**When the Rain Lets Up: My Year of Living Inside Lori McKenna’s “The Bird & The Rifle”**
By Kroes den Bock
Let’s start with a confession. In the rainiest seasons of my life—literal and metaphoric—I don’t reach for party anthems or the dead-horse-boyfriend refrains that punctuate so much of country radio. My solace has always come in songs that feel like hands brushing crumbs from my kitchen counter while I ugly-cry into my coffee. Lori McKenna’s 2016 album, *The Bird & The Rifle*, contains such songs. But there’s a track on that album, “Old Men Young Women,” that slipped by the general public, a song I didn’t even notice at first, overshadowed by her breakthrough single “Humble and Kind.”
I found “Old Men Young Women” one slow, muggy Sunday in June, surfing the back pages of minor music blogs, hunting for country that cut through the slick radio polish. And I found it—almost by accident, as if McKenna herself had left the window open for anyone brave enough to climb in.
The setup, if you haven’t heard: Lori McKenna, the songwriter behind Tim McGraw and Little Big Town anthems, sits at the table and wonders about old men and young women—not the cliché of “old man with a young arm candy” exactly, but about the eternal ache of time, trust, and what’s lost along the way. The song begins:
*“Old men love young women
That’s how it goes, isn’t it?
Love with the lines still on their skin
They want the kind of world where no one gets hurt
And you get to start over again”*
On the first listen, I laughed—I thought this was a barroom joke. I imagined McKenna on a barstool, gently mocking some local lothario for chasing after girls half his age, hair all dyed, teeth uncanny white. But as the second verse rolled through my headphones, the song warped and turned quietly devastating:
*“Nobody ever tells you
That it all happens soon
Nobody ever helps you
When you’re sleeping next to the moon
Old men young women, both just tryin’ to heal
Take it from someone who knows how it feels”*
At this point, McKenna’s voice—never flashy, all cracked honey and heartbreak—slides straight through your chest. I recognized something in that line, “Both just tryin’ to heal.” For years, in my thirties, I’d found myself drawn to people (at work, at bars, in old apartments painted like the inside of a Band-Aid box) who moved through life as if the rules had never applied. There’s an honesty in McKenna’s sadness here—a secret handshake between those who remember being the young fool and the aging dreamer alike.
The lyric that did it—the one that made me switch off the track and just sit with myself for a few minutes—was:
*“They say love makes us wise
But love never lies
It just leaves out the part where you lose”*
What other songwriter would admit that? That love may grow, but it’s also what reminds you how much you lose with every risk you take, every year you bleed into the walls of a home, every mistake made for love. I thought back to my own life—the 2017 breakup that left me drifting in my own apartment, the way I sometimes haunted live music nights alone, nursing whiskey and avoiding the eyes of every other lost soul. We all want to start over; sometimes we crave someone young in spirit, or someone world-weary, not for exploitation or bravado, but for the impossible fantasy of “undoing” our oldest wounds.
The production is barely there—a few lean, shivering acoustic guitars, a bit of worn-down piano. McKenna, who co-wrote the song with Barry Dean and Luke Laird, knows restraint. This is country at its plainest—no bombast, just the hushing honesty of someone who’s seen how vulnerable people become in the ruins of their big plans.
But why does “Old Men Young Women” matter to me deeply, and why do I want you to hear it, even if you’ve never cared for “sad” country? Here’s where the psychoanalysis comes in: the year I found this song, I was stumbling through the aftermath of an “almost-marriage.” I fixated on the ways I’d failed; I obsessed over my receding hairline, my accumulating disappointments, my inability to make grand declarations and then live up to them. I felt too old to start fresh, too young to call it wisdom. My therapist, months later, asked if I’d learned “anything at all” from the loss, and I thought about Lori McKenna’s line, “They say love makes us wise / But love never lies…”
She gets it. There isn’t a moral in the suffering; there’s just honesty. And sometimes, that’s enough: finding a song that holds your failures gently, that doesn’t shame or dismiss the stupid ways we reach for renewal.
*“You get to start over again,”* she sings. Not with a promise, but a question. Is starting over even possible, or do we just wear our scars forward, hoping new company won’t notice, or won’t mind?
There’s something I need to admit: I used to laugh at ballads about regret, thinking they were the domain of losers who never learned to dance. But now, several years and therapy bills later, I understand just how brave it is to say, “Take it from someone who knows how it feels.” This is why McKenna’s minor-key masterpiece gnaws at me while the hits fade from memory. She sings for the people who clean up after heartbreak, who walk away from the “reset” button knowing the same pain will return, maybe softer, maybe sharper. She sings for the ones who still trust love, even when it leaves out the part where you lose.
There are hundreds of country songs about age and romance. There are few that understand the exquisite danger of hoping for new beginnings when you know damn well heartbreak is never far behind. “Old Men Young Women”—an unheralded gem from a Grammy-winning songwriter—is my anthem for the honest year, for accepting what’s gone and sitting in the ache until it turns into laughter. If you’re haunted by your own unfinished business, give this song a quiet listen.
And if you catch me, someday, staring out a rain-blasted café window, headphones on, a small smile behind the sorrow—know that I’m living inside Lori McKenna’s world, where healing and regret ride side by side, and where starting over is always just a song away.
—Kroes den Bock