McKenna strikes chord with country fans
Sentimental and intense, Lori McKenna is writing some of the most popular ballads in country music
Lori McKenna can mint country hits out of everyday talk — just not every day. On a recent visit to the hair salon, her head thrown back in the sink, she was listening for lyrics over a rush of warm water, hoping the talky woman in the next chair might volunteer a few magic words. Slosh-slosh-slosh. Blahblah-blah. And ... nope. Instead of going home with a new hook in her head, McKenna had to settle for some new colour in her hair.
But this is how her songwriting often begins — eavesdropping and people-watching while she runs her daily errands. “We’re all people-watchers in some way,” McKenna says. “We see a person and we make a story up in our head. ... I don’t know if empathy is the right word, but we develop some curiosity in one another.”
McKenna’s exquisite new album, The Tree, directs that curiosity toward families — her family, other people’s families, imagined families, families where the kids grow up too fast and the parents grow old too soon, families that make her new songs feel as mundane and urgent as life and death. And while many have praised McKenna for her ability to elevate our most piddling pedestrian life-stuff to profound heights, for her, there’s no heavy lifting involved. When the ordinary is already extraordinary, the music is all around us.
“I’m not a truth-seeker. I’m not someone who wants to go around the world and find out why we exist,” she says. “For me to get sick of writing about my neighbours?” She can’t imagine that.
McKenna got her start on the New England folk circuit in the 1990s, but everything changed in 2004 when her fourth album, Bittertown, began to circulate in Nashville’s most exclusive corridors. Before long, a music publisher phoned to say Faith Hill would like to hear every song McKenna had ever written. Less than a year later, she was sitting on plush couch in a bright TV studio, chit-chatting with Hill and Oprah Winfrey. “Literally, Nashville called me,” McKenna says. “Now, I know that never happens.”
Thirteen years later, McKenna has become formidable in country music, co-writing nearly 100 songs a year. Astonishingly, that qualifies as below-average on Music Row, but the publishers don’t push. They know that this is the pace that helped McKenna write Girl Crush a love-triangular waltz for Little Big Town, co-drafted with Hillary Lindsey and Liz Rose; not to mention Humble and Kind, a human decency anthem that Tim McGraw carried to the top of the country charts in 2016. (The song ’s parting lyrics seem to accrue virtue as the United States grows more cruel: “When you get where you’re going/ Turn right back around/And help the next one in line/Always stay humble and kind.”)
In addition to farming them out, McKenna occasionally includes her biggest songs on her own albums — Humble and Kind anchored 2015’s The Bird and the Rifle — but they usually only make the radio when someone else is singing them. And that’s fine by her.
“I know this sounds like (BS), but I swear, I just want to write good songs and be proud of myself,” McKenna says. “And I will say that I get proud of myself pretty easily. Like, if the house is clean when I go to bed at night, I’m so excited.”
Her songs can start anywhere, but many of them get finished in her basement in Stoughton, Mass. — the same small town where McKenna met her husband, all the way back in Grade 3.
McKenna says she likes to come up with a song title (she was hoping to catch one back at the salon), then work from there, strumming chords and mumbling melodies until her gestures start to point toward a story. For all of the precision and sophistication in her storytelling, here’s the surprising thing: A song ’s narrative arc often follows the sound of whichever syllables happen to materialize in her mouth.
“The rhyme speaks to where the story lands,” McKenna says. “When I get going, something rhymes with something else, and suddenly this isn’t a song about elephants, it’s a song about soup. It has more control than I do, and I learned very early on to trust it.”
Other times — and this seems even more mysterious — her characters’ fates are sealed before the tune even gets underway. Maybe this explains why the songs McKenna creates out of whole cloth still sound so certain, so hard-lived. She’s quick to point to Numbered Doors, a paralyzing ballad from 2014 that follows a drug addict from her wedding day (“She wore a borrowed dress nobody wanted back”) to her funeral (one more time: “She wore a borrowed dress nobody wanted back”). She says the story is entirely made up, but “I just knew she had to die, right away.”
And this has to be McKenna’s greatest gift: her ability to walk right up to the edge of sentimentality without forfeiting the intensity that the moment demands. She calls that charged creative space “the edge of whatever it is” — and yes, it can get lonely out there.
Earlier that week, McKenna and a co-writer were putting the finishing touches on an especially shattering new song when her colleague lamented, “It’s so sad.” McKenna replied, “It has to be.”
So maybe songwriting teaches a songwriter how to live — along with the rest of us, of course. And that’s the fundamental generosity that radiates from McKenna’s songbook.
Her songs render worlds that feel detailed enough for us to step into, yet ambiguous enough to make into our own — there’s just enough room to confirm what we know and learn what we don’t.