Note to Carrie Underwood, Deana Carter, Lee Ann Womack, etc.

When choosing songs for your respective next records, please make sure to reserve at least one slot for Lori McKenna, who is totally on some Patti Griffin/Lucinda Williams type shit right now as far as gracing superstar pop-country singers with career-defining material. Particularly attractive candidates include “As I Am,” “Borrow Me,” “Girl Like Me” and “One Man.”

Nominally an indie-folk/alt-country type of gal herself, McKenna gains admittance to Nashville’s inner sanctum by being so good at nailing the kind of implacable physical realities and narrow parameters of existence so intrinsic to pop-country’s safe-at-home mindset. The joke’s on Music City, however, because McKenna uses her intimate knowledge of the salt of experience to disrobe suburbia and small-town quietude as the suffocating, spirit-killing shams they often are. Her women may keep up appearances, but just beneath the surface they’re almost unseemly in their desperation for recognition and affection. They cling fiercely to the few things they know while never forgetting just how empty and drained their rigid lives have made them.

The two best country songs I’ve encountered this year by some distance were both actually released in 2005, and were both written by McKenna. “Bible Song” as performed by Sara Evans and “Stealing Kisses” as covered by Faith Hill are rarities in Nashville for explicitly associating traditional communal and family values with stultifying horror and absolute loneliness. Both Evans and Hill are far better singers than McKenna, and further lend her compositions the weight of their own stardom and the contextual nuance of their personas. Still, neither has ever before delivered a more emotionally devastating performance, and both owe a significant debt of gratitude to the deftly powerful internal rhythms of McKenna’s songcraft. Evans lulls you into false contentment so convincingly (aided no doubt by her own apple-pie pro-life public image) with blue-collar blandishments – “they marry young in these parts/they work the factories” – that it literally catches you in the throat when she cries “I ran as fast as I could/through the tall grass and the midnight wood.” In a song loaded with concrete realities, the incomplete suggestion that a grief-stricken mother “came undone” is simply terrifying.

Faith’s domestic drama (one of three McKenna songs on her most recent album) is even more gut-wrenching. The teenage girl who once exulted in the allure of surreptitious romance is now the intellectually and spiritually stifled housewife who can’t entice her husband to even get it up. The throwaway line about how “you haven’t talked to an adult all day/except your neighbor who drives you crazy” is pitch-perfect (made even better by Faith’s delivery), but the real twist of the knife goes right back to running again, Faith “standing outside the high school doors/the ones you walked out of twenty years before” and then whispering to “all of the girls/run, run, run.”

Faith’s performance in the video is almost ridiculously agonized in places, but this scene, with schoolgirls bounding out-of-doors, nudging and brushing by the breaking-down Hill, is undeniably heart-rending. I just hope Gretchen Wilson’s paying attention.