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Who's Using Fishman?
Lori McKenna
October 2005
Lori McKenna is a mother of five from Stoughton, Mass. (pop. 27,000), about 20 miles outside Boston. There, she lives quietly—well, as quietly as a house with five children can get—with her husband of 17 years, Gene, a plumber for the local gas company. She drives the kids to school in a 1999 Ford Windstar minivan with 150,000 miles on it.
Lori McKenna is also an acclaimed singer-songwriter who has just been thrust into the limelight thanks to superstar Faith Hill’s decision to record three of McKenna’s songs for her chart-topping Fireflies album. Hill (herself a wife and mother of three) heard in McKenna’s work what a steadily growing audience has been hearing since her 1998 debut, Paper Wings & Halo: an intimate understanding and honest expression of the realities of domestic life.
McKenna began singing at open-mic nights in Boston, and the enthusiastic response led to her own shows. Surprisingly, McKenna found it perfectly natural to balance her full home life with a burgeoning musical career. She took care of the kids all day, played shows in the evening and wrote songs at the kitchen table after the children’s bedtime.
“The open-mic nights turned to shows, the shows turned to making a record, and then the record did really well, so we thought we’d make another one.” Paper Wings & Halo was followed by 2001’s Pieces of Me, 2003’s The Kitchen Tapes—and, finally, Bittertown.
Lori McKenna
chooses the Fishman...
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