'It's the Rawest I've Ever Been': Inside Brandy Clark's Personal New Record

Photo: Victoria Stevens

The creation of great art might seem like the mystical result of sorcery, yet the truth is much more human and grounded. Hard graft and natural talent are crucial elements in such an equation but, for any artist trying to wrestle their muse into life, finding exactly the right collaborators, at exactly the right time, is equally pivotal.

Having penned some of this century's finest country songs for, among others, Kacey Musgraves, Miranda Lambert, Sheryl Crow and Reba McEntire, Brandy Clark is undoubtedly one of Music Row’s most vital modern songsmiths. Whether trading in  character studies, witty take downs or stun-you-into-silence tear jerkers, her ability to blend classic country storytelling with unforgettable ear worm hooks is, quite simply, the musical equivalent of gold dust.

Yet, even with all that success, and three acclaimed solo albums under her belt, she welcomed a helping hand from a gifted friend when it came to making the follow up to 2020’s Grammy nominated break up effort ‘Your Life Is A Record’. Enter Brandi Carlile, an equally lauded singer, songwriter and fellow Washington native who, like Clark, has traversed the Nashville scene as a lesbian for her whole career.

After a captivating pitch from Carlile to produce her fourth album, the pair, who’d already collaborated on a couple of stellar cuts during the pandemic, decided to embark on a longer creative journey together. Driven by their fizzing camaraderie, shared experiences and deep respect for each other’s talents, the result is an intimate and empathetically sparse self-titled record that Brandy with a ‘y’ has described as being “way more personal than I had planned, so I want people to love it.” 

We caught up with Clark to discuss working with Carlile, making the move into Americana with her most personal music to date and why, following such a great experience, she’s planning to fix what ain’t broken and reinvent her songwriting approach moving forwards.

When Brandi Carlile approached you at last year’s Grammys and said she wanted to produce a whole record for you, what was her vision and pitch, particularly with reference to why she thought she was ‘the bold move you needed to make’ at this point in your career?

The two tracks her and I worked on during the pandemic, Like Mine and Same Old Devil, I loved the process of that with her. There was a real ease in it. So I was already intrigued by that, but when she said ‘I see it as your return to the Northwest’ it definitely intrigued me that she wanted to approach it from that perspective. Because I am from the Northwest, I’ve now lived in Nashville longer than I lived there, but it’s still home for me. And when she said ‘you need to make a bold move and I’m it’ Brandi really wanted to help me step more into the Americana space. She said ‘you write these great songs and I think with a little rawer, edgier production you can step right into Americana.’ 

I’ve always been on that line of country and Americana and she said ‘This record is like a Trojan horse because it’s gonna be raw, it’s gonna be edgy but then, on the inside of it, are all these great songs.’ As an artist we have to continue to inspire ourselves and she pushed me at a time when I wasn’t feeling particularly inspired. I talk to lots of my artist friends and we all go through periods where we’re like ‘I don’t have anything to say, does anybody care?’ and I just became more inspired the more I talked to her about everything.     

You’ve described us as hearing the real, raw you on this record. So how is this version of Brandy Clark different to previous albums and why do you think this was the time it chose to reveal itself?

All of my records have been me, but right now I’m at a spot in my life where I’m probably the most me I’ve ever been, because I’m the oldest I’ve ever been. As I’ve grown up and become an adult and lived life, I’ve had no choice but to become more of who I am and I think the two songs on this record you wouldn’t have heard on another record are Northwest and She Smoked In The House. I wrote Get High about a girl I went to High School with but it was more of a composite character of several people I had known. Whereas She Smoked In The House, that is 100% about my grandma, every detail. So that’s a deeper version of me than I’ve shown. And Northwest, even though it’s uptempo, that’s about where I grew up. Every place in that song is real. 

In the past I’ve written those songs but wouldn’t have put them on records because I’d think ‘It’s too specific, no one’s gonna care.’ And Brandi pushed that. She’s like ‘I don’t want you to have anything on this record, I don’t want you to sing one syllable you don’t mean.’ I don’t want it to sound like I haven’t done that on my other records because I have, I just think this is more introspective. I’ve always been very real when I’ve sung about relationships. I made a record about the break up of a relationship I’d been in for 15 years, so I’m good to go there. But Dear Insecurity, I’ve never sung something like that. That’s the rawest I’ve ever been. 

Was that a comfortable place to land in?

To talk about my own insecurities and frailties in a song, that’s scary. And I didn’t realise what I was revealing until Lenny Waronker, one of the guys I work with at Warner, said ‘These songs are more intimate and vulnerable than your last record.’ I was taken aback and said ‘Lenny, that record was so personal to me I don’t know how this one could be more vulnerable.’ And he said ‘That was vulnerable about the ending of a relationship, this is vulnerable about you.’

In terms of capturing that rawness, the album was recorded live on the floor in a week or so, which sounds very much like a ‘flying by the seat of your pants’ experience. How was that for you?

It was scary. I’ve worked with producers that record live but there have always been a lot of overdubs. This was definitely the quickest and most, like you said, flying by the seat of your pants record I’ve ever made. But what you end up with is a very raw sounding record that matches the raw emotions of these songs. The last song on the album, Take Mine, that’s just me and Dave Palmer, who played all the piano, and strings were added after, and we had to get our cake together because he had to follow me.

