Brandy Clark sparks celebratory and communal show at Cedar
by Michaelangelo Matos and Laura Buhman
October 23, 2023
Recently, I recommended the Nashville singer-songwriter Brandy Clark to a coworker who listens to country music. I said start with Clark’s debut, 12 Stories — one of my favorite albums ever. A week later, my coworker told me brightly, “I listened to Brandy Clark.” “What did you think?” I asked eagerly. Her expression changed: “I couldn’t listen to it,” she said. “I couldn’t stop crying.”
I understood. Clark is a songwriter who cuts to the bone from every possible angle. This is part of what makes her a Nashville pro — angles on the everyday are Music Row’s specialty. But her scalpel is sharper than nearly anybody’s — in or out of Nashville. Her songs can hit you wherever you live.
Where I lived when I first encountered them was, basically, online. SoundCloud is famous for breaking both hip-hop and dance music, but it is also where I first heard Clark’s debut — it was streaming there, having been rejected by every label in Nashville. “More than once,” as Clark told the crowd at her Cedar Cultural Center show on Friday night. But after she hit gold with a co-write of Kacey Musgraves’ “Follow Your Arrow” in 2012, Musgraves began talking Clark up to interviewers. One of them, the Londoner Alex Macpherson, posted the SoundCloud link to Clark’s 12-song demo on Facebook. I put it on out of curiosity and was promptly knocked sideways. I couldn’t stop crying — and I couldn’t wait to do it again.
The demo was finally issued as 12 Stories by a California indie label, Slate Creek, in October 2013. (Clark eventually signed to Warner Bros.) And over a decade, that story — encountering Clark’s music on the word of a friend amazed by what they’d heard — has clearly happened to a lot of others as well. The Cedar was packed — the front door held a sold-out sign. That room always sounds amazing, and Clark’s performance could not have sounded better anywhere else. It couldn’t have sounded better, period.
The crowd was filled with a wonderfully contained energy. A spry opening set featured Tattletale Saints — aka the vocal duo of guitarist Cy Winstanley and bassist Vanessa McGowan. After the set by the New Zealanders-turned-Nashvilleans —who also play in Clark’s band, along with drummer Megan June — I went to get a soda and ran into Laura Buhman, The Current’s photographer for this piece. She noticed the vibe too. “I’m getting excited for this,” she said. “I didn't know who she was, and then I looked up her credits.”
Those are abundant. In addition to Musgraves, Clark has written songs with and/or for a slew of other Nashville names: Reba McEntire, the Band Perry, LeAnn Rimes, the Oak Ridge Boys, and Toby Keith, to pick a random sample; she and frequent co-writer Shane McAnally were also recently nominated for a Tony Award for their work on the musical Shucked. Clark’s biggest hit came with Miranda Lambert’s “Your Mama’s Broken Heart,” which she performed in the middle of the show by herself. “It’s as close as I've come to a classic,” Clark explained, because “every Sunday morning I get texted videos of drunken bridal showers singing along” to it.
Buhman would later cleanse her palate afterward by seeing the hard-touring industrial-dance mainstays My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult at the Fine Line, and I caught the drum & bass monthly Mechanix at Eagles Club. But for both of us, the real thrill kill took place at the Cedar. As Clark put it onstage, “I tend to write better about darker subjects.” Then, with a shrug: “We all have our gifts.”
Clark’s unshowy onstage demeanor and understated vocal style might read as unassuming to someone used to a stage-show assault like the Thrill Kill Kult’s, or the low-end workouts showcased at Mechanix. But she only seems unassuming. More than anything, Clark is canny. That shrug was showbiz, pure and simple — but showbiz is often an amplification of real-life considerations, and that’s what she puts across. Clark’s songs are rooted in the everyday, but the level of specificity can be breathtaking, something her often sly, seemingly offhand, quietly intense phrasing (think of a less brassy Loretta Lynn) underlines.
“Your Mama’s Broken Heart” came second in a two-part solo acoustic mini-set, following a spine-tingling version of K.T. Oslin’s classic “’80s Ladies,” which came complete with a great story attached: Oslin came backstage at a showcase gig and told Clark, “Nobody knows what to do with you, do they?” Clark admitted so. “It only takes one,” Oslin said, and left, having said precisely what Clark needed to hear.
Now, there is obviously a danger to falling for an artist’s backstory — especially lately, when it tends to overshadow things. (A recent piece on Artnet by a critic targeted for online abuse from someone he’d actually reviewed positively — because, in essence, he’d written about the artist’s just-OK work as well as his good-guy persona — sums up that danger brilliantly.) But there’s an aspect of the singer’s backstory that was key to this show: Clark is an out lesbian, which is far less uncommon in the music business than it used to be, but still uncommon enough, particularly in Nashville, to bear noting. It also had everything to do with the audience at the Cedar. To my admittedly rusty eye, they read as country fans as much or more than Americana ones, and a lot of them were middle-aged gay women. There were loads of group selfies. It was their night out, and it was glorious.
