Three songs into a set last month in Wichita, Kansas, the country singer-songwriter Brandy Clark issued a neighborly warning to the people in the audience, most of whom had come to see the night’s headliner, Tanya Tucker, and may have heard Clark’s name for the first time just a few moments before, when she was introduced over the loudspeaker. “I hope you’re not offended easily,” Clark said, smiling. Then she launched into a story song about a woman with whom most of those present seemed to be on quite familiar terms. “She hates her job, loves her kids,” Clark sang. “Bored with her husband, tired of the same old list of things to do.” To unwind at the end of another tedious day, this woman sits down and “rolls herself a fat one.” And then on to the chorus: “Sometimes the only way to get by is to get high.” Perhaps someone at the show was offended, but mostly I saw knowing nods and, as the song went on, more and more people singing along.
“Get High” is from Clark’s début album, “12 Stories,” which was released in 2013. The rest of the Wichita set was largely devoted to songs from her new album, “Your Life Is a Record,” which is out this week. She played the rowdy revenge fantasy “Long Walk,” which had the crowd laughing at its wicked punch lines, and “Who You Thought I Was,” a song that turns unexpectedly from childhood dreams to adult regrets, and which prompted people to lean forward to hear every word. Clark has been winning new fans this way for years, one catchy, finely chiselled song at a time. With any luck or justice, the lonely and lustrous country-pop of “Your Life Is a Record” will earn her many more. But her previous album should have been a smash, too: “Big Day in a Small Town,” from 2016, is terrific, and its lead single, “Girl Next Door,” couldn’t have been more perfect for radio, with hooks and beats and stacked rhymes. Except that, over the past decade, country radio has mostly exiled songs with ambivalent or outright unhappy endings—especially when a woman’s voice is singing them.
According to the musicologist Jada Watson, in 2018, the ratio of men’s records to women’s that were played on country radio was nearly ten to one. Brandy Clark is something of a critical darling; her first two albums generated five Grammy nominations. But a lot of people, including a lot of country fans, have never heard of her, for the same reason that a lot of people have never heard of Cam, Mickey Guyton, Nikki Lane, Yola, Ashley McBryde, Ashley Monroe, Kellie Pickler, Kelsey Waldon, and others. All these women—and a dozen more besides—have released singles over the past several years that, in a less restrictive radio environment, might have found, at the least, a chance to compete for airplay. But country music, both as a genre and as a radio format, exists with a maddening contradiction: for nearly a decade now, women have been practically excluded from mainstream-country-radio playlists, even as the lion’s share of the best country music is increasingly written and performed by women. And no one illustrates that better than Clark, who writes songs as well as anyone.
Clark, who’s forty-four, and grew up in the tiny lumber town of Morton, Washington, built her reputation by writing songs for other artists—often, in Nashville’s collaborative way, with Shane McAnally, and usually a third writer, too. She co-wrote the Band Perry’s gothic melodrama “Better Dig Two,” in which the singer promises to love her partner till death do us part, then repeats the pledge with such escalating vehemence that the vow starts to sound like a threat. She co-wrote Miranda Lambert’s “Mama’s Broken Heart,” which, like “Better Dig Two,” was a radio hit. She also co-wrote LeAnn Rimes’s “Crazy Women,” Reba McEntire’s “The Day She Got Divorced,” Sunny Sweeney’s “Bad Girl Phase,” Hailey Whitters’s “Ten Year Town,” and Kacey Musgraves’s “Follow Your Arrow.” Clark’s songs have been cut by everyone from George Strait and Toby Keith to Darius Rucker and Sheryl Crow.
Clark writes most often about luckless characters—women, usually—who are struggling, pissed off, or both. The issues at hand are typically working-class and kitchen-table. (That’s where the woman in “Get High” rolls a joint, while the dinner dishes soak.) Both the title track of Clark’s second album, “Big Day in a Small Town,” from 2016, and that album’s opener, “Soap Opera,” are about the melodramas that go down in rural places where nothing much seems to be going on. The woman in “Three Kids, No Husband”—which was co-written with another of the moment’s finest country songwriters, Lori McKenna—has long ago dumped any dreams she might have had to make it big. Now she just hopes she can make it. “There’s how you plan it out, and how it turns out to be,” Clark sings.
