Soccer mom has become something of a pejorative term. It represents something safe and too vanilla, laden with images of "The Simpson"'s Helen Lovejoy crying out to save the children. This mythical woman is someone that politicians aim to please and entertainment is often accused of catering to. However, she is someone rarely depicted in the media, being dismissed as too boring to be of note. Lori McKenna is the master of the soccer mom song. From making out under the bleachers with the man she would later marry in "One Man" to putting peanut butter on snacks for her kids in "Unglamorous," her career, as a singer and a songwriter are mined from her life and that life seems to revolve around her kitchen table. With a gift for raw details and an innate sense for the moments in life that her audiences want to see reflected back to them. Her latest album, Massachusetts, finds her pondering the wonder of a marriage that has lasted and getting ready to let her oldest children go. It is an album that deftly blends wisdom, wonder and weariness into a perfect reflect of its age.
The album leads off with the bitter blast of "Salt," a song that grew out of McKenna's desire to write a song with food in the title. "You ain't worth the pain, you ain't worth the spit in my mouth when I spit out your name," she snarls, before noting "hearts don't fly, but they can run like hell when they have to." "Make Every Word Hurt" flips the script, and finds McKenna on the receiving end of a goodbye, begging for the band aid to be ripped off. Of course she covers the middle ground too. "Shouting" finds her anxiously trying to put her man back together so she can save the relationship. "Don't leave me, that's all I hear you say and somehow that keeps me from all of the plans that I made," she sings on "Shake." While she does some pretty break up songs, McKenna is often at her best on her love songs. "How Romantic is That" is a laundry list of the little moments that have built her marriage from the ground up. "Our honeymoon lasted 24 hours and was a town away, then it was you and me in that little apartment, right months before the baby came," she sings "that boy I loved may not have been my hero, but the same is not true of the man he became." She sums it up in "Better With Time," "It takes a crazy kind of love to survive." Her husband is not the only one she is writing love songs for on this album. "My Love Follows Where You Go," Take Me With You When You Go" and "Grown Up Now" find a mother in middle age watching her babies leave the next. "Our time together is like aging, I wish we could all age slow," she sigh on "Grown Up Now." One of the most poignant songs on the album is "Smaller and Smaller," a song that finds here morning the death of the small town she has spent her last several albums coming to terms with. It's the town that she dreamt of escaping in "Bible Song" and "One Man," the one she wanted to save in "Buy This Town." "Smaller and Smaller" finds her looking out the window, watching it turn slowly into a mid-sized suburb. Middle aged motherhood and gentrification are not the sort of subjects that most songwriters would opt for, but Massachusetts is another example of how extraordinary McKenna really is.
Lori McKenna reflects a slice of life realism that used to be common and now is quite rare. McKenna would have fit in well between John Conlee's "Common Man" and Charly McClain's "Radio Heart," or even with Mary Chapin Carpenter and Kathy Mattea. She is part of a larger thing that is missing from mainstream entertainment, something that soccer mom is code for, grown ups. She exists in a world of kids who need fed and bills that get solved by paying them, and making do with whatever is left in the check. Its not as much fun as being a teenager on a Saturday night, nor as bleakly glamorous as violent and unchecked poverty. It is, however, a life filled with a hundred million moments, every one of which has its own story. Lori McKenna is the master of these stories.
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