Lori McKenna

From her Boston residence Lori McKenna has established a thriving parallel path as one of Nashville’s most sought-after songwriters while sustaining her own steady output as a recording artist. Four independent collections of folk and Americana had already appeared before her songwriting career accelerated in 2005, after which placements with Faith Hill, Carrie Underwood, and Keith Urban drew wider attention to her catalog. Through the following decade she secured multiple major cuts, among them Tim McGraw’s “Humble and Kind” and Little Big Town’s “Girl Crush,” and earned recognition as an award-winning writer. Beginning with the 2016 album The Bird & the Rifle she launched a three-record partnership with producer Dave Cobb that produced her first Grammy nomination for a project under her own name. Following the July 2020 release of The Balladeer she turned toward shorter-form projects and joint singles.

McKenna grew up in a household steeped in music and began composing as a teenager, yet she did not step onto Boston’s folk stages until her late twenties. Paper Wings and Halo introduced her work in 2000; she then aligned with Signature Sounds and delivered three further albums within four years, among them the widely praised 2004 set Bittertown. A publishing arrangement with Harlan Howard Music reflected her emerging reputation, but the decisive shift arrived when Faith Hill recorded three of her compositions for the 2005 album Fireflies. That project reached the summit of both the country and pop charts, prompting Warner Bros. to reissue Bittertown later the same year.

Although the Warner relationship produced only one additional studio album, 2007’s Unglamorous, a fresh publishing contract with Universal Music arrived in 2008. By decade’s end further cuts had been recorded by Tim McGraw, Mandy Moore, and Vance Gilbert. McKenna kept issuing her own recordings as well, earning praise for Lorraine (2011), Massachusetts (2013), and Numbered Doors (2014). Continued demand brought collaborations with Keith Urban, Hunter Hayes, Alison Krauss, and Little Big Town; Hunter Hayes’s “I Want Crazy” topped Billboard’s pop chart, while Little Big Town’s “Girl Crush” secured her first Grammy and CMA trophies. She has maintained her primary residence in Boston throughout, traveling regularly to Nashville for sessions yet remaining outside the city’s central orbit.

A 2015 agreement with Creative Nation led to work with Dave Cobb, whose production approach had already shaped acclaimed releases by Sturgill Simpson and Jason Isbell. Their first joint effort, the more intimate 2016 album The Bird & the Rifle, included McKenna’s own reading of “Humble and Kind,” the country hit she had previously supplied to Tim McGraw; that single brought her a second straight CMA Song of the Year award. The Tree followed in 2018, again under Cobb’s guidance, and featured Mellotron contributions from her son Christopher McKenna on the track “The Lot Behind St. Mary’s.” The Balladeer, released in July 2020, drew deeply from personal experience and marked the final installment of the Cobb trilogy. Holiday material surfaced on the 2021 EP Christmas Is Right Here, after which she began a sequence of collaborative EPs with Luke Laird and Barry Dean. The three volumes of The Songwriter Tapes, issued in early 2023, presented refreshed versions of songs the trio had originally written for other artists. Later that year she joined Caroline Spence for “The Next Good Time” and Hillary Lindsey for “Killing Me.”