Canadian singer/songwriter and actress Mackenzie Porter is set to release her 19 track debut album Nobody’s Born With a Broken Heart via Big Loud Records this Friday April 26th. 8 of the 19 songs including the title track Nobody’s Born With a Broken Heart are available now.

Pre-save her debut album Nobody’s Born With a Broken Heart here and get 8 tracks now!

Hailing from a small town in Alberta, Canada, Mackenzie has had quite the career already as both an actress and a singer/songwriter. Mackenzie played a lead role in the sci-fi series Travelers and has appeared in music videos such as I Was Jack and You Were Diane by Jake Owen and also Dustin Lynch’s Thinking ‘bout You in which she is also Lynch’s duet partner in the actual song.

Mackenzie Porter and her husband Jake Etheridge (TV’s Nashville) have recently welcomed their first baby, a girl named Bowen. So not only has Mackenzie been busy creating and releasing her debut album but also enjoying life as a new mum and facing all kinds of new challenges.

Porter signed her record deal about six years ago and since then has released EP’s and singles but April 26th 2024 marks the first time she has ever released a full album. You may be curious as to why it has taken so long for her to bring out an album in those years? We ask Mackenzie all about that in our interview below!

We loved talking with Mackenzie, she is very sweet and really fun to talk with! I could have talked mum life and music all day long!

Enjoy!

Hi – How are you?

I am good!

Congratulations on being a mum! How are you? Apart from feeling of amazing having a baby, how are you?

I feel good! I was saying to my husband that there’s days when it feels so smooth when she goes down for her nap and eats really well and then there’s days when it’s hard and I am like “oh my gosh, she’s really fussy” and we don’t know what’s going on, is she not feeling well? I have definitely learned that there’s not a lot of planning that can be done and that you’ve got to go with the flow a little bit. She is so amazing! It’s more than I have felt in my life for anybody! Obviously the love is so insane. Just learning to be a mum is sort of day by day thing.

Definitely a day by day kind of thing and planning goes out of the window!

I literally will be like “ok, if I get up at 5am, I can get all of this done by this time” and then it’s no, if she decides to cry for an hour I have to put it all aside and tend to her. I think it’s the time of my life where I am meant to have these moments.

How is Jake with being a dad?

Oh my gosh he is so good, he is better than I am. He is super patient. I had to have a c-section so the first five days he did all the diaper changes and all of the burping and things like that. He kind of took over because I couldn’t really do a lot of that stuff because I was healing still. He was more confident with changing a diaper than I was at first.

It’s a hard recovery having a C section! I had two!

Yeah! The first four days are rough and then it got better really fast, for me anyways.

Dads don’t hear the cries and screams the same way the mother does. You may think he is doing things better but that’s not true! I can tell you you’re doing amazing and they really don’t hear the cries the same way we do!

It’s funny because I have a show coming up and so it will be like the first night that I am not going to be here. It’s in a couple of weeks. He (husband) sleeps through the cries!! I am like “how are you going to wake up?” This is so crazy but I am going to have an app on my phone and if he doesn’t wake up, I’m going to have to call him!

Oh wow! It’s hard but again congratulations and I have been looking at all the instagram photos and they are so sweet. Making me broody a bit but then I am like “Nope! I am done at two”.

Hahaha that’s what everybody says, the baby fever is intense for a lot of people.

It is! Has she inspired any songs yet?

I haven’t actually written a song since I have had her because till right now I haven’t been working. I know that my songwriting is going to change drastically. It will have more depth to it and I will be writing from a different perspective!

I am dying for an honest mums country album so if you’re in the mood to write one, I will definitely be buying it haha!

It’s amazing because my perspective of other mums has totally changed. I am in awe, especially of people who have more than one kid, I am like “how?”. How people have more than one kid and still work, I don’t know how people do it but they do, women are pretty incredible!

I agree!

Let’s talk about the album that you have recently released – ‘Nobody’s Born With a Broken Heart’. It has been six years since you signed the record deal and have now finally released an album! It must feel like another baby?

