She is a founding member of the band Lake Street Dive and winner of the 2005 John Lennon Songwriting Contest in the Jazz category.

Similarly, singles from her third album,Comeback Kid were also released in advance of the April 12, 2024 release by Keeled Scales for that album on an expanding number of streaming platforms and social media sites such as Apple Music, Spotify, YouTube and Instagram as well as physical media outlet channels such as Bandcamp.

At age 13, Kearney and her band, Metro Pilot, won a songwriting contest for a song called "Live" (verb) about the dangers of tobacco, where the prize was to perform the song in front of a live audience including keynote speaker and former United States Surgeon General C. Everett Koop.

"[5] Lake Street Dive's early 2023 "Gather Round Sounds" concert tour found Kearney returning to Iowa City for a sold-out show at the University of Iowa Hancher Auditorium on January 24, 2023, with Mr. Medd and other local music educators joining as the horn section.

[7] Kearney's knowledge, skills and innate capacity for creativity took her to a much higher musical level while studying with Mark Urness, a versatile bassist, composer, and educator in Iowa City at the time who later moved to teaching at Lawrence University in Wisconsin.

Kearney has credited Paul Chambers, Charles Mingus and Charlie Haden as some of her main influences from her jazz study period.

[5] Kearney likes to travel, play tennis, and run to stay fit and raise money for her favorite charities.

She often seeks adventure on the road, like surfing in Mexico and bungee jumping in New Zealand, and is a master of chipology.

She once held the one-game record for selling the most (104) foam fingers during a Boston Red Sox game and humorously refers to this early career as her "fall-back, in case the music thing doesn't work out.

"[10] As a songwriter/composer she has registered over 85 songs as a member of Broadcast Music, Inc. Of those, at least 25 are held solely by her, and the rest with different songwriters/composers and artists including Lake Street Dive, Cuddle Magic, Joy Kills Sorrow, Benjamin Lazar Davis and Margaret Glaspy.

Of her love for teaching she once wrote about her students, "...a joy to witness how practicing a creative act can bring the world around us into sharper focus, drawing our attention to little wonderful things that may have otherwise gone unnoticed, while simultaneously softening some of life’s rougher edges and making the big things that dominate our attention seem less daunting.

The band has uploaded numerous videos, including their annual, humorous Halloween covers,[19] and T Bone Burnett asked them to perform on the Another Day, Another Time: Celebrating the Music of "Inside Llewyn Davis" show and album.

[22] The Fundies was another part-time band collaboration featuring Margaret Glaspy, Rachael Price, Brittany Haas and Kearney.

Kearney has played live, written for, and recorded with, a host of acts as a collaborator and backing musician, including Rodney Crowell, Ed Sheeran, Aoife O’Donovan, Margaret Glaspy, Bella White, and Brazilian singer Tiago Iorc.