With her acid wit and poignant lyrics, the US songwriter is being hailed as a successor to Nashville-era Taylor Swift
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 and fighting trolls who accused her of faking it for publicity. It’s the longest she’s spent at home since
music became her full-time gig seven years ago. She has been writing songs with her two housemates but, otherwise, lockdown has been an exercise in getting comfortable with her own company. “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 (the latter honed at stand-up nights between gigs) did spook the famously conservative country industry. “They’re terrified to take a chance on something they don’t understand,” says Shorr. So she self-released the album, a gloves-off evolution of Taylor Swift’s Nashville years. It made the
New York Times’ best albums of 2019.