LAUREN WATKINS - Mama, I Made It - Big Loud Records/Songs & Daughters

Since striking out the gate with the 1-2 punch of “Shirley Temple” and “Camel Blues,” Lauren Watkins has created an insatiable buzz around her songwriting depth, vocal prowess, and unbridled authenticity as she’s continued laying the foundations of her path with deliberate precision through each next song.

Having introduced herself last year with the release of two, very well-received EP’s, Watkins is now riding that wave of momentum into the anticipation of her first full-length album (due out this summer), giving us a taste of things to come with “Mama, I Made It.”

Co-written by Lauren, Rocky Block, and Lauren Hungate, though in many ways remorseful as it is freeing, the song carries a slyness within its carefully budding melody that allows you to feel the edges of her smirk as she sings an open letter to her mama, her rock, in the heartbroken aftermath of yet another fight with her better half.

Gripping the gasoline lit fuel of what awaits her when she goes back inside, she confesses through the opening verse to having put his Babe Ruth baseball through the drywall and shattering the glass on all the frames that held their pictures, while utilizing the second verse and the bridge in anxious anticipation of the impending rumor mill that is surely to arise.

However, it’s the up and down battle that conflicts within her that really allows the totality of the lyrics to take their shape. Wrapped around self-aware truth told through lines that see her admitting that she had it made and made it worse, she holds the lift of the chorus within her tone as she intriguingly swerves the typical route of pointing the finger and only blaming him, to instead, put the blame on herself with a knowing wink that justice was served: 

“I pushed a grown man to his limit

Aimed for a nerve and damn, I hit it

Ain't no point debatin' where the blame is

Too much Makers made a mark

Tore a twister through this trailer park

He's sure to make my goodbye grapevine famous

Ah this train's a wreck, it's such a mess

And mama, I made it”

By skating ever so gently around the facts of what he may or may not have done that caused her “crazy,” while fully embracing who she is and what she just did, there’s a maturity level reached through the open ended style of the lyric that skillfully becomes a bold showcase of her songwriting expertise in that it allows the listener to inject their own situation, resonating a strong, personal connection with the song.

(Review Written By: Jeffrey Kurtis/ Artwork Courtesy of Big Loud Records / Songs & Daughters, Image by Brayln Kelly Smith)

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