CD Odyssey Disc 1765: Lori McKenna

Welcome back to the CD Odyssey. I got out for a run today before the rain came, which helped me get an extra listen in on this next record. Running is one of those “don’t do anything else while listening” tasks that is allowed under Rule #4.

Yeah, I realize it says “walking around” but running is basically walking around at an accelerated pace.

Disc 1765 is…The Balladeer

Artist: Lori McKenna

Year of Release: 2020

What’s up with the Cover? This album came out in 2020, so no surprise the live action shot has no one else in it – Lori is probably maintaining a minimum six-foot distance in observation of COVID protocols.

How I Came To Know It: I was already an avowed Lori McKenna fan, so just bought this record when it came out, as we fans do.

How It Stacks Up: I have six Lori McKenna albums. I want to have eight, but those missing two are devilishly hard to find. Anyway, of the six I do have, I put “The Balladeer” at #4. It isn’t bad, it’s just that there are four better.

Ratings: 3 stars but almost 4

Lori McKenna is not going to blow the doors off with her vocals, and as songwriting goes this is very much dead centre in the down-home old school country variety. Don’t expect to be artistically challenged but do expect to find yourself settling into a contemplative and peaceful headspace.

A Lori McKenna song is like the rustle of browning maple leaves blowing past on an early fall breeze. It feels easy and relaxed, with the rustling restlessness memory of days gone by. She’s an old soul that is always in a state of remembering being young, and it creates a narrative that marries the two experiences.

On “The Balladeer” McKenna explores well-worn themes of faith, family and wistful reverie. My instinct was to be bored with the subject matter as overused and obvious. How many songs can you have about intergenerational love (grandfathers/grandsons, moms and daughters, sisters, etc.)? Turns out you can have quite a few if those songs are each individually good enough to hold your attention. I won’t deny that I would love McKenna to explore a bit more creative space, and write songs with more edge, but I also can’t deny that the simple themes she chooses are done with artful care and quiet beauty.

On this record, McKenna often explores character by comparison, and how similar experiences can yield very different people On “Marie” she writes from the perspective of two sisters, raised in exactly the same experience, and the subtle turn of how they are both the same and different. How as siblings you can walk in the same shoes through childhood and end up both the same and different. Or as McKenna reflects:

“She looks more like our mother
She's prettier and softer
And she always helps me find my way
I've been lost a time or two
She knows bigger words than I do
But we both got the same size shoes
And no one's ever walked in mine, but me and Marie”

This “same but different” theme is further explored from a darker place on “Two Birds” where she tells the story of two women who meet one fateful night to find out they are both in a relationship with the same man. The women are different in temperament:

“One was a red dress, a wild one from out West
Didn't waste a minute with her heart
The other was a bluebird, careful with her sweet words
Unless she let you hold her in the dark”

But united in their betrayal. It would be a great song if that’s all McKenna explores, but she goes even further to capture the strange pathology of the man

“He wasn't cruel, he wasn't mean
But he had a way of breaking things
His aim was truer than an arrow from a bow”

So easy to just make the man a cad, but he is depicted here not so much cruel as careless. Like a child with a stone throwing it idly, felling two birds with one stone. It is a great image that reveals late, and adds depth to the story you’re not expecting.

This is McKenna at her best, seeing humanity in even the most broken of her characters. You’ll find tragedy aplenty on “The Balladeer” but you’ll be hard pressed to find true evil. In McKenna’s world even people making the worst choices are just damaged and hurt, and looking for connection.

This record felt like a collection of hugs from your mom or maybe your favourite aunt. Sometimes the hug is the kind you might get at a wedding, and sometimes at a funeral, but all of them feel kind and reassuring.

Best tracks:  The Balladeer, Marie, The Dream, Uphill, Two Birds

CD Odyssey Disc 1709: Lori McKenna

Apologies for my comparatively long absence, gentle readers. I’ve had a very busy work week and right when I thought I’d squirrelled away some down time, went and got myself sick. The worst part of it all, is I had occasion to go out in public dressed as a pirate and had to bow out. The number of times one gets the opportunity to dress up as a pirate in life are limited, and missing even one stings.

