Brandy Clark has been known as a topflight country songsmith for nearly a decade, writing or co-writing songs cut by fellow outstanding writers like Kacey Musgraves and Miranda Lambert (among other excellent country musicians, stars or not). When it came time for her to get to work on her third studio album Your Life Is a Record, which is set for release Friday, Clark found herself looking at things through a new creative lens. Two years after the release of her Grammy-nominated 2016 record Big Day in a Small Town, she sat down with producer Jay Joyce to carefully map out the project.
“Jay is the most creative person I’ve ever met in my life — he can do anything,” Clark tells the Scene on a recent phone call. Joyce, known for playing in rock bands around Nashville in the ’90s, produced Big Day as well as other acclaimed and well-loved country records like Eric Church’s Desperate Man, Ashley McBryde’s Girl Going Nowhere and Lambert’s Wildcard. “I thought it would be really cool to challenge someone like him — who’s known for kind of a more electric, heavier sound — to cut all acoustic.”
Joyce jumped at the chance to try something a little different, recruiting guitarist Jedd Hughes and multi-instrumentalist Giles Reaves to help bring their vision to life. To elevate the stripped-down accompaniment, Joyce also recruited Lester Snell to compose Memphis-style string and brass parts for the tracks. The intricately layered arrangements add invigorating splashes of ’70s soul without tying Clark to that period. Not that it would be easy to peg someone with a voice and writing chops like Clark’s to a specific time, anyway.
Although Clark didn’t realize it initially, the impact of her own personal heartbreak and its aftermath played a large role in the record’s development.
“In the couple of years before, I had gone through a breakup of a 15-year relationship,” she explains. “When we started to sort through the songs for this album, those are the kinds of songs that really floated to the top. It was Jay who said to me, ‘You know, this is a breakup record.’ I guess I was too close to it to see that.”
“I’ll Be the Sad Song” begins the album with Clark’s gentle and rich voice tracing the bittersweet memories of a relationship. The song also introduces the concept alluded to in the album’s title.
“I love the idea that if your life is a record, people or places are the songs,” says Clark. “To say, ‘I couldn’t be your happy song, but at least we had a song’ — it’s like that great quote about ‘It’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.’ ”
Clark used this new chapter to experiment in several aspects of her art, recruiting Randy Newman for “Bigger Boat,” her first recorded duet. Clark also brought in John Osborne, renowned guitarist and one-half of the country duo Brothers Osborne, for a fiery solo on “Bad Car.”
“I think John’s one of the best guitar players ever,” she says. “When he came in, the first take could have been the one, but he just gave us a lot.”
Clark has co-written some of country’s most moving songs in recent years, including Musgraves’ 2013 standout “Follow Your Arrow” and Hailey Whitters’ “Ten Year Town,” the song that helped boost Whitters’ profile substantially in 2019. That lyrical brilliance shines brightly throughout Your Life Is a Record. Even though personal relationships are a key element of the album, Clark uses those stories to explore many sides of the human experience. In the poignant “Who You Thought I Was,” Clark examines the distance — sometimes a wide gulf that you only see after you fall into it — between what you think you want out of life and what really matters most. Driven by a groovy bass line and soaring strings, “Love Is a Fire” weighs the risks you take by opening yourself up to someone, and reckons that the experience is worth the potential pain.
The eclectic mix of narratives adds up to Clark’s most engaging record to date. It all comes full circle with the final track “The Past Is the Past,” an intensely honest look at what happens when one door closes before another opens.
“It’s a bittersweet feeling in my chest when I hear that song,” says Clark. “But it’s a hopeful feeling. It was really a reflection of the sadness and everything you go through in the ending of a relationship, when you’re putting your heart back together.”
In many ways, Your Life Is a Record is about giving old wounds a chance to heal. By recognizing how some bumpy roads led to the path she’s on today, Clark has seemingly ushered in an exciting new season of life, both personally and creatively.
“I think when you accept that the past is finally the past, that’s when you move on.”
