Lori McKenna - Bittertown (2005)

This songwriter and mother of four, who lives a stones throw from the town she grew up in, doesn't fit into any stereotype. She's garnered comparisons to Lucinda Williams, Bruce Springsteen, Dashboard Confessional, and Roseanne Cash. Her songs, as solid as Georgia oak, are played and sung with an emotional grit under the nails that comes from digging in life's mundane and less illuminated holes. These songs grab you with Lori's signature strident, soulful, and unapologetic vocals sharing earnest observations and stories of growing up and growing old, of loves and losses, winners and losers, guns and god, and drinkers and dreamers in a town that is resting uncomfortably between its blue collar roots and modern suburbia. Incapable of artifice, Lori McKenna speaks of the bitter and the sweet, but doesn't simply write songs, she documents her life, and in turn ours, in word and melody. Meet Lori McKenna and welcome to Bittertown