Lori McKenna

One of the coolest women I know gave me the tickets. So, I traveled, what with depositing the kids at their reluctant grandmother’s house and then from there to the city where she was playing, about 6 hours in one day. I remember traveling this way for rock shows for work, and also for Dead shows. That Man met me there, after doing his own two and half hours on the road. He was late as always, but he was eager. Most men would not be so game. It’s a bonus for us both that his passion for music – and taste – equals mine. And I love her songs, and he knows that, and as it turns out, he loves what I love.

So we hooked up, two unencumbered grown-ups, in some town we had never been before and found ourselves in a standing-room-only crowd listening to Lori McKenna. Lori McKenna is the singer-songwriter, who of all the favorites that I have either worked with or worshipped, staked her claim in my heart and held on so tight that I will, even now, drive all that way just to see her. She is, after all, just a mom, like me – so if she can, I can.

People say she writes about all things “domestic” and to some degree, that’s true. It’s also a lazy critique. She is domestic (duh -- five kids, suburban Massachusetts housewife, married at 19), but to assume that every one of her songs is about that? It makes the domestic in me (who also married young, has three kids, lives in suburban Mass) close to crazy and downright offended. Listen like I have to every song she has written: this isn’t Cascade and Calgon -- this is poetry, plain and simple.

Just listen to “Falter” or “Pieces of Me” or “One Man” or “Swallows Me Whole” or “Ruby’s Shoes” or “Bible Song” or “How To Be Righteous” or “Monday Afternoon.” You’re a mom? You’ll hear yourself. A dad? You’ll hear yourself too. A human being? Yeah, she’s got something for you, too.

Her story is true and compelling, and so the publicist in me knows why it makes sense to talk about it. She finds a way with five kids and a high-school sweetheart husband in a small town like mine (yours?) to make music. She wears the same clothes as me. She loves Target like me. And somehow, when the time comes, she makes a space in her life to let her poems creep out.

After all the life I’ve lived (which so far has been quite massive frankly), this woman has the one thing I still want. It’s not her rock n’ roll life I covet – I’ve been there, I left that – it’s the balls she’s found to get up and tell it that I envy. So, it’s no surprise that when I feel compelled to explain or exclaim in words the way I do, it’s usually her singing in the background that I hear.

As the night in Northampton wound down, and after I hounded that poor woman for a picture of us both together (sickeningly embarrassing looking back), I remembered how much I missed that feeling, the one I had as a kid for the musicians who ultimately changed my life: Elvis Costello, The Cure, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, The Band, the Grateful Dead, Nirvana, The Jayhawks, Morphine, Wilco, Josh Rouse, Johnny Cash, Kristen Hersh.

God, I thought, here I am all kinda grown up, and still laid down like a kid by a great song and a guitar -- and loving it. When she hauled her own equipment out the door, in an old sweatshirt zipped over her sexy top, and flung that stuff into the back of her minivan (!!), I was sold for good.

When it was time to go, I held my husband’s hand so I could yank off the too-cool-sneakers that were blistering my feet and walked home barefoot to a hotel where we would spend the night without our kids, her music still echoing in our ears, our beer-buzz lingering like the one we had when we were teenagers falling in love.

It occurred to me then that nothing changes that much after all. What you loved when you were little, you’ll probably love when you’re old. I haunted record stores once; now I plunder ITunes. I have always loved music and songs, and well, not to be sappy, but I have always loved him too, and I still do.

And I love Lori McKenna.