(2023) Lori McKenna - 1988
Review:
The songs on Lori McKenna‘s latest album, 1988, were largely written during lockdown, though not in creative isolation. The album, produced by Dave Cobb, who also plays keys and guitars, takes its title from the year she married her husband, Gene. As that suggests, it’s a reflective affair about family and friendships, opening with the guitar-chiming Prine-like The Old Woman in Me, a reversal of the familiar letter to my younger self in which she speaks to an imagined version of her older self as she sings, “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” and being content with who she’s become (“The old woman in me, she don’t wanna go back in time/Thinks her 50s might have been her prime”). The connection across the years continues with the slow-walking rhythm and soaring chorus of Happy Children, a co-write with her son, Chris, a benediction and words of advice from parent to child (“When you’re young you wanna be old, when you’re old you wanna be young/I wish you all the best in case this life’s the only one …I hope you find your true north/I hope you make some dreams come true…I hope you get up every time you fall/And you get back in again/But if you only get one thing that’s a given/I hope you have happy children”). The second co-write comes with the Nashville country-pop Killing Me, on which she collaborates with Luke Laird and Hillary Lindsey, the latter singing harmonies, which, utilising a familiar country tactic of wordplay, is about being frustrated with someone who pessimistically never goes out without an umbrella as who always sees the glass half empty (“Even when I’m always pouring, pouring the wine”), summed up in the catchy refrain “Would it kill you to be happy/‘Cause trying to make you happy/Trying to make you happy is killing me”. The second Laird co-write, this time with Barry Dean, Days Are Honey, a song about a relationship enduring through life’s ups and downs (“Some days are dust, some days are diamonds/Some days are fallen, some days are flying/Some days are broke, some days are money/Some days are dirt, some days are honey”) and the wisdom of “When you think that you know everything/Ain’t the beauty in what you don’t”). Again on the marital theme, written with her other son Brian, the catchily strummed, steady rolling title track is a love letter to her husband (“I’m thanking God for the plans He made/Looking back on those early days/Half scared to death, half stupid brave/I hope you understand /I’ve been your biggest fan since 1988”). The cover sports an image of an angel with a 1988 tattoo, which is, in fact, the one her daughter got to celebrate her parents’ marriage. It’s not all sunshine, however. Backed by chiming guitar, Growing Up reflects on the bittersweet and tough nature of getting old, inspired in part by phone calls and text threads as her closest friends were grieving the loss of their parents, balancing the warm memories of “Making out in backseats behind the Dairy Queen/All the stars we hung above those small-town trees”, with the raw present of, “Now you’re 6 years sober taking your mother to her treatments/She says she wants to see the old house one more time/And you can’t go back any more than she can go back/If you said you didn’t miss it, you’d be lying”. The impact of alcohol is also felt in the Stevie Nicks feel of a Jessie Jo Dillon/Dustin Christensen co-write The Town In Your Heart, which plays like a letter to a sibling or friend who has fallen into its clutches, written by the one left behind, recalling happier days (“an old white church and a Dairy Freeze/A borrowed car and a field of dreams”) and the regrets over what came later (“I wasn’t ready to say goodbye, goodbye/I wasn’t ready to let go when you let go”) with the heartbreaking line “I hope I live on a road in the town in your heart”. In between, set against a backdrop of small two blue-collar hopelessness, it turns to opioid addiction in the slow swaying Wonder Drug and the way prescription drugs can ruin as well as save lives (“I remember you innocent/Now all you are is bones and skin/With your father’s temperament/Still paying off that original sin”), and the dreams and relationships they crush, (“Remember we had it all planned out/A fenced in yard, a job, and some kids/How dare you leave me high and dry now/Thinking somehow, it was something I did/It’s a monster I know it, its fangs started showing/Took more than I ever could give/Why couldn’t love be the wonder drug”). The penultimate Letting People Down returns to perhaps address herself again and the guilty feeling of coming up short (“I hate letting people down and I do it all the time”), though the lines, “Staring at trophies in milk crates/On the floor of a northeastern garage/Wondering how it’s all such a blessing/And why it’s all so damn hard” and “It’s the Massachusetts turnpike/And when I get home, I’ll creep down the hall/Snow in the headlights, they call it a dream/But the world’s flat and I’m falling off”, feel more about the pressures of touring and delivering audience expectations. Co-penned with Ben West and Stephen Wilson Jr, the album ends with The Tunnel, a final strummed swaying reflection on teenage years (“Near the old folk’s home past Page Street and Ash/That patch of woods next to the pink laundromat/The things you learn in middle school, you don’t learn in class/Stole some weed from your uncle so we hopped the fence/By the section 8 housing back when we were best friends”). But, presaged by “Your dad sat on an upside-down bucket in the garage watching westerns/With the sound turned down, a cold beer in his left hand/Your mother called him in for dinner then ate alone”, then echoing The Town In Your Heart with friends going separate ways, (“the road heading south is somebody’s north/Just like somebody’s darkness is somebody’s torch”), some finding a path, others a brick wall, (“Those walls could’ve caved in any second for all that I knew/So I held my breath, said a prayer, and kept running/‘Till the shape of the end took the afternoon sun in /I don’t know how it works or how God picks who gets to get through/It just seems like a lot of life’s been mostly the tunnel for you”), and of the scars we carry with us, (“you’re covered in tattoos, just under the skin/But you’re wearing those long sleeves, so nobody knows”). Thankfully, it closes on a note of hope rather than despair (“There’s a light at the end, I promise my friend, it’s coming”), an uplifting sign-off to an album that is both deeply personal and universally resonant; 1988 is a vintage year, up there with her very best. — folkradio.co.uk
Track List:
01. The Old Woman In Me
02. Happy Children
03. Killing Me (feat. Hillary Lindsey)
04. Days Are Honey
05. 1988
06. Growing Up
07. Wonder Drug
08. The Town In Your Heart
09. Letting People Down
10. The Tunnel
Media Report:
Genre: americana, folk
Country: Stoughton, Massachusetts, USA
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits
Compression mode: Lossless
Writing library: libFLAC 1.2.1 (UTC 2007-09-17)
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