Had everything gone to plan, Kalie Shorr would have just wrapped her first UK tour. Instead, the 25-year-old country songwriter is stuck in Nashville, diagnosed with coronavirus. She has been writing songs with her two housemates but, otherwise, lockdown has been tough. “I am very extroverted and thrive on chaos,” she says with a guilty laugh.
Shorr is no stranger to it. Her 2019 debut album, Open Book, documents the worst year of her life: her older sister’s fatal heroin overdose; a cheating boyfriend; an eating disorder relapse. “I’ve never been worse, thanks for asking,” Shorr sings on the album’s opening line. “Is it making you nervous, all this honesty?” Her poignant bleakness and acid wit did spook the famously conservative country industry. So she self-released the album, a gloves-off evolution of Taylor Swift’s Nashville years.
Family of Black EMT Worker Who was Killed at Home by Louisville Cops Hires Ahmaud Arbery Attorney
Shorr grew up “honestly, just poor” in Maine, shuttling between her divorced parents. In a home where religion was “kind of a replacement” for psychology and therapy, she was sent to a pastor to address her anorexia, someone “who has no qualification in talking to a teenage girl about how she’s not eating cos she’s trying to maintain control over her world and she doesn’t have any”, Shorr recalls. She was left to figure it out on her own, and songwriting became a way of processing the world.
After travelling to Nashville to perform at a showcase organised by Perez Hilton, Shorr realised she would have to move there if she wanted to make it, so she headed south aged 18.
Shorr joined Song Suffragettes, a female songwriters’ collective countering the industry’s gender disparity. Showcasing her song Fight Like a Girl at its weekly live slot earned her a publishing deal. For a while, Shorr smoothed down her edges to try to get playlisted on country radio. Then her bad year forced her honesty back out; after her sister died, she wrote Vices, confessing to all her unhealthiest coping mechanisms. When she showed her manager another new song, the savagely funny kiss-off F U Forever, “he was like: ‘Fuck, I guess we’re doing this!’” Shorr says.
Source: Whiskey, addiction, breakups: Kalie Shorr is the new queen of country
Recent Comments