Album review: “The Tree” by Lori McKenna
It’s sad when a breath of fresh air for a genre is, in reality, simply a return to form. But that’s where the songwriting in Lori McKenna’s “The Tree” finds itself on the country music landscape.
The Grammy Award-winning songwriter behind Little Big Town’s “Girl Crush” and Tim McGraw’s “Humble and Kind” has been turning out solid tunes for more than two decades and is finally receiving some recognition, despite country radio’s sickening appetite for bro-country.
While her voice may not be as refined as those who have recorded many of her songs, McKenna’s own recordings, like her recent “The Tree,” retain their own kind of magic — a sense of authenticity that comes from hearing the words from the songwriter’s mouth. What these songs might lack in luster they more than make up for in elegance.
Her songs are so full of wisdom and goodness that buying a Lori McKenna album is like purchasing a guidebook about living a moral life.
From her upbeat instructions for a joyous life (“Happy People”) to an elegiac rumination on teenage nostalgia (“The Lot Behind St. Mary’s”), she’s the kind of songwriter that grasps onto eternal truths and turns them into poignant and poetic tales of love and loss, like “The Fixer,” which tells a heartbreaking story of a well intentioned soul who just wants to help but finds himself helpless.
“People Get Old” best illustrates McKenna’s knack for putting reality to song as she sings, “Time is a thief and pain is a gift / The past is the past, it is what it is / Every line on your face tells a story somebody knows / That’s just how it goes / You live long enough, the people you love get old.”
Her songs are so full of wisdom and goodness that buying a Lori McKenna album is like purchasing a guidebook about living a moral life. Take “The Way Back Home,” where she sings, “If the truth hurts in your throat, keep mercy on your tongue.”
As a mother of five, McKenna has plentiful source material from which to draw her lyrics for “A Mother Never Rests,” where she sings, “She only sits for a minute, she’s a hummingbird in the living room / She’s a silhouette smiling with the weight of the world on her chest / She’ll move a mountain for you by the afternoon / A mother never rests.”
Truly, McKenna is a champion of the everywoman, weaving the stories of girlfriends and wives, mothers and daughters, the women who take on the world every day but rarely receive plaudits. She honors those women with songs like “You Won’t Even Know I’m Gone” (“I will wash and fold all your clothes / Sort them carefully into rows”) and “You Can’t Break a Woman” (“She ain’t waiting on pins and needles for you to come home / She wasted too much time on wasted tears / Her heart stopped beating for you a long, long time ago”).
While she often lauds the everywoman, she also offers a tribute to the queen of country, the great Patsy Cline. It’s common for country singers to pay homage to elder statesmen like Hank Williams and Johnny Cash, but it’s rare to hear about the women who paved the way alongside them. McKenna amends that with “Like Patsy Would.”
Like any talented songwriter, McKenna knows how and when to turn a phrase, as she does on the almost stereotypically country “Young and Angry Again,” singing, “I could use a little of who I was in that way back when.”
Not all of McKenna’s phrases are that original. The title track places its focus on some well-known idioms like “The apple never falls far from the tree.” But she takes these phrases, adds to their understanding, and makes them her own: “The tree grows where it’s planted / And that’s the fate of a fallen seed.”
Although her lyrics often touch on sadness, loss, and even heartbreak, there remains a sense of solace throughout. “The Tree” may not be quite as strong as its stellar predecessor, 2016’s “The Bird and the Rifle,” but it’s still a lovely and exquisitely consoling record.
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