talk shows. But the big prize still eluded him. His album didn’t
take off because he couldn’t get his first single played on Top 40
radio.
It was the same old story. The equivalent of Gail Vance
Civille and Judy Heylmun had loved Kenna. Craig Kailman
heard his demo tape and got on the phone and said, “I want to
see him now.” Fred Durst heard one of his songs over the
telephone and decided that this was it. Paul McGuinness flew
him to Ireland. The people who had a way to structure their
first impressions, the vocabulary to capture them, and the
experience to understand them, loved Kenna, and in a perfect
world, that would have counted for more than the questionable
findings of market research. But the world of radio is not as
savvy as the world of food or the furniture makers at Herman
Miller.
They prefer a system that cannot measure what it promises to
measure.
“I guess they’ve gone to their focus groups, and the focus
groups have said, ‘No, it’s not a hit.’ They don’t want to put
money into something that doesn’t test well,” Kenna says. “But
that’s not the way this music works. This music takes faith. And
faith isn’t what the music business is about anymore. It’s