Who knew Lori McKenna — the songwriter of “Humble & Kind,” perhaps country music’s most serious and honorable song — also had a sneaky side?
But sometimes a mom’s gotta do what a mom’s gotta do, especially when she needs help writing a song and her songwriter son just happened to come home for a visit, lounging around the house watching a game on TV.
“I was like, ‘Hey, what are you doing?'” recalls the Grammy-winning songwriter and singer, laughing over her moment of deception with her 33-year-old son Brian. “Can I show you something?”
Together, the two McKennas turned that “something” into the title track of her brand new album, in 1988 — and given that it’s a love song for her family, who else could she co-write than her firstborn child?
In fact, his involvement should be considered the ultimate full-circle moment in McKenna’s storied career. The song is named after the year she married her high school sweetheart, Gene McKenna, and was three months pregnant with Brian when she walked down the aisle.
“I made him write it with me, of course,” says McKenna, 54, speaking from the home in Stoughton, Mass., where she and her husband raised their four sons and a daughter.
The entire album, McKenna’s 12th, is awash with the wise, soul-baring storytelling she’s long been celebrated for, sung in her intensely emotional voice. And again, her muse for most intimate songs was her own life and family.
Just a few albums ago, she talked about how she assumed her writing would become less personal over time. But today he realizes that it is hopeless.
“I can’t do it!” she says laughing. “Something is wrong with me! I keep thinking I’ll be able to do it and I can’t.”
On her latest album, Lori McKenna writes and sings whole new chapters in her ‘humble and kind’ life
This time, McKenna achieved the ultimate fusion of her two great passions – family and music – by collaborating with her children. Brian is one of two sons now pursuing songwriting careers in Nashville; Chris, 29, also followed in his mother’s footsteps, contributing a song to the album.
Involving children in the writing process is as natural for McKenna as songwriting itself, which began as an adolescent hobby and has long since turned into a lifelong obsession.
“I just love it,” she says. “Writing songs is the only thing I could do 10 hours a day. I don’t take the fact that I do something I love for a living. I just love hunting that thing that you don’t have complete control over. If it’s a really good song, there’s magic there.”
It’s no surprise to McKenna that her two sons chose her profession after spending their childhoods watching two role models: their father, a plumber for a Massachusetts utility company, who dragged himself home from work every day, and their mom, who had so much fun on her the job often didn’t seem like it was working.
“I tell my husband all the time, I don’t think the fact that I enjoyed my job affected them as much as it did him that it drained him,” says McKenna. “I think I’d just make sure I didn’t do that if I was a kid and saw my mum playing and my dad exhausted! He makes fun of me, but it’s a balance. When you write for yourself, you still have to work. I’m blessed enough to just enjoy it.”
Long among Nashville’s songwriter royalty — though she never settled in the city — McKenna earned her Grammys for “Crowded Table” (sung by the Highwomen), “Girl Crush” (Little Big Town) and “Humble & Kind” (Tim McGraw). , and the list of artists she has written for and with is a superstar who’s who, including Taylor Swift, Chris Stapleton, Miranda Lambert, Faith Hill, Carrie Underwood, Maren Morris and George Strait.
Watch singer-songwriter Lori McKenna sing Tim McGraw’s CMA-winning hit, which she wrote, ‘Humble & Kind’
But she has always been part of her professional identity as a cameraman. Years ago, she reveals, she debated whether to give it up, and her friend Beth Laird, now her manager-publisher, helped talk her out of it: “She said, ‘Why would you do that? The artistic side of what you do really feeds the songwriter, and the songwriter in you understands the song better because of the artist in you.’”
Now he sees making the album as “my way of having a voice in the conversation.”
IN in 1988, on his fourth album produced by Dave Cobb, McKenna once again tackles personal themes that evoke a whole range of powerful emotions, from regret to pleasure, from fear and sadness to hope and joy. They were all fed, she says, by a persistent impulse to look back unflinchingly.
“I’m so nostalgic,” she says, “and I think for me, going back is a way of learning about myself now. I keep discovering things like, I did it then because it makes sense now. My songs explain my life. Even if I’m a co-writer, there’s something I learn about life from that.”
However, her “greatest teachers”, she adds, are her children. She says she didn’t really think about why she needed Brian’s input on “1988,” but one reason certainly emerged when he came up with the song “half scared to death, half stupid brave” to describe his parents’ teenage marriage — a line that proved to her beloved husband in the song.
“Then you know, oh, [Brian] he knows my experience,” says McKenna. “He knows that’s the feeling because the children don’t miss anything. They know what their parents are going through. They know what their parents are. They know the energy of what it feels like.”
She enlisted the help of her son Chris on “Happy Children,” another family-inspired song on the album. McKenna got the idea after hearing someone say goodbye with, “I wish you happy children.”
“And I thought that’s the most brilliant wish I’ve ever heard in my entire life,” she says, “and it has to be a song.”
Stuck on the chorus, she again enticed her son, who was sitting on the couch, not to watch the game.
“Chris was sitting there, all talented and busy,” she says, “and he brought me on the chorus.”
Fortunately, McKenna says, both sons “don’t really call me ‘mommy'” when they write together.
“They don’t say, ‘Mom, come on,’ which is great and great,” she says. “I think the reason they do that is because they’ve had enough experience writing with other people that they know you have to get to know the songwriter in the room, not who you think the person in the room is. So they don’t roll their eyes at me or say, ‘No one would ever say that, Mom!’”
The fact that McKenna is now writing with her children is a clear sign that she is in a new phase of life, and she shows this self-awareness in another outstanding song, “The Old Woman in Me”. The lyrics are actually a look ahead: “I hope to become an old woman one day.”
“I’m a little obsessed with getting older,” he admits, but he also believes – as he says in the song – that he’s now in his prime.
“We come to our senses the older we get, especially women,” she says. “The conversations I have with my adult friends, we enter into them. And I think we feel more settled in our bodies. I can really get worked up about the vanity of this, but it won’t change the way I look. My job is to change the way I feel about my appearance. I’m going to try to embrace aging in a way that’s just total positivity.”
A song, McKenna says, can also be the first step toward new lyrical themes.
“I’m not really a ‘what’s next’ person,” she says. “I’m more of a ‘let’s go back’ person. But I really think the writing that follows is going to be a little more in the moment as far as understanding goes. Even ‘The Old Woman in Me’ made me look at the person I wanted to be versus where I thought I would be.”
What’s next? On September 28, she will kick off an 11-stop tour with fellow songwriter and singer Brandy Clark. McKenna says she’s not sure who came up with the pair, but she was blown away by the invitation.
“I said yes, please,” she says. “Brandy is one of my favorite writers and people. We’ve managed to write a bunch together over the years and I just love it. I think we do different things, but they overlap in many ways. We’re really going to make a night of it.”
Categories: Trends
Source: HIS Education