Lori McKenna: Unglamorous

Label: Warner Brothers/StyleSong
Sound/Style: alternative-leaning country/folk

By Steve Morley

If you’re from anywhere near Stoughton, Massachussetts, you need no introduction to Lori McKenna. While she raised her five kids there, she also nurtured her own musical gifts, honing her songwriting and performing in small venues around her modest working-class hometown. Her discovery by a Nashville publisher led to a dishrags-to-riches story after her songs were recorded by megastar Faith Hill. While some would jump at the chance to escape the rigors of day-to-day domesticity, McKenna is a family woman who had to think twice about an Oprah appearance because it conflicted with the first day of her kids’ school year. Accordingly, her major label debut Unglamorous is largely fashioned from the fabric of everyday American life. Its central track doesn’t pridefully defend lower-end economics, instead pointing out the value of simple and honest lifestyle choices: “Crowded dinners at the kitchen table—how beautiful/ One TV set and no cable/ No frills, no fuss, perfectly us/ Unglamorous.”

McKenna is enough of an artist, though, to set up some tension between homey contentment and the darker possibilities of life and relationship. It’s here that the music departs from the mainstream variety, taking on rough edges that are typically frowned upon on country radio. From all appearances, McKenna has a happy life, but she just as vividly catches the details of troubled relationships in songs like “Drinkin’ Problem” and “How to Survive.”

By reviewing all the ways that love can go bad, from unfaithfulness and substance abuse to a lack of healthy communication, it becomes easier to understand McKenna’s delight with the predictability of her husband’s return from work in “Witness to Your Life,” which ends with a prayer of gratitude that he “took the right road home.” The track is refreshingly clear-eyed about marriage’s challenges and imperfections, starting from the jumble of a wedding day in humorously remembered fragments. (“Someone was crying and the bells rang/ Then I don’t remember a thing/ You were talking but the words came from somebody else…/This may be just a softer place to fall/ But somebody will answer when you call/ And I will be a witness to your life.”)

“Falter,” featuring guest vocals from Faith Hill, traces the life of an alienated schoolmate who falls though the cracks. McKenna echoes her regret that she never reached out to him and laments the human tendency to avert our eyes from the weaknesses we all ultimately have in common. (“Why don’t we open up/ Knowing that we all falter/ And when will we learn/ To reach out for each other?”)

The most moving cut, “Leaving This Life,” deals with McKenna’s mother, who she lost at 6 years of age. In a stunning twin perspective that McKenna says she only gained through having children herself, she examines the losses sustained by both mother and daughter: “She’s left with that reflection of me at six years old/ And I have her face in the mirror/ Well, she and I, we are defined by what we have lost/ Don’t you wonder whose loss is dearer?”

Unglamorous is a showcase for a gifted and unique songwriter as well as a cohesive full-length work that gets inside the lesser-seen but realistic wrinkles of relationship—from the good and bad to the in-between. By peering into average lives and uncovering the kinds of messes found within, she declares a victory for the middle-class family whose biggest problem is a toy-scattered living room and a sink full of dirty dishes.

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