Brandy Clark's 12 Stories

is it gonna be different in any way?

that is a good question

maybe the order of the tracks, since that wasn't super clear anyway

Track order via Amazon:

1. Pray to Jesus
2. Crazy Women
3. What'll Keep Me Out of Heaven
4. Get High
5. Hold My Hand
6. Stripes
7. In Some Corner
8. Take a Little Pill
9. Hungover
10. Illegitimate Children
11. The Day She Got Divorced
12. Just Like Him

very exciting. doesn't look like it's altered from the soundcloud set, which is great because it now means my second favourite album of 2013 is an actual album. hopefully they don't change the songs' arrangements much, or at all.

they haven't announced a release date yet, have they? i've been in touch with her management, i think it might be an autumn release rather than an imminent aug one - even though you can find the deleted-but-cached itunes release with an end-of-june date.

"just like him" as closer, yes yes yes

the songwriting on this is so good that i've basically ended up transcribing half the lyrics

She just posted on fb that Oct 22 is the new release date.

ah ok, so exactly the same as the soundcloud set except w/ a contraction in one song title. brilliant -- it's a great collection of songs.

I'm so glad this is getting an official release.

Probably my album of the year so far. Definitely my favourite lyrically. Full of terrific lines.

have heard the finished version now - not much changed at all. one lyrical alteration to "the day she got divorced" which makes it even better, and all the songs that weren't on the EP have been gussied up slightly production-wise - only subtle touches though, only one song where i have to wonder whether it makes it better or worse

good lord the songwriting on this thing is so good though

also, for some reason i assumed "just like him" was at least semi-autobiographical, just because of the way she nails the situation in her words and delivery, but the bio says not. she's just an incredible storyteller

think this might end up my actual AOTY

that's good news

I would be all for it.

who's on backing vocals on "What'll Keep Me Out of Heaven"? incredible song

Vince Gill, answering my own question.

"What'll Keep Me Out of Heaven" sounds a bit like Rosanne Cash's "Blue Moon with Heartache", but the Vince Gill thing also brings out that this song would fit well on a 90s neotraditionalist album; sounds like an early Trisha Yearwood song ("The Woman In Me" or "Walkaway Joe", with Don Henley!)

that's high praise from me btw!

"Hold My Hand" sounds like it could have been an early 90s hit too, and maybe now too; not so far from a Sugarland ballad. love the "ha-an-nd" on the chorus. I get a kick out of the synth fadeout at the end because I can't hear the synth elsewhere in the song, but maybe it's just low in the mix once the song gets big near the end.

We got full stream

http://www.npr.org/2013/10/13/230890811/first-listen-brandy-clark-12-stories

can't believe it's finally out there, such an incredible album

This is so good.

xp I know, it seems like forever now.

enjoying this

For an extra-emotional experience, I recommend reading about that Maryville rape case while listening to "Crazy Women".

Annnnd interview

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/brandy-clarks-high-hopes-shine-on-12-stories-20131017

So it's out today so get it already if you haven't dammit

warning to ppl considering buying this from amazon mp3: i just got my copy from there and "hold my hand" has a really jarring momentary skip/static bit in one of the choruses :|

that same jarring digital glitch is in the spotify version. and in rhapsody too. i would think this is a visible enough album that someone would have noticed by now and fixed it. then again, things can move surprisingly slowly in the digital space.

"what'll keep me out of heaven" is as good as music gets. (and for some reason it reminds me of another trad-country cheating song, sunny sweeney's "from a table away," even though they're musically quite different and they take on cheating from opposite directions.)

three best on here are "What'll Keep Me Out of Heaven", narrowly ahead of "Hold My Hand" and "Just Like Him". she's got a way with the romantic songs.

could see "What'll Keep Me Out of Heaven" as a big hit for a different singer. this performance is fabulous (love Vince Gill's backing vocals) but a bigger voiced singer could knock this one out.

otm about "what'll keep me out of heaven"

then again, things can move surprisingly slowly in the digital space.

i learned recently that once a master goes out to digital distribution, it's super difficult to switch it out for another one in the case of an issue like this. even if the digital distributor (who sends it out to all those streaming services & download stores) requests that they replace it with a different version, there's no guarantee that they'll do it (and definitely not in a timely fashion).

Love Brandy Clark, but didn't buy the bait and switch of the recent half-assed Slate piece "Can Brandy Clark Save Country Music?" First, country music does not need saving (duh). Second, little about the piece is about Brandy Clark specifically, and more about the erstwhile team of Clark, Shane McAnally. Kacey Musgraves and Josh Osbourne. And I guess Trevor Rosen, too. Collectively, sure, country is better for their writing, but the piece did not make a case for Clark specifically/exclusively. Indeed, check out the full header in the link:

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2013/10/brandy_clark_12_stories_shane_mcanally_and_others_saving_country_music.html

the headline is the biggest problem with the piece, really

Well, it should be something like "Brandy Clark, Shane McAnally and Others Are Behind Some of the Best Country Music Right Now."

will clickbait headlines get josh in chicago to click? see if you know better than our expert columnist!

Slate is all click bait, but forgive me for wanting to read a story about an artist I like.