Clark’s songs capture the routine frustrations and indignities of life in America among the white working class, and although her tone is never bitter or mocking, she doesn’t deny the ironies and absurdities of that life, either. “We load our kids up in our new used car and, after church, we hit the mini-mart,” she sings in “Pray to Jesus,” one of her début’s sharpest numbers. In the chorus, she sings about the only two ways “we can change tomorrow”: praying to Jesus and playing the lotto. The details in Clark’s songs reveal how material conditions inform you-just-can’t-win world views. On “Bad Car,” from the new album, she sings, “It always needs a jump, it always needs Freon, / Yeah, there’s death and taxes and the ‘check engine’ light blinkin’ on.”
The title of “12 Stories” seems to nod to “12 Songs,” Randy Newman’s second album, from 1970; on the new record, Clark duets with Newman on a song called “Bigger Boat,” a jaunty ship-of-state satire where “we keep waiting on the wind to blow” and no one can “agree on who should be captain.” It’s not her finest work, or his, but it highlights the wry, pessimistic wit that Clark and Newman share. “We’re either all the way left or all the way right / The only time we meet in the middle is to fight,” Clark sings. “The rich get richer, the rest get a little more broke. / We’re gonna need a bigger boat.”
Clark has said that much of “Your Life Is a Record” was inspired by the end of a long romantic relationship, and the album includes what at least appear to be the most personal lyrics of her career. “Who You Thought I Was” is a generous but self-critical admission that she could have been a far better partner. In “Who Broke Whose Heart,” Clark tries to divvy up blame before confessing the only things she’s sure of: “I loved you. And you loved me. So fuck the rest.” But here, too, as elsewhere, Clark leans hard into common experiences: the telling details in her songs have a communal rather than idiosyncratic specificity. It’s your life that’s a record, not just hers.
That title line comes from the album opener, “I’ll Be the Sad Song,” a just-lovely bit of personal heartbreak that, typical of her approach, Clark presents as a bittersweet sing-along. It’s about how we all mark our lives by songs we’ve loved. Near its end, a Dobro conjures an unexpected Beatles-esque lick and then dissolves to silence. Horns, maybe lifted off some old Dionne Warwick record, emerge and quickly disappear. Your songs may vary.
In a time when people are more likely to stream music than to spin it, the album’s central metaphor is almost quaint, but still apt. A number of the songs on “Your Life Is a Record” are in conversation with hits from earlier eras. “Love Is a Fire” fans flames similar to those in Johnny Cash’s bellowing “Ring of Fire” (except that Clark’s iteration of the theme actually sounds erotic, with its squirmy beats and heaving strings). “Pawn Shop,” in which a woman hocks her engagement ring to buy a bus ticket out of town, will remind many country fans of “Golden Ring,” by George Jones and Tammy Wynette: in both songs, the pawned ring inspires new dreams. “Dreams don’t die even when they’re broken,” Clark sings. “Tomorrow when that sign says ‘open,’ that guitar oh that wedding band will start a new dream, secondhand.” That last line, echoed by ghostly harmonies and trailed by sprightly guitar picking, may, like several other moments on the album, put classic-rock fans in mind of Fleetwood Mac, a rhythmic and harmonic touchstone for many contemporary country acts.
All of Clark’s albums have terrific songs, but “Your Life Is a Record” is the best-sounding album that she’s released. That’s partly thanks to the producer Jay Joyce, with whom Clark also worked on “Big Day in a Small Town,” and partly thanks to the string-and-horn arrangements by Lester Snell, a Memphis studio vet here working a more purely pop vibe. Maybe that great sound will help the album break through; last week, five of the top twenty spots on Billboard’s Country Airplay chart were held by women. It should have been more, but, then, there was a week a little more than a year ago when the number was zero. With a deck that stacked against them, it’s a wonder people know any women country artists at all, even ones as good as Clark.
“Your Life Is a Record” closes with “The Past Is the Past,” a fragile woebegone ballad of the hit-the-road-and-begin-fresh variety, a venerable and still urgent category of country hit. “Let your wheels roll, let your wheels roll,” Clark whispers, willing herself to go. “Turned the key, found your future in that pedal on the floor,” she sings, her voice and vision both a little misty. She tunes in to a station: “Let your heartbreak beat to the radio.” If only.
