GRAMMY Award-winning singer, songwriter and musician Lori McKenna will release her anticipated new album, 1988, on July 21 via CN Records/Thirty Tigers (pre-order/pre-save here).

McKenna is one of the most sought after songwriters in the Country Music genre and has written hits for the likes of Tim McGraw (Humble and Kind) Little Big Town (Girl Crush) as well as having written with Taylor Swift, Miranda Lambert and many more!

Lori has released a number of sensational albums across the years and this year on July 21st she will release her album 1988.

Produced by GRAMMY Award-winning producer Dave Cobb (Brandi Carlile, Jason Isbell) and recorded at Cobb’s studio in Savannah, GA, 1988—named for the year McKenna married her husband, Gene—serves as a love letter to her family and lifelong friendships. Across these ten compelling tracks, including a songwriting collaboration with her son, Chris (“Happy Children”), McKenna reflects on the experiences, lessons and relationships from her past 35 years.

We caught up with Lori to discuss the album, songwriting life, family, being part of The Love Junkies (songwriting trio Lori McKenna, Hillary Lindsey and Liz Rose) and much more!

Enjoy!

It’s lovely to talk to you, I haven’t seen you since you came over for C2C in 2016.

Oh right yeah! We were suppose to come back in the year of 2020. It was so funny because Liz and Hillary and I were going to come together and Hillary, her daughter is only 7 and was quite young so she had already decided “there is no way I can go, I can’t get stuck somewhere”. Liz and I were still going to go and then of course we didn’t. We decided at that point that we are just going to follow Hillarys lead no matter what because she seems to make the best decisions

I am loving the new album! I want to go straight in and ask about Happy Children because you wrote that with your son?

Yes! This record I am so excited about because I wrote the title track 1988 with my son Brian who’s the oldest and then Happy Children with Chris. I love having adult children. I have always loved all the stages of “ok my kid is doing this now”. We have been so lucky and so just having two kids in the business is fun for me and we’d sit around and talk about songs. New music Fridays we get to cheer each other on haha, it’s really great

What is it like writing with your kids because I have a seven and 2 year old who makes songs up about poop every day! It must be amazing? You must be so proud and it must be so different from writing with anyone else?

It is different in the way that I…and I do find myself doing this, if a co-writer is quiet, I watch myself and make sure that I am not bossing them around, not running the co-write too much. I’m an outside thinker so I’ll just think on the outside and I’ll share with my co-writers. Some people think from the inside obviously and I can sometimes, not roll over those people but get a little bossy! If I am in that room (writer’s room) and I don’t know that person well, I ask “am I being too bossy? Do you want me to do this?”.

With my kids, the funny thing is, the three of us just wrote together like last week in Nashville. We all have different styles. What myself, Liz and Hillary are so good at is championing each other’s strengths and filling up for each other’s weaknesses and obviously, in my opinion with writing, with being creative, your strengths and your weaknesses are almost the same thing! They overlap each other so much and that’s why I love co-writing so much because you can find you ask “how can I help today?” No matter what the job in the song is, how do I help? It was really fun to write with the two of them (sons) because I know them so well, so I think we automatically just fell into our roles. Christopher is already producing a track in his head and Brian is an incredible guitar player so he is moving the chords in a way that I wouldn’t and things like that! They can both be quiet in the way that they’ll follow me being the elder in the room, they’ll follow me lyrically! But if I get something that they are not going to identify with because of an age difference or something then they’ll tell me. It’s really fun! I think that co-writing is one of the greatest gifts of songs in my life. Music and the joy of co-writing. Although I do like to solo write too, I think co-writing has brought me so much joy over the years! I have learned so much about myself from being in the room with somebody else.

That must be nice! It must be nice to have that help with even the little bit of struggle. I remember Natalie Hemby saying for example that she had a title of a song in her head for a very long time and was in a write with Miranda Lambert and she said something like that she had this title ‘White Liar’ in her head but couldn’t get a song out of it and right away Miranda goes into sing “Hey, White Liaaaar, truth comes out a little at a time” and Natalie jokingly replies “I hate you”! Because it came that easy to her!

I have seen Natalie do that, it’s a great thing! You get to see magic! That’s what happened with Girl Crush! I said Girl Crush, I had no idea what Girl Crush was about all I had was the title. I had thought zero about it. Hillary started literally singing the first four lines of that song! I have talked to Hillary about this before, because she is so melodic and I think Liz is a genius too but both Liz and I have talked that the fact there is another level of genius in Hillary. It’s almost like when somebody says to you “Tree” your brain automatically sees a tree but Hillary does that with songs, you say a title and she immediately sees the song! I think that’s what we are all trying to get to and some of us are obviously leaps and bounds over others but the fact that we get to write together and that somebody in the room can have that flow and someone else is in there but you have to dig it out of them or they have to dig it out of themselves – it’s like the greatest teamwork ever!

