Anyone who says women can't have it all clearly has never confronted the force of nature that is Lori McKenna. She has been a devoted wife for 18 years - almost half her life - and equally doting stay-at-home mother of 5 along the way.

But somewhere in the painting of this slightly tilted Norman Rockwell portrait, McKenna also became one of the country's most gifted songwriters, beloved by a cultish fan base, championed by Faith Hill and feted by Oprah Winfrey.

Sometimes McKenna herself has to take a deep breath and try to sort out everything that has transpired over the past couple of years, from Hill covering 3 of McKenna's songs for her 2005 album "Fireflies" to her acclaimed opening slots on the recent Tim McGraw/Faith Hill Soul2Soul 2007 Tour to the overwhelmingly positive attention being lavished on her fifth album and major label debut, "Unglamorous." McKenna's "pinch me" moments seem to come more frequently these days.

"I know, isn't it crazy?" says McKenna with a giddy laugh from her hectic home in Stoughton, Mass, a Boston suburb.

"I've never been accused of overthinking anything in my life but it's possible I may have overthought this whole process of what it's going to be like up there. And it was surprising, but I was really very comfortable. The most nerve wracking part of the process is walking up this series of staircases to get to the top of the stage, and I had convinced myself that I would fall at least once. With 19 shows, I had to get up, and I had to get down. But once we got up there and the guitars worked and the mic worked, I was just really comfortable."

In a lot of ways, it's been easier for McKenna to take the stage with her band night after in front of tens of thousands of someone else's fans than it was to face a few dozen bar patrons at her first open mic over a decade ago.

"My first open mic, I was physically shaking," says McKenna. "I have Mark Erelli and Russell Chudnofsky with me, who are my band, and Mark's a brilliant songwriter, and we've talked about it, and we've all been in situations where we've played house concerts, and those are far worse. You have 20 people sitting in someone's living room, and it can be so much harder than playing for 15,000 people who aren't your fans."

McKenna is quick to acknowledge McGraw and Hill and the openness of their fans with making her experience opening for the pair so incredibly easy.

"The thing that made it work was that the audiences were amazing," says McKenna. "They gave us 30 minutes of their time every single night, and they were so gracious. I think partly to do with they're Faith and Tim fans, and they knew that they were friends of mine, but I also think Faith and Tim made us such a big part of the show. Faith was on stage five minutes after I was off stage."

By way of comparison, McKenna notes that the night before the tour began at Omaha's Qwest Center, Gwen Stefani had played the arena, and because of set changes and other delays, audiences had to wait over half an hour between Stefani and opener Akon. Then the story takes an unexpected turn into showing just how unassuming and nonplussed Lori McKenna is about this whole situation.

"I kept calling him Acorn, but I know it's Akon, and that shows you how old I'm getting," she says with the gentlest of Boston accents and a laugh aimed squarely at herself. "My five-year-old daughter knew like five of his songs, and I'm like, 'How do you hear this stuff?' Then I kept calling him Acorn, and people were like, 'Why don't you just stop? You're making an ass out of yourself.'"

When she finishes laughing hysterically at herself, McKenna makes the point that a long gap between opener and headliner is never particularly good for the opener, and Hill was vigilant to not let that happen to McKenna.

"Literally, the longest night, Faith was on seven minutes after we were off," she says. "We were really part of the show, and that's a credit to Tim and Faith for wanting to help out their friends this summer, but also to make us part of their family and part of the show."

After her experience with the couple, you'd be hard-pressed to find a bigger McGraw/Hill fan than the one McKenna has become.

"They're both such great people," says McKenna. "I think at the point where I am, where things are starting to change and new decisions come across your table, and you're getting new fans - in the Northeast, you're used to fans but you've probably seen them before, and you might know their names - it's such a blessing to watch someone like Tim and Faith who've been down that road, then become superstars that, at the end of the day, are just great people."

If McKenna's star should rise to similar heights as her summer tour mates, it's a safe bet that she'll retain the homespun charm and devotion to family that has been reflected in her songwriting from the start, the very quality that drew Hill to her work in the first place.

Long before Faith Hill heard her songs, Lori McKenna was writing them and before that, she was living them. Married at age 19 to Gene McKenna, a plumber for the local gas company, the former Lorraine Giroux, one of five children herself, became a mother three times in the subsequent eight years, staying at home to raise her children except for a few part time hours at her brother's glue factory to help make ends meet.

By the time she was 27, McKenna had already been writing songs for half her life. She began when she was 13, 7 years after the death of her mother from cancer, perhaps as a way of coping with the devastating loss. Whatever her motivation to write songs, McKenna was never particularly inspired to do anything with them.

