The Tree’s Stark Beauty

Lori McKenna says that if she hadn’t become a songwriter, she would have been an office administrator. “I used to work for my dad doing customer service,” she says, “and I always thought I’d be good at that kind of job.” She didn’t start writing songs until she was 13: “The first song I wrote was a country song about Barbie,” she laughs. Thank goodness McKenna continued writing songs; numerous country artists are also grateful: Reba McEntire, Alison Krauss, Faith Hill, and Keith Urban are just a few of the artists that have recorded her songs. In 2017 she became the first female Songwriter of the Year in the Academy of Country Music, and her songs “Girl Crush” (Little Big Town) and “Humble and Kind” (Tim McGraw) were awarded Grammys. These awards simply recognize what her fans have known all along: McKenna writes songs that might sound simple but that are layered with emotions and that echo the complexity of daily living.

On her eleventh album, The Tree, McKenna once again delivers stunningly beautiful songs, filled with glimpses of human foibles, the folly of human desire, the raw yearning of young love, the anger that accompanies loss of control, and the interconnectedness and rootedness of family. The title track opens sparely with acoustic guitar before McKenna joins in with her vocals. The song’s poignant plainness celebrates steady growth and the rootedness of place. Like the tree, no matter how far the singer journeys from her family or from her community, she discovers that the values of her family and community are planted deeply in her. Just as trees grow and change, the singer grows and changes. “I’ve tried leaving and being/Something I was never meant to be/And I’ve tried staying, ever changing/And standing in one place/Just like that tree/No matter how many times I’ve denied it/The apple never falls far from the tree.” The propulsive country rocker, “Young and Angry Again,” fueled by producer Dave Cobb’s insistent lead riffs, captures the energetic yearning to return to a time in life that was fueled by passion, desire, and dreams. “Lighting cigarettes just to hold ’em/Up in the air singing Never Get Old/Throwing bottles at a high school chain link fence/Telling yourself all you’ll ever need
Is a heart full of fire and gasoline/I could use a little of who I was in that way back when/To be young and angry again.”

The spare folk ballad “The Lot Behind St. Mary’s” recalls an innocence under which questions about faith, love, sex, and guilt lie. “It was funny to have my son Chris in the studio playing on this song, even though he’s grown, of course,” she laughs, “because I kept thinking ‘What if he thinks this is about his mom and dad?’” The song came about, McKenna says, because she had just started reading the Springsteen autobiography. “He talks about growing up surrounded by God. Church was a big part of my life, too, especially when I was younger. Springsteen made me realize what being a big part of that community meant to me. It was like being at the crossroads of growing up and also being judged by the rules of the community.” McKenna captures this feeling in the song’s chorus: “And I know we can’t go back in time/But every now and then you look at me/As if to wonder why we can’t/Get back to the love we made before our teenage dreams were buried/In the lot behind St. Mary’s.”

The album closes, appropriately enough, with a song about the struggles, successes, and desires of songwriting and singing. A starkly beautiful song, “Like Patsy Would” sounds as if the songwriter is sitting up late one night with loneliness, as well as the ache for solidarity with other writers, coursing through her heart. The chorus, which dominates the song — its repeated three times, and there are only two verses — captures the singer’s desire: “I wanna pray it like Jesus is listening/I wanna play it like I’m made of strings on wood/I wanna write it down like Hemingway/Like it’s the last damn thing I’ll ever say/And try to sing it like Patsy would.”

McKenna writes with clear-eyed vision about the challenges all of us face in life: one partner taking care of the other as they age, the loss of youthful freedom and desire when it’s subsumed in a workaday world, the yearning for home when it seems lost to us, the desire to be rooted even as roots are severed by distance, time, or estrangement, the freedom won by escaping from a worn relationship, and the happiness and love rooted in the daily moments shared by family. There’s an unrelenting, aching beauty at the heart of The Tree because McKenna once again proves just how good she is at capturing the joys and sorrows that fill our hearts and lives.