I love the new album and love the writers on it too and that’s what I love about country music, we all care about the writers as much as we do the singer!

Oh I love that! It’s so true isn’t it? I feel like I have been doing that since I was a little kid!

What would you like to share about the new album?

I got to make it again with Dave Cobb and this is the fourth record that we have made together! We track live, the way he tracks with me we track everything live. Chris Powell played the drums, Brian Allen plays bass and then Dave and I usually sit across from each other and he plays acoustic along with me. Then he overdubbed all the electric guitars before we went in. We recorded it in his studio in Savannah. I think it was the first record that was finished in this new studio that he’s building. Before we went in I called him and said “I want to make a rock record Dave, I want electric guitars, I want to make the record that I would have made in the 90’s” and then I realised that I was making records in the 90’s haha. That 90’s stuff that I grew up with, those records that sit in my heart like Gin Blossoms, Sheryl Crow, all of that stuff that still sounds so refreshing to me. He was like “sure, we can do that” and everyone is teasing me about the fact that I call this my rock record because I know it’s not really a rock record haha. But I wanted those electric guitars, I wanted that feeling that was sort of trying to go back in time a little bit where the basis of the record is going to be 1988. That was the year my husband and I got married, so it was kind of like when the family was established, we began that year! That came to me because my daughter Megan has a tattoo, I don’t know if you saw the logo of a little angel on the cover of the album. An angel with 1988. That’s actually a tattoo my daughter got! She called me one day and said “what year did you and dad get married?” I said “1988 why?” And she said “nothing!!” And then she came home with this tattoo. I thought it was so sweet that she thought of that and that that was important to her. So that is where the song came from. Every record that I have made, I need like an anchor. Then everything sort of stems off of that. We just had a ball recording and I am very excited for these songs to come out. They all mean something different but at the end of the day, it’s just another two years worth of my favourite songs that I have been able to write over the last two years. Our album cycles are usually every couple of years and being able to record with Dave again was just another joy. It was a ball.

When you say you wanted a 90’s rock edge to it, I can hear that and when I was listening to it, it instantly took me back to the Boys on The Side film soundtrack which I was obsessed with!

Oh, I don’t know that is that a film?

Yeah with Whoopi Goldberg, Drew Barrymore and Mary-Louise Parker. But the soundtrack is Melissa Etheridge, Sheryl Crow, The Indigo Girls, Bonnie Raitt, The Pretenders and Stevie Nicks and more!

Oh see yeah, that is so nice, I am going to look up that movie. A few of the songs were written after I decided this is what I want to do next like Bees of Honey, I wrote with Barry Dean and Luke Laird and I had a little bit of that chorus “some days are good, some days are bad” and Killing Me which I wrote with Hillary Lindsay and Luke Laird. Usually I am known for ballads, my songwriting heart goes to a ballad so some of those songs, I went to Luke and I went to Hillary and Barry and people like that to ask how to move the song a little faster and things like that. I am glad that the bit of 90’s tinge comes through it, at the end of the day, I had a vision at the beginning and if it isn’t exactly what you want it to be but it has to be what the songs need to be and that’s what Dave does for me, he always listens to me and he finds his own way to help me achieve what I need in a way that he pushes me in a way that he thinks the song needs to go.

Were any of the songs on the album laying around for a while or where they all built for this record in mind?

Yeah the oldest songs on here are just a couple of years old but The Old Woman In Me, I have been playing at shows for a couple of years. That one came out, I think during lockdown. Covid really changed the way that I write. Zoom really changed the way that I write songs. I always did a facetime session every now and then, especially with Barry Dean and Liz Rose. A co-writer I know really well, we can do that. But during covid of course, we all got on zoom and you’re writing with perfect strangers just starting at each other on the computer. Since Lockdown really, I am writing more now than I ever have. So this record is a batch of newer songs probably more so than on any other record I have made because usually they’ll be songs on there from years old. The Old Woman in me is probably the oldest one. The Town in Your Heart was only a few weeks before I cut and the same with Killing Me. It’s been a really good process of experimenting with brand new songs. I am used to singing songs to audiences, I am used to the audience being part of the writing process for me. How do I sing this in front of people? How do I sing this alone? How do I sing this with a band? How do people react to me? The Old Woman in Me was really the only one that had that sort of landing in the songwriter process.

It’s such a relatable song. I think your songs have become more relatable to me since I became a parent. I love how Humble and Kind and Happy Children sort of follow on from each other and it makes me want an entire parenting album from you ha!