"The first song I ever wrote was, strangely enough, a country song, but not so strangely, it was about a little girl asking her mom where the dad had gone," she says. "I would always make up little songs, and two of my brothers are songwriters, and I would share them with one of my brothers. It wasn't until I was 25 or 26 that I would play them for my friends if they would come to the house and hang out with me and my kids. At the end of the night, I might sing a song."

When she was 27, McKenna's family forced the issue and made her take her guitar and her songs to an open mic at the now defunct Old Vienna coffee house, a regional club that often hosted national touring acts. McKenna reluctantly and shakily climbed the stage and did her two songs with an unexpected result.

"I remember so clearly this being my goal that someday I'll get up enough nerve to do the open mic at the Old Vienna coffee house," says McKenna. "My sister-in-law and my sister and my brothers dragged me there, and they talked me into it. I did two songs. and I was physically shaking. The guy that ran the open mic, Robert Haigh, followed us outside and told me to come back. I went back about a month later, and he was like, 'I was wondering when you were coming back.'"

As McKenna played out more and more, her reputation in the Boston folk community grew exponentially. Her songs were a quiet reflection of the life she lived every day, and her poignant observations and compelling melodies made her a fast favorite among Boston area folk fans.

"I did the bar gig thing for a couple of years, and I think I learned a total of 10 cover songs. I was always so bad at learning other people's songs," says McKenna with a laugh. "Luckily enough, I got to play this bar down the street that the guy was nice enough he didn't care what I played. He liked my music, so he let me play my own stuff. I could never have done the whole cover thing. It would have been way too much work for me, I'm sure."

In 1998, McKenna recorded her debut album, "Paper Wings and Halo," which she self-released. At that point, the Old Vienna's Haigh was instrumental in helping McKenna get gigs, securing a producer and offering career advice, which was invaluable for the budding artist.

"He never took a dime from me," says McKenna. "He essentially managed me for free for about a year before I was doing real shows and actually making money, and then I got a manager from that point on. (Haigh) was my guardian angel. I don't think I could have done it without him at all."

Eventually, she was signed by Signature Sounds, which released her next three albums: 2001's "Pieces of Me," 2003's "The Kitchen Tapes" and 2005's critical breakthrough "Bittertown" (in that time, she and Gene released two more children as well). All were well received, garnering McKenna three Boston Music Awards, but "Bittertown" seemed to spur the most talk about next level success.

"'Bittertown' was definitely the biggest learning experience for me; it was like a turning point in my confidence," says McKenna. "I had a manager right from the beginning, who was great, and I think what I did with the first few records was I did what I was supposed to do, and I did what made sense, but I didn't have the confidence to back my steps up as well as I should have."

"We went in to make 'Bittertown' with Lorne (Entress), who produced it, and he played drums and a zillion other instruments, and Kevin Barry who played bass and guitar, and it was sort of just the three of us. It was sort of a long studio experience, but it was necessary for it to take that long because I was just learning. If I hadn't done that record before I made this record for Warner Brothers, I think I would have been just a mess. 'Bittertown' gave me so much back."

Still in all, the industry buzz over 'Bittertown' may not have been enough to raise McKenna's profile without one more critical push. One of McKenna's longtime friends and former label mate on the Boston folk circuit, Mary Gauthier, had gone pretty much the same route, parlaying her Boston cred into a deal with Lost Highway.

"Mary and I were friends from doing open mics, and we were on Signature Sounds together," says McKenna. "Mary brought this up, but out of that patch of singer/songwriters that came out that year in Boston, Mary and I were the two old ladies. She's the gay one, and I'm the one with all the kids. As it turns out, being gay is much more normal than having five kids. So, Mary and I were the old ladies...we joke about the other stuff."

About three years ago, Gauthier gave a copy of 'Bittertown' to Melanie Howard, the widow of legendary Nashville songwriter/producer Harlan Howard and owner of her late husband's publishing company, in the hopes of drumming up some publishing interest for her old friend.

Howard was floored by McKenna's material, contacting her within a couple weeks of hearing 'Bittertown' and telling McKenna she wanted to pitch her songs around Nashville.

A month later, Howard met with Hill, who was just completing work on a new album, in order to play her some of McKenna's songs. The impact they had on Hill was just as immediate; although she was essentially finished with her album at that point, she took four of McKenna's songs into the studio, three of which wound up on the album proper, one of which became the album's title, "Fireflies,"(the fourth was used as an iTunes exclusive).

After "Fireflies" was released in 2005, Hill began telling the story of how she had discovered McKenna's songs and her cottage industry career - which had been conducted in the same small house that she and Gene had bought just after getting married - began to blossom into something quite a bit more involved.

Warner Brothers Nashville called with thoughts of doing an album, which she accepted (Warner reissued "Bittertown," without changes), then came her next opportunity of a lifetime - an appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show alongside Hill, whom she had only just met.