Here’s a related professional fact: Clark’s self-titled new album, her fourth, was produced by Brandi Carlile. That’s Carlile, who was at Joni Mitchell’s side for the legend’s first full-length concert since 2000, who has become one of the key tastemakers of American music, and, judging from the T-shirts in the room, who played an appreciable role in the show’s sellout. (Carlile had also appeared on Clark’s third album, Your Life Is a Song, in 2020.) Introducing “Dear Insecurity,” which on the album is a duet with the producer — McGowan filled in onstage — Clark noted that Carlile had proposed doing the entire album together over Zoom shortly after Clark lost a Grammy. (“I’ve lost Grammys before,” Clark said brightly. Who hasn’t?) She also said that she and her recent tourmate Lori McKenna had decided to turn the words “Brandi Carlile” into a drinking game. Country songwriters? A drinking game? You don’t say.
Just as fortunately, Carlile’s work on Clark’s album makes a difference — it’s detailed, rich, and expansive, total ear candy. That cushioning adds a gorgeous contrast to Clark’s lyrics, further exposing their razor-sharpness. The first time I put the album on, the first song, “Ain’t Enough Rocks” — the tale of an abused daughter exacting revenge on her father told with breathtaking, hard-nosed economy that essentially (albeit in a secondary voice) advocates murder — made me take a breather. Two songs later it happened again, with “Tell Her You Don’t Love Her”: “Even if it’s a lie — make it sound true,” finishes the title phrase, with a chorus that concludes, “If you ever loved her at all.” Musically, it goes down easy, letting the chorus come to you — and then hit like a brick.
The Cedar crowd, rightly, felt celebratory. Presumably, a number of people there were evangelizing to their companions, like the middle-aged women to my right. “I’d never heard her until you played her on the way up,” one of them told the other, “but I trust your taste in music.”
And it included families (the Cedar is always all-ages), mostly toward the back, like I was. The woman to my left was there with her husband and teenage daughter. She had first seen Clark perform at the Grand Ole Opry — they’d gone to Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium simply as tourists and country fans — and had much the same reaction to Clark as I did. This was her fourth time seeing Clark. (It was my second—I’d seen her as part of a songwriter’s showcase at Joe’s Pub in New York a decade earlier.) I told her my SoundCloud story and she gave me the acid test: “What’s your favorite song on the first album?” I voted for “Hold My Hand,” a woman’s entreaty after she and her boyfriend run into his ex: “Let her know for sure that I’m more than just a soft place to land.” We got along great after that.
That communion radiated to and from the stage. This crowd paid close attention to every word, the kids included. (Many of them were clearly fans, too.) They went nuts between songs: hooting, shouting, whistling. (I did plenty myself.) Clark’s watchful air — the person that nothing escapes — is precisely her star quality.
Her banter helps — not something to say lightly of any musician. Upon skipping the rigmarole of forcing the audience to applaud enough to demand an encore: “I’m wearing these tall shoes and I need to go up and down those stairs as few times as possible.” Introducing “Tell Her You Don't Love Her,” Clark gave us not one but two great stories: First, the song had been inspired by the bad relationship of the sister of the song’s co-writer, Emily Weisbard. (As is Nashville custom, many of Clark’s best-known songs are co-written with others, a process that, in some cases, she likened to blind dating.) Then came the recording session, where the bassist — you guessed it — started crying, explaining to the artist: “I’ve been all three people in this one.”
There were too many moments like that in the songs to count. Early came “She Smoked in the House,” from the new album, with Clark explaining that it had gone through a couple of iterations before she realized she was talking about her grandmother. When real details came forth, so did the whole song. You can tell Clark is a writer to the bone because her favorite topic is writing.
Her favorite topic to discuss, that is — not to sing about. That’s heartbreak, whose nuances she plumbs so acutely. And as estimable as all her albums are, it’s still the debut I turn to most. Clark played to her strengths by isolating her four selections from 12 Stories — all at the end. The stoner-mom anthem “Get High” and the loose, gratifying, rocking revenge comedy “Stripes” (its nod to Orange Is the New Black inspired at least one YouTube video edit) ended the main set, and the two-song “encore” that finished with the album’s lead-off, a despairing little number titled “Pray to Jesus.”
Second to last? “Hold My Hand,” of course. Starts slow, the narrator observing her man’s reaction with cool observational empathy: “She could steal any woman’s man,” echoing Dolly Parton’s “Jolene.” Then comes the twist: “This’d be a real good time to hold my hand.” The bridge is where things turn some more: “Don’t let this moment linger,” a warning and a plea. This time, I only cried a little.
