Lori McKenna's Back-to-Back Grammy Run and What It Taught Nashville About Outside Writers

In 2016, Lori McKenna won the Grammy Award for Best Country Song for co-writing "Girl Crush," performed by Little Big Town. In 2017, she won it again, for "Humble and Kind," recorded by Tim McGraw. Back-to-back wins for the same songwriter in the same category are unusual at any level of the industry. Doing it as a non-Nashville-based folk singer from a working-class Massachusetts background was the kind of story the music business occasionally produces and consistently fails to explain.

McKenna had been making records and writing songs for two decades before this period. She had not arrived in Nashville as a young writer hungry to crack the market. She was a mother of five from Stoughton, Massachusetts, who had been discovered by Faith Hill in the early 2000s and who had maintained a dual career as a solo artist and staff or co-write partner for Nashville acts ever since. The Grammy wins did not create her. They documented something that had been accumulating for years.

The Road to "Girl Crush"

"Girl Crush," which Little Big Town released in late 2014, was co-written by McKenna, Hillary Lindsey, and Liz Rose. The song describes a narrator's intense envy of the woman her partner loves, rendered as a near-obsession that is precisely drawn and emotionally complicated. It is a country song that refuses the expected resolution, and when it began receiving country radio airplay in early 2015, some stations reported listener complaints from audiences who misread the premise.

Those complaints became their own story, and the controversy briefly positioned the song as a cultural flashpoint. But the song's actual achievement was quieter and more lasting than any controversy: it is a piece of songwriting that handles ambivalent desire with the precision of a good short story.

According to McKenna's Wikipedia entry, the song received both Song of the Year and Best Country Song Grammy nominations for the 58th Grammy Awards in February 2016, winning the latter. It also won Song of the Year at the CMA Awards in November 2015, which McKenna later described as the moment she felt the Nashville community had genuinely embraced her.

The McKenna Solo Career Running Parallel

What makes the 2015-2017 period particularly interesting is that McKenna's commercial songwriting success ran parallel to a series of strong solo albums that received serious critical attention without the radio support or industry infrastructure behind the cuts she was writing for others.

The Bird and the Rifle, released in July 2016 on Creative Nation / Thirty Tigers, arrived in the months after the "Girl Crush" Grammy win. Rather than capitalizing on the commercial moment by pursuing a mainstream country sound, the album leaned into McKenna's folk and Americana instincts. Reviews cited its directness, its domesticity, and its refusal of the scale that might have been expected from a songwriter operating at McKenna's commercial level.

As the MusicRow piece from July 2016 noted, McKenna described Nashville's writer community as supportive in ways she had not expected, and the album's release through Creative Nation / Thirty Tigers placed it squarely in the independent distribution infrastructure that had also supported Isbell, Simpson, and other Americana artists during the same period.

"Humble and Kind" and the Second Grammy

"Humble and Kind" was written by McKenna as, according to her official biography, "a lullaby, guidebook, and tribute" to her five children. Tim McGraw recorded it for his 2015 album Damn Country Music, and its release as a single brought it to country radio in early 2016.

The song's directness, its list of parental advice delivered without irony or qualification, connected with a radio audience in ways that some more complex or ambiguous country songs do not. It became one of the larger commercial country songs of the year and earned McKenna her second consecutive Grammy for Best Country Song at the 59th Grammy Awards in February 2017.

The back-to-back wins positioned McKenna at the ACM Awards that year as the first woman to win Songwriter of the Year from that organization. The first-woman milestone was noted at the time, but the more durable fact is that McKenna had written her way there from a career structure that would not have predicted it: no Nashville staff deal in her early years, no major-label solo career, no Nashville-based life until well into her professional trajectory.

What McKenna's Career Tells Independent Songwriters

The McKenna 2014-2017 arc is useful for independent singer-songwriters in several specific ways.

First, it demonstrates that a solo artist career and a commercial co-writing career are not mutually exclusive, and that success in one does not require abandoning the other. McKenna's most commercially successful period as a hired songwriter coincided with some of her best-reviewed solo album work. The two strands fed each other, because the songwriting discipline required for tight commercial country writing improved her solo craft, and her solo albums maintained the artistic credibility that made her a desirable co-write partner.

Second, it shows that geography is less determinative than craft. McKenna wrote from Massachusetts, not Nashville, for years before her major commercial breakthroughs. The quality and specificity of her writing was what created professional relationships across the distance, not physical proximity to Music Row.

Third, the dual-career model McKenna demonstrated, solo artist plus hired songwriter, remains viable and is better documented because of artists like her. The financial structure, where commercial cuts provide income that subsidizes solo album cycles, is one that multiple independent singer-songwriters have applied in variations across subsequent years.

The Songwriting Behind the Commercial Writes

McKenna has spoken in interviews about the collaborative process for songs like "Girl Crush," describing the co-write room as a place where multiple writers bring partial ideas that get combined and refined. That process, specific to Nashville's co-write culture, produces different work than solo writing, and McKenna's ability to function in both modes, writing alone for her albums and writing collaboratively for cuts, reflects a range that is not universally available to songwriters who approach their craft as exclusively one or the other.

The writing on The Bird and the Rifle is intimate and direct in ways that commercial co-writes rarely are. Songs like "Happy People" and "Giving Up on Your Hometown" work through the specific textures of domestic life in ways that resist the universalizing pressure of radio songwriting. That specificity is the mark of a solo artist's sensibility, and it is what kept McKenna's personal work distinct from the songs she wrote for others.

The Later Career and Continued Relevance

The 2020 album The Balladeer extended McKenna's solo trajectory, with the Associated Press describing her as "one of the best songwriters working in any genre." She co-wrote "Crowded Table" for The Highwomen, which won Best Country Song at the 63rd Grammy Awards in 2021, adding a third Grammy in the category to her record.

That the 2021 win was for a song recorded by a supergroup including Brandi Carlile and Natalie Hemby reflects the network McKenna had built across the Americana and country-adjacent space over her career. "Crowded Table" was co-written by McKenna, Hemby, and Carlile, which is to say it came from three songwriters whose individual careers had converged around shared values and aesthetic commitments.

---

FAQ

What are Lori McKenna's Grammy wins for songwriting? McKenna won the Grammy for Best Country Song in 2016 for "Girl Crush" (Little Big Town), in 2017 for "Humble and Kind" (Tim McGraw), and in 2021 for "Crowded Table" (The Highwomen), co-written with Brandi Carlile and Natalie Hemby.

Where is Lori McKenna from? McKenna is from Stoughton, Massachusetts, not Nashville. She maintained a Massachusetts-based career for many years while writing commercially for Nashville artists and releasing solo albums on independent labels.

What is The Bird and the Rifle? The Bird and the Rifle is McKenna's 2016 solo album, released on Creative Nation / Thirty Tigers. It arrived during her most commercially successful period as a Nashville songwriter and was reviewed positively for its folk and Americana sensibility.

Was Lori McKenna a staff writer at a Nashville publishing company? McKenna's arrangement with Nashville publishers evolved over her career. She is known for co-write relationships with Hillary Lindsey and Liz Rose, among others, but her career structure was not the traditional staff-writer model of an emerging Nashville songwriter.

What does McKenna's career demonstrate about the songwriter-for-hire path? Her career shows that solo artistic work and commercial songwriting can coexist productively, that geographic distance from Nashville is not a barrier to commercial success as a Nashville songwriter, and that a distinctive personal voice, even in a collaborative co-write context, is what creates lasting professional relationships.