“Here is what I know” is the first line of “A Mother Never Rests,” the opening track off country singer Lori McKenna’s latest LP. “Even when she’s sleeping she’s still dreaming about you”–her voice is weary yet sure of wisdoms both received and earned. McKenna dives into the laundry-list of domestic chores and anxieties expected of a mother in red-state America. These songs in country (and hip-hop) are often the only thanks moms receive, but McKenna isn’t interested in merely writing her own polite eulogy. The song climaxes with the double-tracked assertion “When you hurt, she hurts–that’s how it is,” but that rousing finality is followed by a quiet reprise–“That’s how it is, I guess.” The sly rebellion of that musical shrug ties the song together. It also exemplifies the verve and vision McKenna brings to her portraits of small-town American family. The close repeats that one-eye-open opening but in the first person–“Even when you’re sleeping, I’m still dreaming of you.” She makes that anxiety seem blissful. Her motherhood is both achingly personal and universal.
McKenna is most present in the culture (though anonymously perhaps) through her songs “Girl Crush” and “Humble and Kind,” turned into major hits by country acts Little Big Town and Tim McGraw respectively. “Girl Crush” was that rare treasure–a genuinely subversive Top 40 song, not for some partisan refurbishing of cultural tropes, but for empathetic inquiry into human foibles that Big Country can’t touch. The song recounts the attraction and resentments of the female narrator towards her ex-lover’s new bae. The chorus–“I’ve got a girl crush/ Hate to admit it…” caused something of a stir. I remember a friend reassuring me (and herself) that the song was not about lesbianism. I can’t help but think, though. that both of us walked away with quietly broadened hearts and minds. Sometimes when I think of McKenna I think with a chuckle of those Marxist screenwriters in the Coen brother’s Hail, Ceasar! sneaking radical subtexts into the usual Hollywood fare. McKenna’s no ideologue, so it’s an indicator of how far down modern bro-country has slunk that her injection of some basic humanism into the mainstream is so startling.
Song-for-song, her 2016 album Bird and the Rifle still packs the biggest punch. From the opening line it set itself out–“I get dressed in the dark each day/You used to think that was so sweet… By six A.M. I’m in the car driving.” Those lines echo pre-dawn commutes past cornfields when half-conscious heads scope out their surroundings (both outside and in). McKenna probed quiet in-between moments of a working class struggle that’s concrete yet fluid enough to seem like an all-American condition. The song evokes Iris Dement’s eternal “Easy’s Getting Harder Every Day.” But McKenna also goes beyond that song’s aching lament. What she lacks in Dement’s focused anger she makes up in a willingness to move beyond spousal estrangement. Perhaps because she lacks Dement’s fundamentalist scars, she’s able to–nay, insists on–ploughing her material and existential fortunes alongside her partner.
You can’t pin her songs down to the purely autobiographical. Recurring tropes appear enough, however, to provide a basic arc to her primordial romance. “We Were Cool,” also off Bird and the Rifle, is my favorite (because personally relatable) origin story. In it, she probes the memory of a small-town high school romance, complete with appropriate old-school signifiers and all (though nowadays that means “Smells Like Teen Spirit”!). The song wafts atop sun-drenched summer airs like a heady first kiss or cigarette. But then before the final refrain of “Man, we were cool” comes the clench—“We had a baby on the way the year our friends started school.” The song unconsciously echoes Gwendolyn Brooks’ “We Real Cool.” Both feature lovely, callow youth thumbing their noses at systems made to destroy them. Not that they’ve fully sussed the terrors of their predicament. The song closes with “But then dreams fade into the everblue/And time just slips away from you.” Atop a bubbly melody, McKenna authentically plumbs depths of melancholy worthy of Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl.” Even if it’s not the soundtrack of her own life, the song is real enough to signify as truth.
Trawling down these caverns of regret, though, holds its own real-world dangers. Van himself never looked back on the stalker-ish vibe of his biggest hit. And as the Country half of the country ruminates on What Could Have Been—atop women and the vulnerable–it takes real sensitivity and an active bullshit meter to pull off this kind of thing. It seems that women artists can more honestly navigate such terrain. Indeed, McKenna’s female narrators explore the psyche of their male subjects (and partners) in ways that might be foreign or inaccessible to their inspirations. John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats has said of his own narrators that they’re revealing more of themselves in a three-minute song than most could bear to personally discover in three years. The distilled song allows a thunderbolt of insight beyond simple self-assertion. Songwriters nowadays capable of this going past the self skew unmistakably female, and McKenna‘s in the top tier. She even represents male allure better than most men can market themselves. Tyler Childer’s recent cross-faded, chauvinistic blusterings (to choose an alt-country comparison) don’t say as much in an album as McKenna’s simple “I was sitting on his right/ On his left was a fresh tattoo.”
