Brandy Clark has long been a lauded pen in Nashville’s inkwell, landing hits with chart toppers like Kacey Musgraves and Miranda Lambert (among others), while also handily stepping out front with her own records woven from classic country music clarity and contemporary heart-on-the-sleeve fearlessness.
Clark will be in Silicon Valley this week, opening for veteran singer-songwriter Mary Chapin Carpenter on June 14 at the Mountain Winery in Saratoga.
On her self-titled fourth album, Clark is as powerful as ever, showcasing stunning personal narratives alongside blood-and-bone ballads that rise above to survey fresh angles bound by neither convention nor cliche.
“I think that’s always the challenge of a songwriter and a singer,” says Clark, who on her latest release maneuvers deliberately through tales of heartbreak, homicide and home. “There are songs that aren’t hard for me to find a way into—like ‘Take Mine.’ I wrote that for my godson. And ‘Dear Insecurity’ (which won the 2023 Grammy for Best Americana Performance), I wrote that about my own insecurities.”
On “Tell Her You Don’t Love Her,” Clark implores a friend’s ex for mercy, an act the album’s producer Brandi Carlile approached with skepticism.
“Whenever I go into a project with any producer, I like to give them the last 18 to 24 songs that we whittled down from my catalog,” revealed Clark. “You just get too close to [songs] at some point. I always think of the producer as the last writer on the songs, and I’ve never made a record with a producer that I wrote songs with. I’ve been fortunate in that way that they were coming in new—much like a listener comes in—and the only song that Brandi didn’t choose that I was set on having to record was ‘Tell You Don’t Love Her.’ She said, ‘I just don’t believe that from you.’ And I said, ‘Well, it’s the truth!’
“I really wrote that about a friend of mine that was in a situation with an ex-boyfriend where he was kind of stringing her along, and my thought was, ‘Tell her you don’t love her. Come on, stop this. Stop the long goodbye.’ So that really shifted it for her,” she said. “The work tape was really big, you know, like big vocal, big guitar, and Brandi said, ‘I think my problem with it is this is a small emotion. You are pleading with this guy to let your friend off the hook. It’s not a big, aggressive emotion,’ so we broke it down really small, and by the end of the recording she said, ‘You know, that’s top three for me now.’”
After connecting during the pandemic lockdown, Clark and Carlile (dubbed BC Squared) collaborated on two tracks that would ultimately appear on the deluxe edition of Clark’s 2020 album, Your Life is a Record.
“Working with Brandi Carlile, another artist, was a very different experience for me as an artist myself,” Clark says. “The thing that Brandi was really good at—I mean, she’s great at several things—but one of the big things was holding a mirror up in front of my face and saying, ‘Okay, is this really you? And if it’s not really you, what’s your way into it?’”
Clark calls her latest collection “the rawest version of me at this point in my life,” and though a few critics and fans may have been surprised by some of Brandy Clark’s more bare-knuckled moments, this isn’t a reinvention but a live-edge cut of the songwriter.
“I’ve been in the world of trying to write commercial songs. I’ve never been really great at writing commercial songs. A lot of people think I am because I’ve had a few hits, but overall, I’ve had a lot more non-commercial songs,” she says. “But you get into that mindset of a certain, for lack of a better word, formula. And Brandi doesn’t know that formula. So for me to bring in some structure and her to bring in some non-structure, I think we landed in a really great place.
“This was maybe the most valuable lesson I learned in making this record,” Clark added. “I said, ‘Oh, I love your choices! Why did you choose those songs you chose?’ And she said, ‘They’re all great songs. But I chose the songs that when I listen to them, I felt like you wrote them in your bedroom and not in a writing room.’ That really hit me.”
Indeed, the intimacy and vulnerability of Brandy Clark are its greatest strengths, especially on songs like “She Smoked in the House.”
Clark wrote that song about her grandmother. “I wrote it by myself…I really thought it was a song that was so specific to me that it wouldn’t resonate. And it sure did. I was wrong! Every time I think I’m the only one that had that grandma or had that love or whatever it is, I am wrong! It’s good to be reminded of that.”
Brandy Clark plays at 7pm on June 14 at the Mountain Winery in Saratoga, opening for Mary Chapin Carpenter. Tickets: $63+. mountainwinery.com