When I first signed, never would I have thought that it would take this long to put out a full record. We have put out EP’s and singles and little bundles but when I first had the record deal, I jumped on a tv series for three years so that took up those first three years. Then after that I had to develop I guess and build and figure out who I was and figure out what I wanted to say. Then finally after years and years of writing and trying things and figuring out my music and my sound, here we are! 19 songs and ones that I’m really really proud of on this project.

So in a way, as you said you had time to develop and figure out who you were as an artist – despite it being likely frustrating to wait so long , do you feel somewhat grateful as it’s probably a better album this way?

Yeah! There’s things like of course I feel a lot more honest in songwriting and I feel like I am in a better place and then there’s honestly times where I wish I could have put out more music a little sooner too. The industry is that, sometimes you don’t get to make all the decisions because there is a whole team of people like the record company and so on. I do still really trust those people and I do feel like we all think that this was the time and these were the songs.

Yes and I am loving it and it’s being released in two halves is that correct?

Yes! So we kind of did it in a weird way! There was never the intention to have it be this big, a 19 song record, but 8 songs are out now so a lot of familiarity with those songs and then I have another one coming out and then the rest of the record. So it won’t be 19 in one day which would be kind of intense!

Did you narrow down to 19? Were there even more tracks and some didn’t quite make the album?

Yeah there’s still a couple where I am like “dang, I kind of wish that was on the record” but maybe record number 2 or 3 and we are already starting to work on that!

Oh amazing! How did the song selection process come to be as you also have some outside songs in there! How do you choose an outside song?

When we were narrowing it down, I had picked my top ones that I had written and then the label would send me songs or some of my friends even would say “hey, you should listen to this song I wrote”. It’s kind of the Nashville way. There was one called ‘Pay Me Back In Change’ and this young singer (Emma Klein) wrote it by herself and I heard it and I was like “I really need this song on my record so much”. So we just asked her “can I cut this song? It feels like something that means a lot to me, I have been in this situation before and I think it’s beautifully written” I wanted to put my voice on it and my sound. That is kind of how we like pitched the outside songs and then went down and picked out of all my songs and the outside songs.

What song was the biggest challenge to write?

I don’t know if any of them were super challenging. It depends because sometimes the best songs flow out really, really fast and sometimes the best songs take multiple times. ‘Pick Up’ we wrote three or four tiles and ‘These Days’ we wrote three or four times. I don’t think they were challenging because you know there’s something good there! It’s almost like a puzzle piece. The challenging writes are the ones where you are like “oh I don’t really like this” and I feel like it’s not going anywhere but you want to follow through. The ones that you can see the angle but you don’t know how to get there, I think that’s more fun than challenging?

How did you pick the bookends of the album?

So for me I already knew the closing would be the title track of the record (Nobody’s Born With a Broken Heart). Lyrically that kind of sums up the record and it ends on this line that says “maybe this love will put back the parts because nobody’s born with a broken heart”. The idea of like there’s hope and that this love of my daughter will heal a lot of parts in myself that are broken. I knew that was going to be the way that I wanted this project to wrap up because I felt that wrapped it up. To open it, we picked ‘Easy to Miss’ because musically it felt like the first song. I listened to the whole thing and I thought “If I was going to listen to a record, what song feels like the first song of the record musically, like the first few notes then concept wise, shares what the rest of the record is going to feel like”. I feel like ‘Easy to Miss’ did that!

Yes and it flows well from end to starting it again! I do pay attention to those things haha! It shows there has been a lot of work put into the album because I do notice it sometimes when an album is rushed!

Thank you so much, I appreciate that because there was a lot work that went into it. It’s always scary to release it out into the world and what are people going to think? It’s scary to work on something so hard and care about something so much and then put it out there. So it means a lot you saying that to me.

You’re very welcome!

What is the most memorable part for you making this album!

Hmmm, I have never been asked that question! Being in the studio with Joey Moi my producer. A lot of these songs are rough demos when I write them or when these other songwriters write them! They kind of are a base line of what the song could be like and then to go to the studio and have all these Nashville musicians come in and play what they hear and what their creative brain brings to the project is like my favourite thing. To hear this rough demo and what we build that day and then what I get to sing on top of. That is probably my favourite part of making a record.

Were there any particular songs that did sound completely different from the rough demo to full production? To the point where you were like “wow! I didn’t know it could sound like that?”

