Warner Bros / Wea
2007
Unglamorous
About This Album
Unglamorous marks a new stage in the career of Lori McKenna, a gifted contemporary singer/songwriter from Massachusetts who makes her major-label debut here. Her previous releases -- Paper Wings and Halo (2000), Pieces of Me (2001), The Kitchen Tapes (2003), and Bittertown (2004) -- were spare, masterfully written, and sometimes painfully intimate. It was easy to envision McKenna sitting at home alone -- her husband away at work and her kids safely at school -- writing songs at her kitchen table with her acoustic guitar in hand, recording her music onto blank cassettes as a ticking clock fills the quiet between songs. The Kitchen Tapes romanticized this notion, its cover featuring a drawing of a kitchen table with a cassette lying upon it, a wooden chair pulled out from the spot at which McKenna presumably had been sitting, unassuming tiles dotting the floor. "Recorded by Lori McKenna," a back-cover credit reads, while a stark cover of Radiohead's "Fake Plastic Trees" signals her knowingness. Songs like "Bible Song," "One Man," and "Stealing Kisses," each from Bittertown, wonderfully showcase her gift for turning domestic small-town quietude into a kind of poetry, one marked by serenity as well as melancholy.
Track List (try tracks 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 and 8)

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