This story is featured in CityBeat's March 20 print edition.
Brandy Clark is a rare country music success story, starting her career as a starry-eyed songwriter before transitioning into a gifted performer in her own right. The Pacific Northwest native moved to Nashville in the late 1990s to join the “music business program” at Belmont University, an experience that no doubt prepared her for the ups and downs of the modern country music industrial complex — an entity that hasn’t exactly been inviting to female songwriters and performers over the years.
Clark’s storytelling acumen was apparent by the time she worked with a range of artists, from Reba McEntire, Darius Rucker and Miranda Lambert to Sheryl Crow, Keith Urban and Kacey Musgraves (with whom she collaborated on the Grammy-winning “Follow Your Arrow.” By 2012, she started opening shows for Crow. Her debut album, 12 Stories, surfaced a year later, featuring a dozen songs rife with personal touchstones, lacerating wit and a direct, plainspoken voice that rarely fails to penetrate. Clark’s fourth and most recent record, 2023’s self-titled Brandy Clark, was produced by friend and confidante Brandi Carlile.
“She pushed me a lot,” Clark said of Carlile in a recent interview with Billboard. “I’ve never been as challenged by a producer as I was by her. I gave her like 18 to 24 songs and asked her to pick about a dozen. I liked them all, but I was surprised by some of her choices. She told me, ‘I chose the songs that I thought sounded like you wrote them in your bedroom and not in the writing room.’ And that was a really good reminder for me because, when we all got into music, it wasn’t because we needed it to be perfect; it was because it moved us.”
Two such “bedroom” tunes are “Buried,” a sparse, acoustic-based tune about living without shame, and “Dear Insecurity,” a duet with Carlile that uses one’s various insecurities as a metaphor for an insensitive lover. The latter won a Grammy this year for Best Americana Performance, yet another noteworthy step in Clark’s rise in prominence.
Brandy Clark plays Ludlow Garage on March 28 at 7:30 p.m. Info: ludlowgaragecincinnati.com.