Hahahahahaha oh we can all probably do with that right? It’s so funny that you said earlier that if you were going to write a song with your children it would be about poop. As soon as you said that I just smiled because I always say that as musicians we talk about poop because we travel and with our kids. It’s so funny how we all go through the same things? It’s a different journey I understand for all of us but if we can’t find each other in parenting then I don’t know! It’s like when you see someone in a store with a kid and they are having a hard time or in a plane. I always think that when I am getting on a plane and there’s a couple with a kid who is going to cry I think “let them sit near me” because it’s not going to bother me because I have been there!

Oh I know. I actually take comfort in seeing other families going through those stressful supermarket shops because I know then that it’s not just me! We all go through it!

Exactly! No judgement here right?

When people have kids, when writers have kids, I think we all expect them to write a record for the kids but you’re so right, we need one for the parents haha!

Were there any songs written for the album that didn’t quite make it?

You know what? We only cut those ten songs. That’s a little unusual I understand but we had it figured out! I came in with about 14 songs and I don’t like to go into the studio with more than that because then you can really, I can anyway, lose grasp of where I am going and how will these all line up together? I think I sent Dave about 14 maybe 15 songs. There was a little bit of leeway of what song do you like today? We cut over the course of a couple of weeks. Like I said, everything is live. The first week that we went down, my son Christopher was with me with his girlfriend who is now his wife and then the next weekend we went back and my husband and my son Brian came with me and every day it was sort of like “what song do you want to do next?”.

I really trust Dave in all of this. There was one song called Without Within, that I wrote with my son Brian, that was either going to be Without Within or Letting People Down (on the album) and you can relate to this because of what we just talked about, the whole parenting thing! I needed a lot of help with which one of these songs do we do? Without Within is more about, it’s a little spiritual in the way like you can’t get to where you need to go unless you go within, without searching within yourself! Letting People Down is obviously just “man! I keep letting people down, I don’t mean to, I’m sorry”.

The consensus with my publisher and with everybody in the room was “wow, we’ve all felt that, we’ve all felt that sometimes we have fell short”. That was the last song that we cut and it really was between those two. Someday I will record Without, Within but it just wasn’t for this record!

Well I hope you do!

What do you love most about the songwriting process?

Oh wow! Like we talked about before, I really do just love the act of songwriting, I feel so lucky that I haven’t got a phone call yet where they say “ok, you’re done, you can’t do this anymore, we don’t need your services anymore” haha! “You’ve written all that you can do, we’re gonna move on” haha! The co-writing process has been such a big part of my life since it was introduced to me because of Nashville. I never really co-wrote songs up here! I live just south of Boston and I don’t live in Nashville. When I got a publishing deal and they started setting me up with people to write songs with it was like a whole new thing for me. Its really taught me so much about myself, it’s given me confidence and I get to be part of this musical community, I get to have the musical journey be a big part of my overall journey. I think the best things for me in co-writing are the laughs and all that but the friendships that I’ve built. Some of my early friends, Liz Rose kind of taught me how to co-write. She was one of my first appointments ever as a co-writer. She’s family to me, her and Hillary are family members. They’re just such a big part of my whole world, my kids world and Barry Dean as well and Luke (Laird). I don’t know what I would do without my co-writing friends. It’s interesting because you will get in a room sometimes with people that you don’t think you have anything in common with other than the fact that you like songs. Walker Hayes for example who I get to write with every now and then. He has just been such a beautiful soul that I would not know if not for songwriting. I could have been the biggest fan of his music but knowing him as a co-writer and getting to know his dad heart, how he parents and how he feels about his family, I wouldn’t have those conversations with somebody if we weren’t trying to write a song. In the journey of trying to find the song, what happens is incredibly deep conversations that you wouldn’t have if you were just having a glass of wine or a cup of coffee with somebody. You sit down in a writing room with somebody and the first thing at the top of the agenda is “ok, dig into your heart and find something that is worth writing about”. You have to have these really intimate conversations, these really beautiful conversations.

It’s true isn’t it? You are probably at your most vulnerable in a way in the writing room and just pour your heart out as if it was a therapy session. As you say, like only happens in the writing room. Well that and the hairdresser chair!

Ahahahahha you’re so right, I forgot about that one!

Is there anyone that you haven’t written with yet that you would like to?

