Lori McKenna - The Tree

The Guardian 80

(CN/Thirty Tigers)

Lori McKenna is the model of a slow-burning success: her 10th album, The Bird and the Rifle, picked up a slew of Grammy nominations in 2017, and she won country song of the year for Humble and Kind, a hit for Tim McGraw – which also won the Country Music Association’s song of the year award (which she’d won the previous year, too). The Tree is another fabulous, understated record: 10 songs about families and domesticity, and the tensions of everyday life, and one (Like Patsy Would) about the aspirations of someone trying to write about the world as well as Hemingway and sing about it as well as Cline.

Related: Lori McKenna: making magic out of the mundane