Honestly a lot of them! There is a song in there called ‘Nightingale’ that I love the way that it turned from the demo to the real track. We did a lot of fiddle and banjo and more wooden instruments and some of the production was a little more pop when I did the demos so to hear it put into this other voice and this other tone is very cool.

‘Nightingale’ is going to be released with the second half isn’t it?

Yes! On the 26th (April)

That’s actually the song that I am most intrigued about! That is about being in Nashville isn’t it? It actually works alongside a question that I did have for you which was my wanting to know what your first week in Nashville as an artist was like after moving there? Is the song in relation to that at all?

That is kind of what that song is about, just being that girl who is so naive and like wholeheartedly doesn’t question what she is doing, her heart or her voice, that’s kind of the song. For me, going through ten years of being in this town and kind of like being beaten down a little bit which everybody does in this industry. It makes you question what you are saying or your music or your art. You kind of start carrying around the scars from that and that song is about wanting to be this girl that first moved to Nashville and never listened to what anybody else said and never questioned what she was making. That is who I kind of want to try to be again when I am making music!

Is Nashville a completely different lifestyle from Canada or are there a lot of similarities?

I think it is. I grew up in a super super small town in the country and then I moved to Vancouver, to L.A and then to Nashville. It is like a little full circle where it went from country small town ish, big city and then back to a big city with a small town heart kind of thing which I love! It’s a really beautiful balance of both!

Oh I love that and there’s a song in there somewhere!

You said that you were filming when you were writing some of this album, was that for ‘Travelers’?

Yes!

Because I loved that show!

Oh really? Oh cool! So right when I signed my record deal, within – my gosh, two weeks? I booked that series. I remember calling the head of the label and saying “hey, I just booked this Netflix show, what do you think? I know I just signed this huge deal with you guys but do you think I should go do it? What’s everyone’s thoughts and opinions?” I wanted to be able to do both. He said that I should absolutely do it and that we would write songs in the middle and they would fly people up to Canada and we did that! It definitely slowed down the process of me putting out music but it was also a very cool experience and one I would never take back because I loved being on that show!

I binged it when I was up all night, every night with my son when he was a baby and it was such a great show and kept me sane haha!

Oh really?

Yeah and Marcie and Trevor (minor spoilers) were my favourite characters. I loved how your Character Marcie opened the first ever scene and closed the last ever scene!

Yep! It was a cool character to play because as you know, I got to play characters within her character. That was cool to experiment that and try different things as an actor!

So which writers came out to Canada?

Emily Weisband, Laura Veltz, and more, they all flew out to Vancouver to write with me which I am so grateful for because it’s such a long trip up there! Some of them have families so to come out and write with me was very cool.

I love Laura Veltz. What was it like working with her?

She is so amazing! I have known her for a long time but she text me the other day and said “how are you doing as a mum?” Because she’s a mum and she knows that those first weeks can be intense with no sleep and the shock of “woah, there’s somebody else that now everything revolves around” she asked if I was hanging in and it was nice to have another mum who is so successful and has such a big career but is also such an amazing mum check in with me and ask how I was doing!

Does Jake (husband) have a favourite song off of the album?

So there is a song on there called ‘Confession’ and he said “that’s the song, that’s the song that is going to blow up” and I will play him another one. There’s a song on there called ‘Sucker Punch’ and he is like “no THAT’S the song”. He is so supportive! I think he is a little biased with husband opinion. He loves them all, he loves more emotional, sad songs. He is a little emotional boy so anything emo is his jam.

Haha that’s so sweet!

Tell me about working with Dustin Lynch because I believe you had to audition and a blind audition for that duet part on? (Thinking ‘bout you)

Yeah I did! So he basically sent out a thing to all these artists in town or the labels I guess saying something like “hey out of your females, who do you think will sound good on this and did they want to put down a vocal and I will see which one I like best” so he got a whole folder of singer A to I don’t know how many he got of all these vocals with no name beside them just A, B, C, D and so on. I guess his team and he picked my vocal. He told me that he heard it and just felt like there was emotion connected to it! He picked the vocal, found out it was me and then went on my instagram and was like who is this girl? To see if I was cool or not haha and then he followed me and that was when I was like “oooh, he followed me, does that mean something?” And a couple of weeks later he called me.