"I was sort of in awe of (Faith) for awhile because I was trying to figure out why she liked what I did - it makes perfect sense to me now because I know her so well now, but I didn't at the time," says McKenna. "When we went to do Oprah, it was only the second time I'd ever met Faith, and I was still trying to figure out what she saw in what I did and why she was attracted to it."

For McKenna, the payoff in all this was the chance to get back in the studio for her fifth and most widely released album to date. When it came time to record "Unglamorous," McKenna was adamant about the things that she wanted to happen when she initially spoke with Nashville veteran Byron Gallimore, who co-produced Unglamorous with Tim McGraw.

"I talked to Byron a few weeks before we went in, and I was insistent that I was going to play the guitar on my record, and I know I'm not that great a player, but I've always played the acoustic tracks on every other record I've made, and this should be no different, and he was like, 'Absolutely!'" recalls McKenna.

"Then I got down there, and the first couple of days in the studio, we had Darrell Scott playing acoustic, and I wouldn't get off the couch. Byron was like, 'Get in there and start playing.' And I was like, 'I'm not moving.'"

"Unglamorous" is clearly the best work of McKenna's career, which is a strong statement considering everything that has come before it. McKenna's songwriting style is neither flashy nor obvious, and her songwriting subjects are fairly close to home, and while every song on "Unglamorous" is sung in the first person, part of McKenna's innate skill is in being able to inhabit a story in order to sing it without having to actually live it.

She will admit to a certain amount of autobiography - "I Know You" is a love song to Gene, whom she met in third grade, and the album's title song is a musical laundry list of all the elements of a normal life.

One of the album's highlights is the deeply moving "Leaving This Life," McKenna's reflections on her mother and the heart wrenching realization that having her own children has given her perspective on how her mother must have felt about having to unwillingly and forever leave her children behind.

McKenna had written many times about her mother in the past and even had an alternately titled version of "Leaving This Life" in her notebook that she didn't even particularly like, but she felt she had explored the topic quite enough.

Collaborator Mark D. Sanders, who experienced a similar loss in his childhood, told her he wanted to write a song about her mother with her, and while she was reticent to do it, she showed him her unfinished song, which ultimately evolved into the beautiful and tearful track that closes the album.

"He got me to the place where the song is now," says McKenna of Sanders' input. "It's such a good example of co-writing gone good. It's one of those things that I never would have gotten. I was having trouble all day writing. I was like, 'Dude, I cannot sing that.' And I literally just started playing it out right before the tour, because the label and everybody was like, 'Are you gonna do 'Leaving This Life'?' And I was like, 'I'll do it some nights, but I can't do it other nights, and I can't think about it too much.' I've lost it a few times playing it live, and thankfully I almost always have the band with me, and they just play until I figure it out again. I wouldn't have put it on the record if my whole family didn't say it was okay."

"Even my dad, who's a tough nut to crack, even cried when he heard that song. And we're Irish Catholic, we're good at denial. So, if he wanted me to do it, then I had to put it on there."

In a further example of McKenna's atypical experience, she wasn't subjected to the standard new artist routine of submitting handfuls of tracks at a time to be either accepted or rejected by the label. With McGraw and Gallimore behind the console and McKenna's proven songwriting track record as a guide, Warner wisely allowed McKenna and her creative team to find the heart of the record without troubling themselves with lesser issues.

"I've been lucky enough to be put in these situations where I can be myself, and the songs can breathe," says McKenna. "I can even be put in these situations with these big commercial dudes and be blessed enough for them to want the songs to shine, too. It's not about radio and all those things. We didn't even talk about that stuff. Byron would just say over and over, 'Just listen to the song.'"

More than a few people have been listening to McKenna's songs, but things haven't changed that much for her fundamentally. The success of Hill's "Fireflies" gave McKenna the means to move her family into a larger house in Stoughton, but Gene still works for the gas company and McKenna is still, to as normal an extent as possible, a hands-on, stay-at-home mom (albeit one with a nanny) - she took her eldest son Brian, a musician, and her two youngest children on the road with her this summer, and she's tried to maintain as much routine as she can.

And just like a mom, she tries to use her success as an object lesson to teach her children a little something about life.

"I don't exactly know how to explain it, but I've just been blessed in so many different ways," says McKenna. "As a mom, it's just so nice to look at your kids and say, 'If you sort of stick your neck out for something you're passionate about, it will reward you at the end of the day.'"

"The only way I can explain how everything's gone down for me is that I'm lucky enough to believe in something that's like a kid almost that loves you back. Kids give you back so much, and that's sort of what music does, too. The biggest change is the presence of new hope, and that has affected all of us. It's been such a gift."