Back to music. My last review was released in 1988. This record is called 1988 but came out last year. Coincidence…or conspiracy? You decide.

Disc 1709 is…1988

Artist: Lori McKenna

Year of Release: 2023

What’s up with the Cover? Our artist, ‘guitaring’ away at an undisclosed location. That window looks like any number of small interior town airport windows I’ve stared out of, but your guess is good as mine if this is in a small town, or even at an airport for that matter.

There’s also a logo of some cherub leaning on the year 1988. I’m not sure how this aligns with ‘possible airport window’ particularly since cherubs don’t need to take public transport to fly somewhere.

How I Came To Know It: I’ve been a fan of Lori McKenna for quite some time, dating back to discovering her through her 2016 album “The Bird & the Rifle”. Despite the gratuitous and unnecessary use of an ampersand in the album title, I was smitten with her sound and have been buying up her records ever since. “1988” was just the latest release.

How It Stacks Up: I have six Lori McKenna albums. I’d like to have eight, but 2013’s “Massachusetts” and 2014’s “Numbered Doors” are inexplicably hard to find. Like, it’s killin’ me. Anyway, of the six I have, something had to be last and 1988 is it. There’s no shame in it. Lori McKenna makes consistently great records, and competition is fierce.

Rating: 3 stars

Some artists get criticism along the lines of “all their albums sound the same”. This seems like a foolish thing to complain about. Some artists change their sound, some don’t, and for those who don’t, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. ACDC is a good example of this phenomenon. Alestorm is another. There are plenty, and holding down the role in the country genre is today’s focus, Lori McKenna.

Lori McKenna doesn’t break any new ground on 1988, and anything you hear on this record is going to remind you of her previous seven records. Homespun small-town wisdom is her stock and trade. Her vocals have a high quaver to them, but never feel breathy. They match wonderfully with her easy guitar strumming and clear, thoughtful lyrics. This is three chords and the truth, distilled down to its purest form.

When you listen to Cypress Hill, you can expect to hear a lot of songs about smoking dope and shootin’ folks. Lori McKenna is similarly consistent thematically, albeit with slightly more sedate subject matter. McKenna likes to sing about the nostalgia of youth, love and loyalty and more than few songs about what it is to age gracefully. Her songs have a small town common sense, and the wisdom of how to quiet the heart, and find joy even in hard times.

The album starts with ground zero for McKenna. “The Old Woman in Me” is an anthem for middle-age, and how to celebrate it. The lines all have a delightful caesura in them that makes everything that comes in the second half of the bar have an even deeper gravitas. It’s an old trick but a good one:

“The old woman in me thinks I look good in these jeans
She remembers what her body did, carrying all those kids
She's narrowed down the truth, she don't even dye her roots
She's proud of the life she lived, says it made her the woman she is”

McKenna has five kids and talks about being a mom a LOT and you get the impression she is, like, the BEST mom ever. Apart from also having an awesome mom, I have no deeper frame of reference for what the experience of being one is like, but McKenna gets me part way there every time she sings one of these tunes.

For all the upbeat tunes McKenna sings – and she does this a lot – she’s perfectly capable of exploring the sadness of ordinary folks as much as she does their victories. The best example on 1988 is “Letting People Down”, which this gem of a quatrain:

“You get up for work every day, you drag yourself right out of bed
The arms of those angels are wrapped around the dreams you left
I look the other way, pretending not to notice
I don't know how it died, but I know where the ghost is”

This is McKenna at her best, pulling your heart strings through the agony of ordinary lives, and the unending complexity that is the human condition.

Because of her subject matter, there is always the danger for McKenna to slide into the trite, and it does happen from time to time on 1988. “Happy Children” is one of those ‘wish good things on you’ type songs with a list of stuff that doesn’t always land. Or maybe I’m just grumpy because McKenna seems to think the happiest thing to wish on someone is that they have happy children. Thanks, but I’ll pass.  

For the most part, though, McKenna delivers authenticity without descent into the maudlin. 1988 isn’t her best collection of songs, but it is still solid entry and head and shoulders above what you might hear on mainstream country radio.

Best tracks: The Old Woman in Me, The Town in Your Heart, The Tunnel