By the time Easter came round, Brandy Clark had spent just three days of 2016 at home in Nashville. The radio tour for her second record, Big Day in a Small Town, started on the fifth day of the year, even though it wasn’t out until June, taking her to two or three different stations a day. “It ain’t for a sissy, I’ll tell you that,” says the 40-year-old songwriter of this cutthroat underside of country. Not that she’s complaining. “I’ve never been somebody who was afraid of hard work. You want your music heard by the most possible people. If somebody says anything different, they’re lying.”
And Clark’s music speaks to a vast audience who weren’t hearing themselves in country. She writes songs for the workers who keep America spinning, the overburdened mothers putting themselves last, the women in middle age struggling to reconcile their faith with their need for relief, be it romantic or chemical. The characters in her songs are coupon-clippers, mums working in diners, faded homecoming queens, farmers so poor “the fleas have left the hound”.
Clark grew up in Morton, Washington, a tiny logging town. Her father died in a mill accident a few months before 9/11, a tragedy she spins into a lament for lost stability – “the broken pieces of the Norman Rockwell days” – on Since You’ve Been Gone. Illuminating working-class struggles feels subtly political, and Clark once wanted to be a journalist. Yet she calls herself “the least political person you’ll ever talk to”.
She doesn’t write striving parables or grass-is-greener fairytales, but meets her characters on their own terms – as much Randy Newman as Loretta Lynn. “I think we are shaped by our decisions,” she says, “and oftentimes by our bad decisions more than our good ones. I just want to draw a portrait of where they are and how they’re coping with their life.”
As an 1980s kid, she was lured into country by the sound of Merle Haggard, Lynn, Patsy Cline and Barbara Mandrell. “There’s a real heartache in it I’ve always been drawn to,” she says. Her mum taught her to play guitar, and for a while they were in a group called Sagebrush and Satin, touring pageants and fairs. As the music bug really bit, she quit her basketball scholarship at college in Washington for Nashville.
Clark had wanted to become a performer, but abandoned the idea after seeing how young female artists were moulded for fame. There’s a bit of that in the lead single Girl Next Door, a high-octane stomper that recalls Stevie Nicks and Tom Petty’s Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around. “If you want the girl next door, go next door,” Clark seethes.
“I often think what attracts us to people eventually repels us,” she says. “My way into that song is that I’m not the girl-next-door kinda artist. I’m not what people expect of a female country artist. I feel like I’m singing about real, truthful, oftentimes unpretty subjects.”
Still, for years other people sang her songs: Miranda Lambert recorded Mama’s Broken Heart (written by Clark and her frequent collaborator Shane McAnally, as well as Kacey Musgraves). It hit No 2 on the Billboard country charts, while the Band Perry’s Better Dig Two, written with McAnally and Trevor Rosen, went to No 1. She co-wrote three songs on Musgraves’ breakout album, Same Trailer Different Park, including Follow Your Arrow, an ode to open-mindedness that was named song of the year at the 2014 Country Music Association awards. Clark, like McAnally, is openly gay, but despite country’s conservative reputation, she says it’s never been an issue.
A stream of hits for other artists followed, but Clark found herself with a pile of songs “no one else had touched”. So she recorded them herself under the title 12 Stories, and shopped the album around labels, fruitlessly, until she was signed by the tiny Texas imprint Slate Creek. At 38, she became a stealth star thanks to her plainspoken accounts of women on the edge, whether heartbroken – What’ll Keep Me Out of Heaven “will take me there tonight”, she sang as a desperate woman contemplating an affair – or comic. Stripes found a woman suppressing the urge to shoot her cheating man because she’d look bad in prison scrubs, deciding: “There’s no crime of passion worth a crime of fashion.”
Reissued by Warner, the record earned Grammy nominations for best country album and best new artist in 2015. The rockier Big Day in a Small Town was shaped by spending three years on the road, and new producer Jay Joyce introducing her to Neil Young’s Harvest. Girl Next Door peaked at a respectable No 39 in the country airplay chart.
Clark has been asked to perform for Hillary Clinton, and will soon be making the late-night TV rounds. None of which, you suspect, matters as much to her as her music finding the people it’s about. Three Kids No Husband is a stoic weeper about a woman who’s “a mom and a dad and a taxi driver and when the baby’s sick she’s an up-all-nighter, a hand, a shoulder and a referee – a real-life hero if you ask me”. Two weeks ago, Clark was playing in Florida, “and afterwards, this guy chased me down – young guy, I would say between 20 and 30,” she recalls. “He said, ‘I just wanna thank you for playing that Three Kids song, because that was my mom.’”
- Big Day in a Small Town is out now on Warner Bros.