Oh that must have been a painful two weeks? Seeing him follow you but not knowing you’ve got the gig! Ooh that’s kind of mean haha!

I know, it felt like a month. Then I had to go into the studio with him and re-cut it in front of him. The part is not an easy part to sing, it’s really high. I knew I had to go in there and basically re-audition in front of him. It actually went really well and it was cute that day because he showed up wearing my merch just to break the ice. I said “did my manager send you my merch?” And he said “no, I went on your website and bought it”. What a nice way to make me feel comfortable and get a laugh out of me right away!

That is really sweet! Will you be coming back to the UK? I know it’s difficult at the moment with your daughter but any plans?

You know it’s funny because my manager actually before I had Bowen, he was like “hey, we have these tour dates, it’s in the UK, it’s two weeks after the baby is born but maybe we can all fly over there..”. I was like “I cannot fly with a two week old baby to the UK” even when I get there it would be like and then what? Get on a tour bus with a baby? But yes, I am definitely coming back when she is older!

Gosh, two weeks? I didn’t even find the strength or will to leave the house properly within two weeks of mine being born haha!

Well we can’t wait to have you back! Thanks so much for talking today and I can’t wait to hear the second half of the album, take care and enjoy the baby phase!

Thank you and thanks so much, I appreciate you chatting to me today!

About Mackenzie Porter

MacKenzie Porter was always destined for stardom. And now, her small-town dreams are becoming a reality. Hailing from a small town in Alberta, Canada, both ranching and music were in her blood. Six generations offamily members lived on the same piece of land – a colony of musicians who also tended to ranchland. Hergrandmother was a skilled piano player, and her father was a guitarist who played in a band.

Growing up in the‘90s, she listened to country radio – Garth Brooks, The Chicks, and fellow Canadians Terri Clark and ShaniaTwain – from her dad’s truck. “That’s kind of how I fell in love with music.” At 4, she began music lessons – violin, piano, singing. She hated practicing, but loved performing. Withencouragement from her mother, she stuck with it. “I would cry so much practicing. But then when I got onstage, it was like I was a different person.”

Porter also hit her stride in musical theater and fell in love withacting. At 13, after seeing an ad in the newspaper for a film and TV acting class that required her to be 18 orolder, she convinced the instructor to coach her individually. During high school, she’d often leave school tofilm projects “45 R.P.M.,” “The Other Woman,” “Christmas in Wonderland,” and “Wild Roses.”When she graduated, Porter was still playing with the family band and booking acting projects, but with a moveto Vancouver at 18, she found herself stuck. “I just could not land another job! it was the first time I had lived onmy own and I was in my first real relationship. I think I was going through an awkward or insecure stage, andI’m sure that read in audition rooms on camera.” Porter needed another creative outlet, so she began writingsongs and enrolled in a recording and production school to learn how to use Logic Pro and Pro Tools.

Porter spent her time waitressing and doing auditions during the day, going to school in the evenings andrecording music in a studio in the middle of the night/ This is where she was able to experiment with her soundand realized her penchant for storytelling was a natural fit for country music. “That’s what I know best.”

In 2013, she sent a handful of songs to Sony Music Publishing in Canada and landed a publishing deal. Soon, shebegan making trips down to Nashville to write with anyone she could including Emily Weisband, ParkerWelling, Matt McGinn, and Dylan Altman. Eventually, she saved enough money and made a permanent moveto the Tennessee capital in 2014. Immersed in the Nashville scene, now label mate Dallas Smith saw Porter perform and immediately sent a textto producer Joey Moi. After several studio and hang sessions with Moi, Big Loud Records coming out to seeone of Porter’s shows in 2016, and a few days later, she was offered her first record deal. She also was finally seeing the fruits of her labor pay off in acting – she landed a role on the sci-fi Netflix series Travelers. While filming in Vancouver over the course of three years, she would work with songwriters whowould fly up on the weekends. “That kind of slowed the process of what they would say was my developmentyears.”

