The New York Times-20080126-The Wonders and Woes Of a Working-Class Life- -Review-

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The Wonders and Woes Of a Working-Class Life; [Review]

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A cornerstone of country music is an age-old celebration of family values: not the politically loaded kind often put in quotation marks as a buzz term for a right-wing social agenda, but the meat-and-potatoes satisfactions and sorrows of everyday life. On Thursday evening Lori McKenna, a twangy-voiced mother of five children from Stoughton, Mass., brought it all back home at the Allen Room, where she was appearing as part of Lincoln Center's American Songbook series.

Ms. McKenna sings in a piercing vibrato-free whine that evokes the generational continuity of working-class life. Her diction is plain, her phrasing bluntly foursquare. Her one deviation into the standard repertory on Thursday was a slow rendition of Dream a Little Dream of Me in which the shimmering lap-steel guitar of Mark Erelli did most of the dreaming.

With her chugging country-rock band (Mr. Erelli on multiple instruments and harmony vocals, Russell Chudnofsky on lead guitar, Paul Kochanski on bass and John Sands on drums), Ms. McKenna sang mostly original songs inhabited by working-class men and women struggling to raise families on limited budgets. These are folks whose lives are never scrutinized by TMZ.com.

The couples experience the usual temptations found in country songs, especially alcoholism and infidelity. Ms. McKenna's alter egos are acutely aware of their situations. In Your Next Lover, she imagines her possibly adulterous partner's ideal woman and declares in all sincerity, I hope she can fix you.

A variation of the same man is addressed in I Know You, a stern but loving X-ray vision of a guy to whom she declares, I know how to make you sick/And I know how you to make you die/The only thing I could never do is let you say goodbye.

But the stirring song she performed that best sums her up, Unglamorous, is a detailed paean to the grounded working-class life with two breadwinners, a home humming with five children, one television (no cable), peanut butter on everything, frozen dinners served on the kitchen table and no diamonds in our bathtub rings.

No frills/No fuss/Perfectly us/Unglamorous, Ms. McKenna concludes. It's wonderful.

[Illustration]PHOTO: From left, Russell Chudnofsky, Lori McKenna and John Sands at the Allen Room on Thursday. (PHOTOGRAPH BY RICHARD TERMINE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)(pg. B11)