McKenna’s fictional couple in the psychic arc of her work presumably forge their lives’ broken pieces from that unplanned pregnancy. Together they create an arduous, if fulfilling life. I think of the line a 2007 album of hers takes its title from: “No frills, No fuss/ Perfectly us: unglamorous.” That narrative arc, the American Dream really, is comfort to listeners like myself. Indeed, the basic humanism of her work has the family cycle as its lynchpin—a family that’s grounded in the present but extends to both past and future. But as I consider my own experience as a Millennial, I wonder if that basic story is still feasible. One key to the appeal of McKenna’s primordial family is that it’s not traditionally patriarchal. Her protagonists have a latent depth of feeling that allows them to navigate personal and public life as thinking, if occasionally flawed, equals. This inner life sustains them spiritually through years of bullshit jobs. Desperation, though, eats away at that way of being together. With safety nets cut and steady gigs in short supply, I wonder if such expansive interiority is as readily available to Millennials considering or thrust into parenting. Oftentimes, apparently shrinking resources create equally shrunk notions of solidarity.
I remember myself at eighteen, after learning she’s pregnant, weighing the coming demands upon myself and her while waiting in a grocery store checkout line. We both worked fast-food jobs with few alternatives. As I clutched my EBT card with sweaty palm I nervously conjured up what, in retrospect, amounted to a neo–fascistic vision of patriarchal family as some categorical imperative. The dream of traditional family life as holy vocation proved a balm against the anxieties of the moment. The desperation of my circumstances demanded an equally extreme psychic framework. Luckily, the dream lasted all of two days. Our little family just couldn’t support the hysterical idyll I wished to impose upon it. Our union didn’t possess enough dignity or material possibility for me to find resonance in traditional depictions of family. Starting a family (especially early) already causes a temporary (?) dip of resources. McKenna’s couple are decidedly working class, but it seems nowadays their experience of lived mutuality might only be available to the middle class. Economic disruption is now undercutting many working-class adults capacity to be the proverbial “good-enough” parents.
McKenna’s (and the listener’s) crisis of relevance mirrors the culture-at-large’s crisis of representation. Depictions of class and binding social systems have largely been abandoned. Instead, we’ve inherited the individual hustler as basic unit of society. Each are alike in the ascending hierarchy of hustle—from the scrappy CEO cutting departments of (human) waste—to the bootstrap Fiverr(er) devouring their lunch of coffee and woe. This devolution into neo-liberal mimetics has duly led to an entire generation’s collapse of self-understanding. It’s important not to overcompensate for anti-Millennial sentiment by saying my generation is the most screwed generation ever. However, recent dwindling of opportunity has precisely coincided with that representational collapse—leading to a decidedly postmodern inability to articulate our basic conditions, needs, and desires. You’ll find glimpses of reality—paranoid desperation brought on by work in The Americans, vulnerable narcissism in Girls, disappearance of the physical world itself in Ready Player One. But few offerings gel the disparate themes and observations into a recognizable whole for Millennials. (Andre Techine’s The Girl on the Train is one happy exception, but it’s foreign so it doesn’t count…) Millennials don’t even have the will to demand an honest self-portrait—our nerves are so frazzled we can only stand being flattered. We’re left with a culture that, though occasionally charming, has little to say about what’s like to be alive now.
Where does that leave pop tropes we’ve used to understand ourselves for the last half-century? Country, in particular, depends in its meaning-making on a generational through-line. But late-capitalism has revealed itself to be a greater destroyer of family values than supposed cultural Marxists could ever dream of. When there aren’t living wages to be earned, families are forced to extend shelter to children long past anything the culture’s prepped us for. And the dazed, receiving parents are often at an extreme ideological remove from their Millennial hangers-on. The elders possess at least minimal capital and clamor for Trumpian authoritarian capitalism while Millennials want free college, or basic universal income, or whatever. Children become hateful in the eyes of the parent—untold squalid little domestic scenes play out daily in a country told to expect the imminent “sharing economy.”
In an era of the great partitioning, when familial divides seem to mirror class divisions, McKenna’s anthems arrive as a humanist relief. But as anthems, their inspiration also informs how we live and think. McKenna’s fortune-favors-the-brave sense of possibility might lead younger audiences toward an unattainable image of domesticity. McKenna’s music of sustainability holds too many pleasures to be discarded as reflective of a lost era. Her life lessons can be integrated into broader ideal of solidarity and humane relations between generations. But we must combat a certain automatic conservatism of narrative that assumes what holds for one generation must be true for the next.
“People Get ,Old” is the lead single of McKenna’s latest album, The Tree. “Someone said youth is wasted on the young” the song starts out, and throughout it comments on aging with the distilled wisdom of generations (read: cliches). But it’s also a marvelous success. She details the lifespan in dizzying leaps atop a descending chromatic guitar figure—it’s as if old sayings have risen again and begun to walk the earth as giants reclaiming their ancient abode.
Houses need paint, winters bring snow
Nothing’ says “love” like a band of gold
Babies grow up and houses get sold
And that’s how it goes
Time is a thief, pain is a gift
The past is the past, it is what it is
Every line on your face tells a story somebody knows
First time through, I flashed on David Foster Wallace’s “great and terrible truths” beneath cliches. But then I thought what a joy and privilege it must be to watch your life fall into the rhythms of a happy cliche. McKenna, singing indirectly across generational divides, teaches us that that in itself is something worth fighting for.