"That's My Kind Of Night" is a good song. wonder if thinking country needs to be saved from that is just another version of "cribbing from Timbaland doesn't make for real country"

Tell it to Bubba Sparxxx.

woulda sounded great on country radio in 2001!

Oh, that Slate piece is by David Cantwell. I saw him do a good talk about Merle Haggard at an EMP Pop Conference

http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/brandy-clarks-debut-album-is-a-stunner-but-will-anybody-hear-it/2013/11/05/04be0ea8-4656-11e3-bf0c-cebf37c6f484_story.html

Washington Post's Chris Richards has moved on from disparaging the sex lives of Arcade Fire to praising Brandy Clark

good piece, as is the tennesseean blog linked in it - http://blogs.tennessean.com/tunein/2013/11/03/peter-cooper-on-music-countrys-misfit/

i'm surprised and disappointed this hasn't got much as much traction as i thought it would

also, this got edited from my piece, but brandy clark aspired to be a journalist, and studied it at college! which makes all kinds of sense

Maybe if she wins a songwriter award tonight, it will somehow help her get industry support for her own release

I listen to it at least once a week and my opinion hasn't moved: I love about half the songs, admire the intelligence and empathy of the rest, love the idea of her, but she doesn't excite me like her clients do.

otm

love "What'll Keep Me Out Of Heaven", "Hold My Hand", "Just Like Him", "Take A Little Pill", "Pray To Jesus", in that order

admire, as Alfred says, "Crazy Women", "The Day She Got Divorced", "Get High", "Hungover", "Stripes", "In Some Corner", in about that order

don't really care much for "Illegitimate Children": the chorus is clumsy. would be a nice b side though.

there isn't a song i don't at least like a lot; if pushed would put "illegitimate children" and "in some corner" at the bottom, but the former is still quite witty and the latter still has a nicely maudlin melody; it's only in the company of the rest that they don't stand out.

feel like there's a really great balance of the wry, detached storytelling and the one-moment-stretched-across-three-minutes ballads that hit the hardest emotionally - euler it seems like you prefer the latter? i really think the narrative detail and characters and just sheer craftsmanship in "crazy women", "the day she got divorced" and "hungover" are among my favourite things on the album.

as a performer she's obviously a lot less...characterful than someone like kacey musgraves, let alone miranda, but that fits with what she's trying to do overall - none of this album is about her, it's quite explicitly about giving voice to other people

"Hungover" is a good one to think about. the "little drummer boy" beat expresses hope for the woman who's finally feeling big enough to stand on her own; but what's said about the partner (a lover? a parent?) is so minimal that you don't get a feeling for the size of her triumph. & I can't really relate to feeling like her so my experiences can't fill in the narrative's gaps.

part of this is that it comes in right after "Take A Little Pill", continuing the earlier song's drone, but the songs aren't well connected; and I love "Take A Little Pill" so much that I'm let down.

I gotta say that this album always gives me a massive sense of empathy. An obvious point and it's not like country doesn't/hasn't had that from the get-go but it puts me in mind of my ex's small town in rural Northern California more than anything else I've heard in the field in recent years. Whether or not its perceived artlessness, for lack of a better term, is the reason why I couldn't say, but it's present.

"Hungover" is a good one to think about. the "little drummer boy" beat expresses hope for the woman who's finally feeling big enough to stand on her own; but what's said about the partner (a lover? a parent?) is so minimal that you don't get a feeling for the size of her triumph

i disagree - it's necessary that he's out of sight and increasingly out of mind, because the alienating distance between them is crucial to the story. we don't know anything about him because she increasingly doesn't recognise him. what makes the song great is the way clark builds the scale of each mini-accomplishment gradually - and the way she mixes up the literal with the metaphorical til they're the same thing. and there are so many awakenings and emancipations contained in it, sexual and domestic and financial...

all true! I think I'd be better able to understand the awakenings if I understood more of what was keeping her down

or maybe that's the wrong way to think about it: maybe he's just another stranger partner relative to which her triumphs, no matter how small, look big

w/out giving away too much from my filed review, I think the album is crisp and confident, if at times still too beholden to a writer's sensibility. Creative writing workshops across the land have so fetishized the detail that they have come to stand for realism—the realism of the inventory, the TSA travel advisory. Good singers don’t need details. Intimations, overheard remarks, aperçues, doggerel even—singers can inflect them. At times the sheer number of details in BDIAST is oppressive. Waffle House? Check. Ill-fitting sequined dress? Check. Jeans needin’ patchin’? Check. She's (still) not enough of a singer to transform. AtT times I'm like, enough already.

the unnecessary detail that jumped out to me as distracting was the chevy truck in "broke." obvs chevy shows up often in country music as product placement or to establish cred or w/e, but i sorta doubted that was the case here. my mind started running through other adjectives they might have considered using there (pick-up, beat-up); took me outta the song a little bit.

but overall i like most of the songs on here. and "girl next door" still sounds great.

"Daughter" is my jam too – that organ!

