Brandy Clark's 12 Stories

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

A good country song is, to me, like a pinewood derby car made in the scouts. With relatively little variation, and with a completely understood purpose, there is still an infinite measure of quality available through steady, measured craftmanship. I enjoy country songs that employ plain, straight languge and are predictable in the second half of their couplets or quatrains without needing a rim shot - unless it's on the 2 and the 4. It's like ordering a pepperoni pizza and getting exactly what the hell you asked for: a pepperoni pizza.

This album, from start to finish, is just that. It has wit, good stories, imagry that paints but doesn't overwhelm or stifle a listeners ability to connect, and is told in deceptively simple terms that belie the otherwise obvious care and effort Ms. Clark puts into her songs.

Without going into specifics about this song or that one - although "Hold My Hand" is the one that grabbed me the most this morning - I think the best thing I can say about this album is that it is full of songs that I know that at some point in the future I will reach for out a need that I know that song will satisfy.

I have to thank Ned for putting this one on his FB profile this morning. I probably would have missed it otherwise.

Yer welcome, sir.

first he told her that her hair looked nice
promised he was gonna leave his wife
yeah, two more lies
she didn't care

god she's so good at stories within stories. stories a lesser songwriter would build a career on, brandy clark tosses off in half a verse

"I'm definitely someone who likes to get my heart broke," she says. "I can get a little addicted to that. And my life is pretty stable, so I have to find it elsewhere. I like to get into books and movies and, honestly, other people's drama, I kind of feed off of that, because it does give me fodder for songs. And not just because it gives me fodder for songs — it's just something I like, weirdly."

http://www.spin.com/articles/brandy-clark-interview/

<3

On Letterman!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmFRXZdtDJY

Grammy-nominated for Best New Artist!

:D

Wait, is that award still a kiss of death?

we've been enthusing on the country thread

idk what a kiss of death would even mean in the context of an artist who only sold 29k of the album in the first place

Shane McAnally ‏@shanemcanally 3h3 hours ago
Dear every major Nashville label that passed on @TheBrandyClark - suck it.

:D

Nice

she also got nominated for best country album :)))

showcasing her way with a metaphor even when responding to her grammy noms

http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/music/2014/12/05/brandy-clark-grammy-best-new-artist-country-album-nomination/19970359/

"I've always thought the biggest gift would be to be able to attend your own funeral," she says. "It's amazing to me how much of an outpouring of love there is at funerals. For me, today's is an example of that. This is like my own funeral."

also an awareness of the category's ill-starred history

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/brandy-clark-the-grammys-country-dark-horse-speaks-out-20150115

new single!!!!! it's GREAT

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9lDtvaGQio

I'm into it.

It's got a pulse!

I've never been to jail / but, hell, I wouldn't put it past me

ha ha, excellent

"The things that turn you on/Are what you want to change" is a good lyric that gains poignancy knowing her sexuality.

the instrumentation is great

Instrumentation reminds me of, like, Prins Thomas.

http://www.npr.org/2016/06/02/479446410/first-listen-brandy-clark-big-day-in-a-small-town

OH MY GOD, "DAUGHTER"

yeah she's taken the leap -- THIS is how I wanted 12 Stories to sound like

i'm finding the songs about individual characters to be more affecting than those about townsfolk collectively ("soap opera"; "big day in a small town").

imo "since you've gone to heaven" bridges that gap effectively, though. could imagine people finding that one maudlin, but it gave me real feelings. hope she plays it when i see her this weekend.

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.

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