hundred thousand records and CDs. In the course of a week, he
might be given between one hundred and two hundred songs by
new artists, and every weekend he sits at home, listening to
them one after another. The overwhelming majority of those,
he realizes in an instant, aren’t going to work: in five to ten
seconds, he’ll have popped them out of his CD player. But every
weekend, there are at least a handful that catch his ear, and
once in a blue moon, there is a singer or a song that makes him
jump out of his seat. That’s what Kenna was. “I was blown
away,” Kallman remembers. “I thought, I’ve got to meet this
guy. I brought him immediately to New York. He sang for me,
literally, like this” — and here Kallman gestures with his hand
to indicate a space of no more than two feet — “face-to-face.”
Later, Kenna happened to be in a recording studio with one
of his friends, who is a producer. There was a man there named
Danny Wimmer who worked with Fred Durst, the lead singer of
a band called Limpbizkit, which was then one of the most
popular rock groups in the country. Danny listened to Kenna’s
music. He was entranced. He called Durst and played him one
of Kenna’s songs, “Freetime,” over the phone. Durst said, “Sign
him!” Then Paul McGuinness, the manager of U2, the world’s
biggest rock band, heard Kenna’s record and flew him to Ireland