Music |
Lori McKenna: Unglamorous
By
Published: Jan 01, 2008
Category:
Country
There are few stages more glamorous than the Allen Room of the Time Warner Center, with musicians performing in front of a floor-to-ceiling, 50-by-90-foot window wall. And on a chilly January night, with a full moon as a background light, it’s impossible not to feel monumentally alive as you wait for a show to start here — open to whatever the performer can bring you, eager to process that gift.
But what gift do I expect from Lori McKenna? I was young when I fled the suburbs, and I still shudder at the memory; the few songs of McKenna’s that I’ve heard celebrate domestic life in ‘burbs like Stoughton, Massachusetts, where she grew up and still lives. My marital history is checkered; she has five kids with her husband of 19 years. But the sinking feeling doesn’t really hit me until McKenna comes out in a nice-girl party dress, sensible grey patent heels and a small cross — it’s what she wore the first time she played the Grand Old Opry. She could easily wear again if she chaperoned on prom night.
Why was I there? Because Lori McKenna, who didn’t sing in public until she was 27, got hit with the lucky stick. Faith Hill put three of her songs on a CD, and then Tim McGraw, Faith’s husband, produced Lori’s new CD, “Unglamorous,” for a big label with real money for promotion. And a friend of mine heard her — her fifth CD, that is — and fell in love with it, and got tickets, and couldn’t go, which is how I found myself, a few rows from the stage, looking more or less directly in Lori McKenna’s eyes.
The questions of the evening:
Is Lori McKenna as good as her devotees — she’s got them, and they’re fervent; just look at the comments on her web site or on Amazon.com — say she is? If so, did she really get lucky when Nashville smiled on her? Or will Nashville change her into just another chick voice lost in a sea of over-production, her songs indistinguishable from [fill in the blank] and her colorful biography as her biggest calling card?
The show started with songs about a blue-collar, heartbeat-of-America lover and a guy with a drinking problem (“I never touch the stuff/But honey I’ll tell you what/You can’t count the ways it touches me”). In another, she gave her man “written permission” to move on. And she thanked the Lord that her husband takes “the right road home” at night. These songs were better written than the slicker-than-snail-snot country made in most Nashville studios; I was on her side.
I started listening more intently when she sang a beautiful line about blessing the “dull sweetness in this life of ours.” And I was stunned by a song about her lover’s “next lover”, who lives a few doors down and wants some not-so-innocent coffee. Very quickly, very efficiently, that song got to…
I hope she reminds you nothing of me
And as crazy, as crazy as it sounds
I hope she’s beautiful.
It was then that she started talking about her mother, and the song she had written about her death — Lori, the youngest of six kids, was just six when her mother died. I don’t know how she got through that song, with its wish to see her mother on the most ordinary of days, doing the most ordinary things; it wasn’t just the women who were weeping in their hands.
She saved her triumphant signature song for the end. The band was amped for this one, and they delivered a burst of power country that thundered through the room as McKenna sang:
Frozen dinner, jelly glass of wine — tastes just fine
Two breadwinners, five kids in short time — with eyes just like mine
How wonderful: crowded dinners at the kitchen table
How beautiful: one TV set, no cable
No frills, no fuss, perfectly us
Unglamorous
And yeah, you can say it was brilliant packaging, theme music for an Oprah-ready singer who hasn’t hesitated to put her family in her videos. And you can say her voice is pleasant but not remarkable. But then you come to her writing, and its intimacy and specificity, and you’re stopped cold — however much you may want to peg her as the poet laureate of the minivan set, she’s much, much deeper than that.
More and more, I’ve been thinking, it’s the little things. Walking the kid to school, watching a late night movie with the wife, a kind word from a friend I didn’t know I had. Moments so nothing you don’t especially notice them — in my revisionist thinking, they’re the glory. Pay attention to them, really live them, and you’re more likely to do the right thing when the doctor tells you it’s cancer or the job goes away or whatever. Maybe.
That’s the life that McKenna writes about, and, more, the feelings underneath; writing mostly at her kitchen table, she’s had remarkable access to pain. But she’s not Sylvia Plath with a guitar. She’s also funny and sassy, the woman you can count on to have a smart remark at the PTA meeting and total knowledge of who’s cheating on whom down the block — but instead of losing that material to her best friend on the cell phone, she uses it in the service of music that’s catnip to women with lives very much like hers.
There are those who don’t like “Unglamorous” because Tim McGraw had a hand in it. I understand that way of thinking. Abstractly, I vote with it. But let’s try some empathy: if you had five kids and Tim McGraw asked you, ever so nicely, if he could make you rich and famous, you might not be so quick to show him the door.
My bet: Lori McKenna’s too smart to get caught up in the machinery of official Nashville. And there’s nothing “wrong” with “Unglamorous” that most civilian ears will notice. It’s just that if you really want to know why Lori McKenna is worth the listen — why she could be the one who writes the songs that come from marrow and last forever — you really ought to go back, to the CDs she made when she was hauling kids around in the Ford and playing small gigs and sitting at the kitchen table, at odd hours, making modest domestic magic.
To buy “Unglamorous” from Amazon.com, click here.
To buy “Bittertown” from Amazon.com, click here.
To buy “Pieces of Me” from Amazon.com, click here.
To buy “Paper Wings & Halo” from Amazon.com, click here.
To download the MP3 of “The Kitchen Tapes” from Amazon.com, click here.
To visit Lori McKenna’s web site, click here.