It wasn’t until 2018 that she released her first single since the label signing, “About You.” “I was veryanxious and stressed about the process being slowed down because of filming. I felt that I had written a lot ofsongs in the off-season that were really good, but I really trusted Joey. He has been my champion since dayone.” The song hit No. 1 on Canada’s country charts. Meanwhile, another song that was released in 2019, “These Days,” was taking off organically in Canada tounprecedented acclaim for the burgeoning star. Because of that momentum, the Big Loud team set “These Days” up for impact at U.S. country radio in 2020 as Porter’s debut single in the stateside format. She started a radio tour promoting the track, but the COVID-19 pandemic halted its growth. “I couldn’t go into the stations, so they said we had to pull the song because we couldn’t put the kind of support behind it that was needed. So the I was at home.” It was another “heartbreak moment” for Porter. But just when her luck seemed to be running out with music, a blind audition to cut a vocal on a Dustin Lynch’s next single gave her hope. Porter landed the feature on his 2020 smash “Thinking ’Bout You,” a 2X platinum,six-week No. 1 that became the longest running top 10 single since the country airplay chart launched in 1990and the most played song of 2022. “Things just snowballed.

It was crazy!”2020 was one of the modern world’s most infamous years – compiling that unexpected success of “Thinking‘Bout You” with the inspiration and down time that the pandemic brought, it also became the year that Porter began writing what would become her Big Loud Records debut album, Nobody’s Born With A Broken Heart, produced again by diamond-certified champion Moi. The ambitious 19-track project, which culminates six years of writing, is teeming with Porter’s magneticswagger and confessional country-pop anthems as she mines the facets of heartbreak that have shaped and shifted her life. “Every time I tell people that [the album is about heartbreak], they’re like, ‘well, you’re in arelationship and you’re happy.’ I am, of course, but there’s a lot of different elements of heartbreak in life.” That’s included devastating career lows, her mother’s breast cancer diagnosis, and the rollercoaster of marriage. “I’m a dramatic person by nature, so when I think about writing, I go back to those moments of being hurt that I remember so viscerally, and that’s how the songs come out.” What initially sparked the project was “Easy to Miss,” where Porter grapples with the uphill battle of getting over a breakup. “Well it’s hard waking up in the morning and it’s hard getting sleep at night, and it’s hard when I’m reeling staring at the ceiling with you on my mind,” she sings with a honeyed lilt.“Confession,” a stripped-back, sweeping power ballad, tackles comparing your relationships to your first love.“I’d scream it from the mountain tops so everyone would know / I’d hold on to you for dear life I’d never let yougo,” she laments as her vocals tower over a cinematic chorus. Over steel pedal and the twinkling of guitar strings, “Sucker Punch” revisits the strife and infidelity of a relationship she thought would last with a raw and glossy flourish.

Porter shines in particular on the album’s kiss-offs. “Bet You Break My Heart” is a playful, self-fulfilled prophecythat channels a brassy attitude. “You’re trouble for me, boy / Like I can already see it’s written in the neonstars,” she teases. “Have Your Beer” evokes the sassiness of Speak Now-era Taylor Swift, as she takes aim at a lover who continually tries to take advantage of her. “You can’t have your beer and drink it, too,” she declares in the sticky chorus. On “Young at Heart,” Porter yearns to be the bright-eyed, ambitious person she was before she became jaded.She also reflects on the heart-shattering disappointments she experienced trying to make it as a singer-songwriter in Nashville on the buoyant “Nightingale.” “The song is about just being the girl that I was when I moved to Nashville, who literally thought that anything was possible and that I was going to be on the radio and a star. I wanted to think like her again.”On the final song of Nobody’s Born With A Broken Heart – the title track – Porter turns her storytelling inward. “I wanted a song that literally started the day I was born until today and spanned the story of my life.” Throughout the breezy, fiddle-flanked number, she details her own journey from innocence to being gradually wrecked by the weight of the world – and becoming all the better for it. And now that she’s had her first child, it’s taken on new meaning. “My little girl is gonna come into this world with no negative thoughts or preconceived notions, and she’s going to have relationships and experience heartbreak. And I hope she does, because that’s what shows that you loved and that you lived.”And for Porter, that’s what Nobody’s Born With A Broken Heart is all about.