Ask any songwriter in Nashville to name their idols in the craft, and you’re sure to hear Lori McKenna’s name come up time and time again. Though she lives in her native Massachusetts, McKenna’s influence on the music coming out of Nashville in recent years is considerable, and growing still. She’s written songs for an enviable roster of artists, including Faith Hill, Little Big Town and Tim McGraw. For the latter’s 2016 hit “Humble and Kind,” she scored a Grammy for Best Country Song and a CMA Award for Song of the Year, and in 2017, she won the Academy of Country Music’s Songwriter of the Year trophy.
McKenna is also a solo performer herself, having made her debut with Paper Wings and Halo in 2000. In July, McKenna released her 10th studio album, The Tree, a follow-up to her Grammy-nominated 2016 album The Bird and the Rifle. On The Tree, McKenna and producer Dave Cobb bring to life another excellent set of compelling and thoughtfully constructed meditations on life, love and family. While not a traditional concept album, The Tree does feel like a series of interconnected vignettes, not unlike what one might find reading a novel whose story is told from the perspectives of different characters. Establishing this loose narrative arc, which she calls an album’s “anchor,” is a major part of McKenna’s writing routine.
“On this record, the anchor for me was really ‘People Get Old,’ but I didn’t want to call the record that because it’s a terrible name for a song, let alone a whole record,” says McKenna with a laugh, calling as she packs to head back out on a tour that brings her to the Country Music Hall of Fame on Friday. “But once we had ‘The Tree,’ I knew I could really make sure all the songs fit into that mindset for me. I’m not really good at sitting down like, ‘I’m gonna write for my record today.’ That stresses me out that way. So I try to just write, and if the song works for what I was thinking as far as a concept, then I’d put it in that pile. But I really need to have a place to start.”
“People Get Old” is one of McKenna’s finest songs. Cut from similarly rich cloth as “Humble and Kind,” the song is at once comforting and cause for taking stock of one’s priorities in life, a phenomenon achieved in lyrics like, “Full of pride and love, he don’t say too much / But hell, he never did / And you still think he’s 45 / And he still thinks that you’re a kid.” In just one rhyming couplet, she artfully encapsulates the complex connection between a father and his child.
McKenna is a master of amplifying the magic in the minutiae of everyday life, and says one of her favorite parts of releasing new music in the social media era is getting to hear listeners’ interpretations of her songs. On this most recent album, standout track “You Won’t Even Know I’m Gone,” which outlines the narrator’s efforts to make sure her family is taken care of when she is away from home, has inspired unexpected readings.
“I think some people read it as the woman is like, ‘I’m out of here,’ ” she says, laughing. “I didn’t see that coming at all, for example. To me, it comes from more of a loving place, like I’m going to take care of everything so you’re fine while I’m gone, and I won’t feel guilty. As a writer, it makes me think, ‘Oh, maybe I didn’t button it up like I should have.’ But as a listener I think it’s fine. I probably interpret songs differently than they would, too. That’s part of songs, part of the process.”
That isn’t the only song of McKenna’s that has inspired debate among listeners. In 2014, Little Big Town released “Girl Crush,” which McKenna wrote with Liz Rose and Hillary Lindsey, from the band’s sixth studio LP, Pain Killer. The track caused a bit of a kerfuffle among radio programmers, concerned by what they interpreted — incorrectly — as lyrics encouraging same-sex relationships. The song does a stellar job of demonstrating McKenna’s mastery of perspective, enhanced by her co-writers: It’s actually about a woman who finds herself so enraptured by a male love interest that she longs to experience him as she imagines his girlfriend does.
Faux controversy aside, “Girl Crush” went on to win Song of the Year at the 2015 CMA Awards and Best Country Song at the 2016 Grammy Awards. (McKenna’s 2016 CMA win for “Humble and Kind” made her the first female songwriter to win Song of the Year two years in a row.) For McKenna, though, it’s more than just an honor to be nominated: She’s still somehow amazed to be invited at all.
“I’m always amazed that I get to go to these shows,” she says, speaking of the CMA Awards specifically. “I’m not from the country music world. So it’s just been amazing for me to be there. It means the world to me that I’m part of it.”
