Grammy Award-winning singer, songwriter and musician Lori McKenna will perform a special acoustic livestream concert on Friday, July 24 at 8PM from her hometown venue, Club Passim, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Available to stream via the venue’s Facebook and YouTube pages, the event will feature McKenna performing songs from her highly anticipated new album, The Balladeer – out the same day on CN Records via Thirty Tigers – and also serve as a fundraiser for Club Passim. In addition to being one of the country’s premiere listening rooms (best known for its role in the folk music revival of the sixties when it helped launch the careers of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell), Passim is also a non-profit organization dedicated to providing exceptional and interactive live musical experiences for both performers and audiences. All donations made during McKenna’s performance will benefit the venue, which has temporarily moved online and is streaming shows nightly throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.
Of McKenna, Passim’s Managing Director Matt Smith shares, “In my 25 years at the club, so many of my favorite moments have been at Lori’s shows. She’s one of the most brilliant writers I’ve known and each time I get to run sound for her it is an honor.” Following her first appearance in 1997, McKenna has performed at the venue numerous times and always stayed a part of the Club Passim family.
Produced by Grammy Award-winning producer Dave Cobb and recorded at Nashville’s historic RCA Studio A, The Balladeer is McKenna’s most personal album to date featuring songs that reflect firsthand on her relationships with her children, husband and family. Following this theme, McKenna wrote the majority of the album alone except for three tracks written with Hillary Lindsey and Liz Rose—a group collectively known as the Love Junkies.
The release of The Balladeer continues a series of landmark years for McKenna following her 2018 album, The Tree. Nominated for “Album of the Year” at the 2019 Americana Music Awards, the album received widespread critical acclaim and landed on several “Best of 2018” lists including Entertainment Weekly, Paste, Slate, The A.V. Club, The Washington Post and Rolling Stone, who declared, “another batch of pristine compositions…the singer-songwriter has established herself as not only one of country music’s most respected songwriters…but more importantly one of its most poignant storytellers.”
Additionally, NPR Music proclaimed, “the beloved writer further cements her status as one of our foremost documentarians of domesticity…she’s an invaluable pillar of songwriting and growing ever stronger, just like that sturdy oak in your childhood backyard,” while Paste praised, “McKenna’s attention to detail, and the way she makes universal sentiments suddenly, and piercingly, specific, are why her songs are special enough to have earned the deep respect of her fellow folk singers.”