By Marc Hirsh
Published Dec. 16, 2025
Lori McKenna will perform four consecutive shows at Passim this weekend. • Becky Fluke
Lori McKenna knows that it’s not always easy for folks to carve out time to attend concerts during the busy holiday season. She’s been on the other side of it, after all.
Back in December 2007, when McKenna began what would become an annual tradition of end-of-year performances at Club Passim, she was a respected folk singer and songwriter who had just begun making inroads into the Nashville establishment. With early champions in Faith Hill and Tim McGraw, McKenna had started down the path that would eventually win her three Grammy Awards for best country song.
The Stoughton native was also committing to shows in the thick of the holidays as a mother of five, whose youngest child was 3 years old.
“We look back now and there are years when my husband was like, ‘Why are you doing this right now?,’” McKenna said with a laugh over a videoconferencing app. “We look back, like, ‘How did we do this when the kids were all those ages?,’ like when you had Christmas choir and you had all these other things [to attend]. ‘How did we do it?’”
As McKenna prepares for this year’s shows (two each on Saturday and Sunday), she remains grateful and maybe a bit awestruck by the people who make their way to Harvard Square every December. And not just because it’s so close to Christmas.
“Year after year after year, the audiences make this show,” said McKenna. “Even in a snowstorm, they’ll come. There’s been years where we’ll go out at the end of the night and there’s 6 inches of new snow on our car. It blows my mind that they just show up. They just support, and at the busiest time of the year. I mean, you couldn’t drag me to something this time of year other than this show.”
McKenna laughed as she said that last bit — McKenna laughs a lot — but she’s aware of the power of her Passim audiences, who provide her with inspiration when she worries she’s lacking in that department.
“Unless there’s something really outside of myself, like if I’m not feeling good or something like that, it’s hard for anything else to have more control over a show than the audience,” she said. “Especially in that room. You can really tell their energy. You can really communicate with them well. They know they’re in for a group experience.”
If Passim is a special place for McKenna, then McKenna is a special artist for Passim. This past fall, the club’s School of Music offered “Songs of Lori McKenna,” a course where aspiring songwriters learned composition using songs like “Humble and Kind” (the McGraw hit that won McKenna her second Grammy) and “People Get Old” as guideposts. It was a nod of appreciation and validation, and McKenna was unaware of it until I mentioned it to her.
“I don’t think I knew about that!,” she said. “Oh my God, that’s so cool.”
Even as her songs are held up as models to aspire to, though, McKenna remains, well, humble and kind.
“I kind of dumb everything down a little bit,” she said. “My songs are quite simple. So maybe it’s good to have a class for people that are trying to figure out. ‘How does she cheat so well, to be able to do this so long?’”
McKenna credited a similarly modest virtue for her success as a songwriter in demand for acts such as Carrie Underwood (“Cry Pretty”), Little Big Town (“Girl Crush”), and Lady Gaga (“Always Remember Us This Way”): consistency.
“At the end of the day, you just have to put your head down and write the best song you can that day,” said McKenna. “Songwriting is really the only thing that I could literally do for 15 hours straight and I could literally talk about forever, because I just think it’s so interesting, and we learn so much about each other.”
Sometimes McKenna’s audience interprets her songs in ways that she hadn’t anticipated. Take, for example, “Happy Children” from her 2023 album “1988,” whose chorus is structured around a series of openhearted blessings that end on “But if you only get one thing that’s a given/ I hope you have happy children.”
An anxious parent inclined to get in their own head might get knocked for a loop by that, and pull darkness and doubt from an obviously kindhearted song: Is my child a happy one? Am I raising him in such a way that he’ll be happy? And hearing this, McKenna still gets excited about how deep her songs can cut.
“I never really thought of it the way that you heard it, and that’s the thing that’s great about songs. You and I can sit right beside each other and hear exactly the same thing and hear it two different ways,” McKenna said. “I think that that’s what’s so beautiful about any kind of art, is people sharing it and then people figuring out what it means to them.”
It all comes back to connection for McKenna, whether it’s to an intimate crowd in a small folk club, a mass audience via country radio, or one father listening alone in his car.
“As [fellow singer-songwriter] Mary Gauthier says, songwriting is a service industry,” said McKenna. “If my job as a songwriter is to make you feel something, then that’s a pretty damn good job to have. It’s a blessing, and it’s for the person sitting in the fold-out chair. It’s not for you. It’s not for the creator as much as for the ears of the people who listen.”
That approach to music has kept McKenna’s perspective on her success similarly modest.
“Anything that I’ve had as far as a feather in the career cap has been because of luck,” she said, “and because I just keep trying.”
LORI MCKENNA BAND
At Club Passim, 47 Palmer St., Cambridge, Saturday, Dec. 20, and Sunday, Dec. 21, shows at 5 p.m. and 8 p.m. both nights. Sold out.