"the acrobat": the title track with Lori McKenna

To know me is to know how much this collaboration with Lori McKenna means to me.

I was wide-eyed with a head full of songs, sitting in the Bluebird Cafe next to my dad. I don’t remember us talking much… just glancing at each other in awe that we’d been given two tickets and somehow were seated front row, nearly in the round. If you haven’t been to the Bluebird yet, it’s a revered songwriter’s venue in Nashville, and it is incredibly small and intimate. Maybe fits seventy people, and our two seats were sandwiched around a table where I was close enough to bump my nervous knee into the back of the guitar of the writer in front of me. The writer tuning up a little further to my right was Lori McKenna.

We had just finished our 47 hour drive from the drifted snowbanks of my hometown in Alberta to the bare-branched sweetgums framing the “Welcome to Tennessee” highway sign. I believe it was December 29th of 2013. Dad had taken me to Kroger, Guitar Center, and Applebee’s earlier that day, and I felt a different kind of alive unpacking in my little garage loft apartment I was renting in Berry Hill. I’d never lived that far from home before, and my heart was racing as thoughts of hopefulness and homesickness swirled around my nineteen-year-old brain.

Everyone at Guitar Center who was just picking up a guitar to test it out was astronomically better than I was. I don’t think I even touched an instrument. I just wandered around listening to everyone until I told my dad we should get back to the loft because I needed to sit and play for ten thousand or so more hours. Being in Music City for half a day had already started sharpening my arrow. I really wanted it to work out and to “make it,” some way, somehow, specifically so I would not have to drive my ass 47 hours back home.

Dad was set to fly back the next day after helping me get settled in, so we drove the Tacoma to the parking lot in the strip mall where the Bluebird still sits unassumingly, to see a show before he left me out there on the moon. I had no idea how much that night would impact my life as a writer.

(Lori and I, the night of the Bluebird show)

I’d heard of Lori McKenna and knew a couple of her songs like “The Luxury of Knowing,” but hearing her play and tell stories six feet from me was something else. The whole round was stacked with incredible writers, but I couldn’t quit thinking about the lines I’d heard in her song until the circle got back to her turn again and she sang new ones that I couldn’t let go of. She talked about ordinary living in her music with diesel trucks and kitchen sinks but nothing about the lyrics or her delivery felt ordinary to me. It was like I’d found someone with a heart that holds on as tightly to a given moment as mine does. I don’t know how her voice comes at you like a razor’s edge and a cozy blanket at the same time, but it does. I went back to the loft that night and combed through her records for weeks in admiration, like a student discovering a new law of gravity.

I found her album called Lorraine… the last song on the album will completely wreck you, and I highly encourage that you let it. It’s hard to pick a favourite, but “Buy This Town” might be it for me. There’s a verse where she says:

If I could buy your pain
First I’d buy the great big sea
And I’d put that pain inside a box and bury it so deep

And it just kills me. So does a song on another record, “All the Time I’ve Wasted On You”. “I could have dug out the Grand Canyon with a spoon” might be one of the best lines ever written. And then, of course, there are her monster songs like Little Big Town’s “Girl Crush” and Tim McGraw’s “Humble and Kind.” I’m still constantly in awe of the fingerprint of her writing.

When I was watching her at the Bluebird, I also couldn’t quit trying to figure out her guitar playing. I noticed she was playing strange looking chords and that her guitar sounded more open, with an aching unlike anything I’d heard before. And this percussive style, almost like a relentless heartbeat running through her rhythm hand. After my decoding time back in the loft, I learned about DADGAD tuning. Somebody had mentioned it to me in passing before, but I hadn’t grasped it until I studied her playing. I immediately tuned my guitar strings to it and ended up, by accident, tuning them a whole step lower into what I now call SADGAD in C and my guitar hasn’t been back in standard tuning since. It completely opened up how I hear melodies when I’m writing. There’s more space for them to exist between the droning notes under my fingers that way.

Fast forward a few years later: as a freshly signed writer in my first publishing deal, they asked me to make a list of my dream co-writers. Lori’s name was, of course, at the top. Probably around a year after that, I found myself in a room sitting across from her.

I know they say you shouldn’t meet your heroes, but I couldn’t disagree more. Lori was everything I’d hoped she’d be and beyond. I’m sure she could see my hands shaking and hear the nerves in my voice, but within minutes she completely disarmed them with her gentle disposition and made space for me to show up as myself. She listened. And she helped me write my truth. We wrote a song that day about how it’s impossible to kill a dream, and I’ll never forget it. I called my dad in my Tacoma after the write. I’m pretty sure I told him I’d officially “made it.”

We’ve written so many songs I’ve loved since then, and I’m grateful now to call Lori a friend. A few years ago, she invited me up to her house outside of Boston, and we spent a couple of my favourite creative days ever writing just the two of us in her basement music room.

One of the songs we wrote was called “The Acrobat.” We both share a great love for Patty Griffin. Lori once told me how she loves the way Patty holds the door open for something transcendent in her songs; even if you don’t know exactly what’s happening in the story of the lyric, your spirit feels it. She holds the invitation open so you can feel whatever it is you need to feel in that given moment. I couldn’t have agreed more. We talked about “Let Him Fly,” as Patty says:

Ain’t no talking to this man
Ain’t no pretty other side
Ain’t no way to understand
The stupid words of pride
And it would take an acrobat
And I’ve already tried all that
So I’m gonna let him fly

I told Lori I wanted to write about the acrobat. About how close I’ve come to being that character in my life, shifting and contorting myself into whatever would be best for someone else. I couldn’t really say it out loud at the time, or even admit it to myself, but I was starting to feel the effects of the pretending sanding my soul. I was pretty lost and starting to feel a darkness internally that I was very afraid of. I think we wrote this song about a character because it helped me hold enough distance from myself to be able to write the truth.

We finished the song, and I knew it was special. I wasn’t ready for it yet, and the song didn’t fit what I was in the middle of releasing then… but I always kept it in a special place in my heart, knowing it would tell me when it was time.

I couldn’t be more grateful that it’s time now. And I’m in awe of the fact that I get to release this song with my hero singing it with me.

During that Boston trip, I made hotel room recordings of what we were writing as temporary work tapes. She told me then, and has sent me encouraging nudges since, that I should make an album with those kinds of recordings. My own Living with Ghosts. The fact that she’s been cheering this on for years makes this moment even sweeter to me now, having a few songs we’ve written together on this coming album.

“The Acrobat” is officially out today. Lori came by to record her part on this song a few months ago and was incredibly supportive of me stepping into the role of producer for the first time. I told her I was leaving it messy, vulnerable, untuned, and imperfect, and it was like she reflected all the light in my eyes back to me as I talked about it. What a gift to see it in hers.

Sometimes I wonder if I believe in coincidence. It all feels more like God nods to me. I’m grateful that Lori was playing the Bluebird the night I got to go. Grateful for the songs she was brave enough to write and share that I could learn from. I don’t think this whole album I’ve made would exist without the hours I spent listening to Lori and the permission her songs gave me to write with this kind of vulnerability. And through that, find my own voice as a writer. I’m grateful for our friendship, and for the opportunity to share a love for the craft of a song with someone I am still so impacted by.

I hope when you hear “The Acrobat,” it feels like Lori and I are holding the door open for whatever your soul needs to hear right now.

And if it’s whispering that you don’t have to make yourself smaller anymore, I hope you trust that it’s true.

From one wandering soul to another, I hope you know you’re loved as you are.

<3 T xo