McKenna had me at ‘Fireflies’
I can’t remember what it was that first sucked me into Lori McKenna’s music — whether it was the way her voice crawls out of her like a slow, onyour-knees plea, or the fact that I felt so at home in the worlds she built in her music.
In the first of her songs I ever heard, “Fireflies,” the country singer/songwriter proclaimed that she believes in “miracles and everything I can to
get by.” My life changed that night.
I do remember exactly where I was the first time I heard her: Sitting on my unmade, extra-long twin bed in Boland Hall at Syracuse University, my Apple laptop warming my legs as I dove deeper and deeper into a Limewire rabbit hole. It was the fall semester of 2005, and I was 19 years old.
At that moment, my favorite singer on the planet was Mandy Moore. I latched onto her during my middle school days, when I found myself drawn to the fantasies peddled in the mass-market bubble gum songs that I could choreograph dances to during Mountain Dew-fueled slumber parties.
It was fun and slick and the words were easy to memorize and belt out at the top of my lungs. I dare you to sing Moore’s “Candy” without smiling at least once. Your mouth does it for you.
But then came that chilly autumn night in 2005, when I drew the short straw for an allnight shift as the RA on Duty. To pass the time, I went on an internet hunt for any Mandy-related nuggets I hadn’t yet unearthed. And I found something that changed everything: An interview in which she discussed her desire to turn further away from her loverhymes-with-above roots, in favor of becoming a songwriter. She named her inspirations, including a woman named Lori McKenna and her song “Fireflies,” which had just been recorded by Faith Hill. I had it downloaded on my laptop within seconds. And after listening to it, I found every other McKenna song available for download, waiting impatiently as they queued and loaded, before listening to them on repeat.
By the end of the week, I’d changed my music interests on Facebook from “Mandy Moore and Kelly Clarkson” to “I like songs that tell stories.” I scrawled McKenna’s lyrics in notebooks and wished I could tell stories with her power, punch and sincerity someday.
I told McKenna this a couple weeks ago, during a phone interview to preview her Thursday date at The Heights Theater, in which I also promised that I have since paid for all her music I once swiped for free. I told her that she had me at “Fireflies,” but the words she spun in “Never Die Young” were the safe space I needed two years later when my mom died during my senior year of college.
I talked about how the heartache in her voice as she sang of her own mother’s memory with mournful turns of phrase like “hearts will all mend, just tell me you were never afraid,” made me feel like she was there on the other side of my laptop speakers ready to reciprocate a long hug and an ugly cry. How whenever I hear her through the intimate space of my earbuds, she’s not some stranger from Massachusetts, but an old friend who can whisper, “I know, I know,” through the hard, lonely moments of life. How she confessed “I’m not a winner, I’m just brilliantly bitter. I’m sealed by my skin, but broken inside,” at a moment when I didn’t know how else to admit such brokenness.
She did that for me — and all the others listening — on purpose.
“To me, I feel like we have so much going on in our lives, and I was raised in a family that’s really good at putting things off,” McKenna said during our long, meandering chat. Her family, she said, is particularly skilled at avoiding tough stuff, like grief or love. It’s easier to push away hard thoughts.
“I literally just texted my sister this morning, and said ‘We are so good at denial,’ ” McKenna continued. “And I think that sometimes that’s a great vehicle for music to be able to pull things out of us that we don’t always want to face.”
There’s catharsis in that — for McKenna in her writing, and for listeners who need to hear their deep-darks breathed into life by someone who feels a little braver at the moment.
“That’s what I’m going for, and music has been my journal. It’s how I express everything,” McKenna said. “Even if the story isn’t about me. I think if you experience the emotion — even if it isn’t your story — there’s something about it that connects us. And if someone else has felt that emotion, and I have too, I’m a part of that team. I’m connected.”
I nod on the other side of the phone. Then I tell her a story of my own:
Earlier this year, I profiled a local pastor who has struggled with doubt and addiction through the course of his lifetime search to understand God and people. It was the result of a slew of long interviews that felt more like conversations over the course of months. And though the story was long, there were so many details I wish I could have squeezed in. Chief among them was a profound moment in which he posited that “the two most powerful words in the English language are ‘me, too.’ ”
It stopped me midthought, not only because I agreed. But because I felt a “me too” even in this idea. I’ve always loved stories — written or sung — in which I recognize some other person feeling the things that I worry make me strange or fundamentally miscoded. Moments that make me feel as though I’m not alone.
Moments like the ones I experience when I listen to a Lori McKenna song.
“I feel so much me too when I listen to you,” I confessed to the musician.
She seemed flattered, though she must get this all the time. Then McKenna went on to explain her process, which she picked up from one of her songwriting friends, Barry Dean, with whom she’s written songs for everyone from Alison Krauss to Hunter Hayes.
“The first verse, sing it like you’re talking to your daughter. Then the second like you’re talking to your friend, and the third like you’re talking to yourself,” she said. “And if you think, ‘Right now, I’m talking to my daughter, and this part of the song, it’s to my sister or my husband,’ and you think about those different people you know in your life, it’s helpful in trying to make something in the song that’s identifiable to more people.”
That kind of attention to inclusion is so evident in many of her biggest hits — like her Grammywinning “Humble & Kind,” which she wrote for Tim McGraw, and also recorded on her most recent album, “The Bird and the Rifle.”
“‘Humble & Kind’ taught me a lot in that way,” she said, self-deprecatingly describing her limits in vocal range and guitar skills. “My punchline has always been that I can’t make you dance, so I have to make you cry. But with (McGraw) making such a big moment of ‘Humble & Kind,’ it taught me you can make people feel things without trying to rip them to shreds. And I’m leaning more in that department lately.”
Her Thursday show could have some slowcry-into-your-sauvignonblanc moments. But McKenna said she hopes it will make you smile, too.
Who knows, maybe she’ll even play one of the songs she wrote with Mandy Moore.