Oh wow! That’s a great question and it’s funny because my publishers ask me that every year! I am bad at thinking of things like what do I want next? I think that branching out into other forms of writing has always be interesting to me. I have been able to write with some pop artists. The way that that genre works, at least here in the states as far as writing is a little bit like mad science to me. It’s like picking sounds and then finding the groove and then the lyrics being top lined or something like that. I have some friends that write in such a different way. When I think about writing songs I picture a computer so I can write lyrics in front of me, a guitar in my lap. My friend Tyler Johnson who’s a great writer and a brilliant producer, he kind of is a mad scientist. He will find a sound that will inspire a song. Instead of a title inspiring a song, a sound might. That is such a different brain space for me. That is always interesting to me, a different world of genre and because I am so in the Americana/Country lane, or folk lane. Even just coming from a groove or a beat is really different. Hillary is really good at that. She was a drummer first. Being able to find what you are good at down a totally different road is so inspiring. When I think about artists that I haven’t been able to write with, Adele would be at the top of the list.

I have such a small range when I write with a singer that can go anywhere. It’s almost like there’s a different instrument. Writing with Little Big Town, when you write with the whole band and even when you write with a couple of them, they are writing the song for their harmonies. When I am sitting by myself, I can never write a song with harmonies in mind and they write almost for the harmonies in some ways. It’s just an entirely different way to go about a song. When you have a singer that can do anything, it’s like a whole new avenue, a whole new road. It’s beautiful!

What song of yours is a family favourite? I can probably guess….

Well my kids know that Humble and Kind is their song. My youngest son David, he has just graduated high school. We are trying to get him to start writing songs because I can just see it oozing out of him but he hasn’t started yet. He is such a country music fan. Like you, he looks at who writes the songs and the stories behind them. He is Hillary Lindsey’s biggest fan. Blue Ain’t Your Colour is his favourite – you get in his car and the first song you hear is Blue Ain’t Your Color by Keith Urban. He is kind of like my “what are the kids listening to?” He is my road to that. He is in love with Parker McCollum’s music currently. Liz and Hillary and I got to write with Parker for his last record and there’s a song called Burn It Down that the four of us wrote together that David is finally a fan of. When David is a fan then I get all excited because he is like “mum, you guys did a good job” haha! My kids are so supportive, I’m so lucky! You can’t do this by yourself because of the travel and things like that. I need everybody to help me and they are just so good at it.

When you have written a song that you aren’t recording yourself, how do the songs get to the artist?

What happens is, if the artist isn’t in the (writing) room. Like this weekend I had two days of an artist write. Those songs stay with the artist because the idea is they they will hopefully cut the song when they next go into the studio.

If it’s a song that I have written alone or with my writing team and none of us are the artist in the room, then we will make a demo or a lot of the times I mostly record on a work tape with my guitar. I send it to my publisher and my publisher, there’s a team of people that go through everybody’s songs and they know who is looking for songs, they know what the artist is looking for, they know when the artist is cutting, they will a lot of times know what the artist has already cut, what might work, what are they missing on this record and things like that. They pitch songs for me. I am not going to lie, it’s really hard to get a song cut by an artist that they didn’t write but it still happens. Humble and Kind, Tim (McGraw) didn’t write but he made it into the song that it is. An artist will still cut outside songs which is a blessing for people like me because it is how we make our living! The song pluggers are the ones that get those songs that get to those artists.

Are there any songs that you love that haven’t been cut yet by anyone?

We just had a song, I don’t know if it’s going to happen but yesterday, The Love Junkies, the three of us just got a text saying this new artist is going to cut this song. We must have wrote it six years ago and it was demo’d and everything. When they said is it ok if this new artist cut this song we were like “of course it is”. It was one of our favourites and it just hadn’t found a home yet! That’s the thing, you can never give up on a song. People like Tom Douglas who are massive songwriters and have been doing this such a long time, when you ask them about the changing environment of music and streaming and how are we going to make a living and all these things. They always say, good songs prevail. You cannot think about it too much because at the end of the day, if you write a good song, it is going to fall into the ears of the people that need to hear it. You have to keep believing that your job is to write the best song that you can write. Maybe they won’t all find this huge home, this mass audience, but they will all find a space in the world that they are supposed to be at. Sometimes songs are just for ourselves.

Can you remember the first song that you ever wrote?

I do, I do remember it. I don’t remember the whole thing. I remember writing a song when I was in like middle school or something. It was literally a country song and my brothers, I have two brothers that are songwriters, I played it for my brother Richie. He was like “how in the world did you write a country song?”. It was about the rodeo and I’m not kidding you, they were like “who are you and where did you get this rodeo song?”. Hahahaha! It was weird, it must have been a past life. It’s funny that now I write country songs because we didn’t grow up with country music. I grew up with James Taylor and singer/songwriters. I remember my brother saying “we don’t know where this came from but keep going”. Haha!

Thank you so much for talking today.

Thank you so much Hannah it’s been a pleasure!