[title subtitle=”review: Marla Cantrell”][/title]
Brandy Clark
Hard knocks, daddy issues, cheating issues, anger issues. That’s just part of the songs written and sung by newcomer Brandy Clark. In her debut album, 12 Stories, she sings the way you hope a country singer will: with a dose of despair, a whole lot of rebellion, and a voice that stays in your head long after the music stops.
Maybe one of the reasons she’s so good is that she’s been writing for other artists for fifteen years, recently winning the ASCAP award for The Band Perry’s “Better Dig Two.”
Clark credits her grandma and her brothers and sisters for teaching her how to craft a story. She sat with them at the kitchen table, listening closely, seeing the ways the tales played out, always entertaining, full of imagination. In a recent interview she said the one thing they taught her was not to let the truth get in the way of a good story.
That takes some of the pressure off when you’re listening to “What’ll Keep Me Out Of Heaven.” The song is about a married woman about to make a decision that will change her life. She’s standing near the elevator in a hotel lobby, debating whether to step inside and go to the man who waits with champagne and candlelight. “What’ll keep me out of heaven will take me there tonight,” she sings.
It’s this kind of writing, where every word seems to be impossibly important, that makes this album stand out. On “In Some Corner,” she’s thinking about the man who got away. Whatever happened between them didn’t last, but on this night, as she’s remembering the fire that flew between them, she realizes she’s not nearly over him. If he called her right then, she’d throw on her coat and head his way.
But not all the songs are as introspective. There’s a lot of action on this album, from praying to Jesus to playing the lotto. In “Crazy Women” the woman at the center of the story heads out with her Aqua Net and a cigarette to set fire to her lover’s car. She wasn’t drunk or high, Clark sings, just tired of wondering if he was coming home. In “Stripes,” Clark tells the story of a woman who decides not to kill her cheating lover because she knows how bad she looks in both orange and stripes. Beyond her anger, she realizes that showing up in a mug shot on the front page of the local paper would be a far worse fate.
All the songs are worth a listen; however, the one that’s likely to get you is “Just Like Him,” a mournful song about a woman trying her best not to end up with a man like her daddy. He broke hearts and dishes, she sings, as she waits all night for her lover to come home. This waiting makes her feel like she did when she was six years old, she says, and your heart breaks with hers. That’s what great songs do, they break your heart. But you still go back and listen again and again.