He was playing organ, and not a forgiving type of organ, so it wasn’t a situation where he could go back and punch in and neither could I. What that does for me, and for a musician like him, is it raises the level we have to bring in the studio because we can’t get it technically right and then have the emotion not be right. Both things had to match up and we both had to get into the same space in our hearts to do something like that. It required a really intense amount of focus.  

There seems to be two distinct sides to the journey you take us on with this record. The first half feels like everything’s under dark shadows, being plagued by pivotal life changing events and trying to find ways to escape them. But that shifts from Northwest onwards, both musically and lyrically, as it becomes more tonally upbeat, positive and about finding salvation, comfort in the familiar and what lifts us up.

I love everything you’ve just said. When I was doing this it was a puzzle to me, finding how these songs would fit together. I could never have articulated what you just said but I always fight for sequencing, that’s a hill I’m always willing to die on and one of the biggest battles here was the sequence. I always felt Ain’t Enough Rocks had to be the first song and that was not a popular opinion when I turned the record in because it’s polarising. There was a big meeting at the label and my manager told me that there was all this discussion and one person raised their hand and said ‘I want you guys to realise we’ve been talking about this song for 40 minutes, so maybe there’s something to that.’ 

I felt really strongly about putting Ain’t Enough Rocks first, and then Buried right behind it, because you think it’s one thing and then hear it’s something different.  And what you said about the top half of the record being darker and back half being lighter, I never realised that but, now you’ve said it, I’m going through it in my mind and it is that way. Which makes me happy because life is a dark and a light journey and to go through all those emotions on an album is what I always want to do and, to end in a light place, that makes me feel we did our job right with the sequencing. That was not intentional. We just went with our creative hearts so that makes me feel we landed in the right place.       

Ain’t Enough Rocks also features the sublime slide work of Derek Trucks. Why was he the right person to feature on that track? His playing is so magical and articulate it almost acts as another voice in the song.

It really does. It sounds like a horn when it first comes in. When we were in the studio we were all really excited to record that. I was a little scared too because of the subject matter, like ‘Does this really work for me?’ If it wasn’t a ‘story song’ it wouldn’t because I’d have a hard time telling that without being the storyteller. It’s not my experience and I don’t want to pretend that it is because I know people who are survivors of abuse and I wouldn’t do that. But since it was a ‘story song’ it felt like I could be the storyteller.

And as we recorded it everybody was loving the song and Brandon Bell, the engineer, and Brandi said ‘What would you think about getting Derek Trucks to feature on this?’ I was just like ‘Wow, yeah, he’s iconic.’ Brandon even went as far as to say he’s one of the top couple of guitar players alive at what he does. So this part makes me really proud. Brandi reached out to him, because she has a relationship with him, and he wasn’t gonna do it. His studio was torn up at the time and he couldn’t figure out a way. Then she sent him the song and he was so moved that he chose to do it. We thought he was the right person but the fact that he heard the song and was inspired to do what he did, that’s why he was the right person.   

You’ve said that you really stepped up your singing on this album because of Brandi. How did she help you achieve that?

Whenever you’re in the presence of someone who’s great at what they do, you step up. When I’m co-writing with someone who’s a great songwriter I become a better songwriter and Brandi, she’s just one of the greatest singers out there. So by riffing off of her in the studio I became greater. A lot of it, for me, was peeling back and not trying to be perfect. The best example is Buried. That’s a vocal she had to talk me into. I was emotional when I sang that and she had Brandon turn my microphone up as hot as it would go and asked me to whisper-sing. Which changed the way the players played. I learned a lot from that. I was like ‘It just doesn’t feel perfect enough’ and she was like ‘It shouldn’t. It’s imperfect and that’s what’s perfect about it.’ 

And then on Dear Insecurity, that was her and I live, I ended up having to cut our time short because I got sick and can hear that in my voice. Being around someone like her, who’s such a great singer, and was willing to let vocals stay that weren’t perfect, including her own on Dear Insecurity, I was like ‘I’m too precious about wanting things to be correct.’ I needed to feel more and working with her as a vocalist, there was probably more feel on these vocals than I’ve ever had.

Finally, you’ve said working with Brandi was ‘the gift you didn’t know you needed and that it’s going to change the way you write and make records moving forwards.’ That seems like quite a seismic thing, given how successful your previous way of working has been. So how do you see your music developing in future based on that statement?

Well where that came from was…I write so many songs. I go through dozens and dozens and dozens, hundreds, to pick songs for a record. By the time I get to a producer I’ve usually whittled it down to about 24 to 18. I always ask a producer ‘Help me pick 10’ and she was very definitive in her choices. The only song she didn’t choose that I insisted on was Tell Her You Don’t Love Her. So I asked why she chose those and she said ‘They were all great songs, but I chose the ones that I felt like you wrote in your bedroom.’ That hit me because I’ve been in the business of making music for so long that sometimes I can forget that’s where it started. Just sitting down in your bedroom, with a guitar and your feelings, and writing a song. 

So moving forwards I’m gonna do more of that. I’m still gonna write a lot of songs because that’s part of my process, but I’m gonna dig in deeper and write about things that really matter to me and not about things that don’t. I see it with She Smoked In The House. That’s a song I thought only I would care about. I wrote that for and about my grandma for myself because I was missing her and I realised, as that song has rolled out, it hits people because it hit me. It hit Brandi because it hit me. Life is short and, thinking about what I want to leave on this earth of myself creatively, I want it to be the realest stuff. I feel lucky that I’ve been able to do that but want to do it even more consciously moving forward.

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