Nine Songs: Brandy Clark

Which isn’t surprising for an artist with a formidable back catalogue. Clark has released four solo albums, co-wrote the musical comedy Shucked, and has written for and with artists such as Sheryl Crow, Kacey Musgraves, Kenny Rogers and LeAnn Rimes. Having initially made her name writing for others, Clark’s star as a performer is in the ascendant, her song “Dear Insecurity” won Best Americana Performance at the 2024 Grammy Awards and Shucked was nominated for Best Original Score at the Tony Awards.

Clark’s love of lyrics takes its roots from learning the craft of writing Country songs, which she feels is “some of the best songwriting out there”. She shares a memory of going to evenings at The Nashville Songwriters Association International, where new writers would have their songs assessed by an experienced pro. “You’d put a song in a basket and if it got pulled out the person who was doing the critique would critique your song, and they were always lyric critiques, they were rarely anything musical. As a songwriter learning to write songs in Nashville, the focus is on the lyric.”

Clark explains that the discipline helped to sharpen her focus on writing linear stories through her songs, which was reinforced when she got advice of how to think beyond the songs themselves from her first publisher. “She told me when she listened to songs, she had a music video playing in her head, and the moment she couldn't visualise the music video, that's where the song fell apart,” she tells me.

“When you have teachers like that you learn, ‘OK, how do I tell a story? How do I keep my listener engaged?’ And I think that's what it's about. The musical side is clearly just as important, but when I was coming up in Nashville that wasn't really the focus of the people I was learning from, and I do think a solid lyric drives a song.”

A pivotal artist in Clark’s education, who didn’t make the final cut for her Nine Songs, is Merle Haggard, who she loves both for his prowess as a storyteller and his ability to weave social narratives into songwriting.

“Merle was so good at writing about topical things, songs like “Okie from Muskogee”, which was about what was going on politically in the country at the time," she reflects. "I love “Are the Good Times Really Over for Good”, it makes me think of my grandparents, it makes me think of a better time in a lot of ways. And so many of the lyrics in that, “And are we rolling downhill like a snowball headed for hell?”

I tell Clark that she has amazing memory for lyrics. “I love them they get stuck in there, like, ‘With no kind of chance at all for the flag or the Liberty Bell’. Merle figured out he was really a voice for the common man, the working man, and that resonated with me, having two blue collar parents, having a dad who worked with his hands. Merle Haggard's songs really spoke to that.”

As an artist who has written for others as well as herself, I ask Clark how it feels when someone takes on one of her songs, and whether they measure up to her original vision of the story she wanted to tell. “I love it when they make their own. The biggest example of that was probably “Mama's Broken Heart” with Miranda (Lambert). She really Miranda-ised it, she made it a much tougher song production wise than it was. So that was a big swing”.

“A lot of songwriters will say, ‘Oh, I was disappointed when I heard the recorded version of that song’, but I've never had that experience”, she explains. “I've had great artists record my songs, so that might have something to do with it, but when someone else records it there’s always something that I learn about the song that I didn't know before.”

Last month Clarke was recording with Shooter Jennings, and she told him that when she writes, she usually just hears guitar, voice or a piano. Jennings told her he saw Clark as an enabler, who creates foundations for other artists to grow into. “He said, ‘You build these worlds with your songs and then you allow other people to come in and colour them.’ I love to think about it like that. It was really one of the nicest things anybody's ever said to me about my songwriting.”

When it came to whittling down her Nine Songs selections, like many artists, Clark found it tricky to decide her final cut. “It was hard. There are certain songs on the list that would always be on ‘the list’, but I decided, ‘I'm going with stream of consciousness,’ and so that's what I did. But there are songs like “Crazy”, which is always top of the list to me.”

As we talk through each of her choices, recurrent themes emerge, her incredible memory for lyrics and a love of words in song, how a song can bring a moment in a film to life, the power of a voice - Clark sings sections of several of them during our conversation. But the vagaries of being in love is the keystone of the songs that have defined her, whether that’s the first flush of attraction, love being unrequited or the comfort and security of a lasting love.