That's gotta be Kacey doing backups on "Daughter" right?

the kind of detail i like isn't the writerly stuff but things like, on "homecoming queen", that little aside "or the captain of the football team". it's a bitchy song (and all the better for it) masquerading as clark's trademark empathy but that one little aside is amazing in a "boys don't think you've got off easy, still got my eye on you" way

i heard "broke" live over a year ago and it's as good as it was then. the way the chorus rolls across the phrase "generic...coke"

i like that she can afford arrangements and is good at them but i never saw her plainness as a negative in any way before. i don't think that's fundamentally changed, how awkward does she seem even existing in the "girl next door" video (and you wonder whether anyone involved even for a second contemplated casting her as the character whose voice she was singing in)

generally i think it's a record that shows she can scale even greater, more attention-grabbing heights than she did on 12 stories and suffers a bit when it tries to reprise it ("you can come over" is nice enough but like..."what'll keep me out of heaven" is unbeatable already)

My review: http://www.spin.com/2016/06/review-brandy-clark-big-day-in-a-small-town/

this is so good!! "girl next door"!

indeed

i love "girl next door" but i hate the songwriting/arrangement impulse that caused her to add the "and go right now and don't look back..." tag at the end of the first chorus. such a perfect verse/chorus until that point, and then it's like, "wait, there's another tool in my nashville songwriting toolkit, here it is, boom!" would have been a nice bridge a minute later, but here it's a bridge too soon. and as a result of that, she has to add another bridge after it the next time it comes around, the "the thing that turns you on..." part, which seems tacked-on and too on-the-nose.

a great song that could have been a perfect song with two hours' less work, imo.

(and i'm your nitpicking cuz)

I didn't mind the filigree so much as the other overstuffed songs. I realize I'm complaining about songs having too many details.

oh my god, the way "since you've gone to heaven" pans out from family tragedy to social decay is heartbreaking

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/jun/16/brandy-clark-country-music-nashville-interview

http://www.npr.org/2016/06/16/482329768/brandy-clark-tiny-desk-concert

Why Brandy, how tart of you

https://twitter.com/TheBrandyClark/status/771384198720520192

best / cleverest line / lyric / turn of phrase on Big Day? let's hear 'em...

saw her live last night, two acoustic guitars and that was it. pretty much perfect. she closed with 'America the Beautiful' segueing into 'Pray to Jesus' which felt like a real message

h/t underrated aero:

https://www.rollingstone.com/country/news/oak-ridge-boys-sing-brandy-clark-hear-pray-to-jesus-w516704

can't get enough of this tune

just started up the new one

It's good!

it is!

“pawn shop” is effortlessly lovely

"Apologies" is sounding the best so far.

flute AND horns

Surprised this wasn't linked yet:

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/no-one-is-writing-better-country-songs-than-brandy-clark-is

"take a cinder block with you as a souvenir" is a great jab
i can do without the randy newman track but most of the rest is great.
it's a beautifully produced album, if this doesn't get radio play for her i can't imagine what will.

https://www.vulture.com/2020/03/brandy-clark-interview-your-life-is-a-record-best-songwriting.html

“Can we be Strangers” is an astounding song. Structurally put together so well. Great lyrics too. What a chorus.

so is "The Past is the Past." Fabulous use of strings generally.

this is a great record, killer AM radio energy

Closet thing I can think of is Lee Ann Womack’s last one

This is brilliant. No weak points at all. I even like "Bigger Boat".

i draw the line at Bigger Boat. Love everything else though!

"The Past is the Past" would make such a killer Springsteen song

"I wanna be at least almost close to worth your love" is such a devastating line

Real damn good. She gets better with each album, seems like. I raved about it at some length over on Rolling Country.

revisited the new one and goddamn is it great

it is! The new singles are not tho.

by which i mean "like mine" and "same devil" which strike me as fishing attempts to see what the country market wants

In celebration of the one-year anniversary of her critically acclaimed album, Your Life is a Record, eight-time GRAMMY nominee Brandy Clark will release a special new deluxe edition, Your Life is a Record (Deluxe), on March 5 on Warner Records. In addition to all eleven songs from Your Life is a Record, the deluxe album will feature six bonus tracks including “Remember Me Beautiful,” a new song Clark wrote earlier this year as part of NPR’s Morning Edition Song Project. The album will also feature special collaborations with Brandi Carlile (“Like Mine” and “Same Devil”) and Lindsey Buckingham (“The Past is the Past”) as well as live renditions of two album tracks: “Pawn Shop” and “Who You Thought I Was."

Moreover, in honor of the album’s anniversary, Clark will perform her first ticketed Livestream concert Saturday, March 6 at 8/7 CT via Mandolin. Tickets for the show are available now with a selection of purchase options, including a limited number of VIP packages with signed merchandise and a virtual meet & greet. Fans will also have the option to add a digital download of the deluxe album to their Livestream ticket, to be delivered on release day. Full details can be found at https://boxoffice.mandolin.com/collections/brandy-clark.

lindsey!

Austin City Limits livestream starting real soon

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lTHkXdC6sc

Saw her at a small venue, blown away, what a songwriter!

Fantastic set: https://www.setlist.fm/setlist/brandy-clark/2022/lille-vega-copenhagen-denmark-bb0c18e.html