn perform live. Both are featured on the album. “Fiddle in the Attic” was inspired by the fiddle Gregory learned to play on, which was discovered in the family attic, hidden away for years, and “Goodbye Ruby” was written in response to Gregory’s beloved 2004 Subaru being totaled in an accident.

“There’s just something about the melody of ‘Goodbye Ruby’ that really does sound like a 2004 Subaru,” Hearn says. “The same is true of ‘Fiddle in the Attic.’ Listening to it, it just sounds like discovery and nostalgia, just perfect for thinking about something that was hidden away and then found.”

Gregory says that the process of turning experiences into melodies is both mysterious and mathematical, emotional and mental. “I was devastated when my car got totaled,” she says. “I felt so sad about it, and fortunately nobody was hurt, but I had all these feelings about losing that car. I was genuinely grieving the loss of Ruby. Sometimes, when I’m writing a new tune, I start out by picking a key, and in this case, I picked the key of B, because the sixth chord, the B-minor chord, has this particular melancholy quality. Paired with the really bright sound of the key of B, it would give the tune a sad but optimistic quality. So I started there and just built the tune on that by messing around with it until I liked it.”

Gregory adds that she intentionally set out to write “Goodbye Ruby” to sound good when played slowly and then more rapidly, to represent the initial period of grieving Ruby and how that sadness eventually gave way to a sense of acceptance, a fond appreciation for what the car once meant to her, expressed musically instead of in words. “I wrote the melody to represent those two poles of the grieving process,” she says. “There’s grief, which feels slow, and then getting on with your life, which feels more energetic. It works for me.”

Hearn’s own approach to music has always been fluidly eclectic, he says, his tastes swinging easily from Iron Maiden tunes, played on the guitar in the basement with his brothers, to playing Celtic folk tunes on his cello at fiddle camp. “I liked the cross-pollination of that,” he says. “I love all kinds of music, and I just really enjoy playing all of it. But I do love trad music, and being a cellist, it’s really fun to explore that kind of music on the cello, which is not really traditional for Celtic fiddle tunes. Other people have been doing it, I know, but it still feels new-ish to me.

“The specific fiddle and cello sound we’ve developed together feels very warm and comfortable to me,” Hearn continues. “It feels very locked-in now, tonally and emotionally. Even where the beats fall, it feels special and unique to us. To me our music sounds really relaxed—but in an excited way.”

“I really love Brendan’s approach to playing traditional old-time music on the cello,” Gregory adds. “Cello is not technically ‘in the canon’ of old-time string band music, so he has figured out this really cool way of using it. When there’s a guitar in the jam, he’ll figure out a more melodic thing he can do, and when there’s not a guitar, then he figures out how to rhythmically fill the role that that instrument would have been covering. He brings all of that to our arrangements as a duo. It sounds really amazing.”

With the release of One Year Since now upon them, Gregory and Hearn are looking forward to continuing their artistic collaboration—writing more more, singing more, recording more. But for the time being, there is a new album to share with the world. “A lot of this music is stuff we’ve sort of been sitting on since the pandemic, playing it a lot and really loving it,” Hearn says. “But until now, we haven’t been able to share it in a form that is exactly the way we wanted it to come out. We’re really happy with it—even if it did take a while to get it the way we wanted it.”