Honesty. Reality. Raw. Grit. Sass. And the Anti-Girl Next Door.
Brandy Clark encompasses each of those and more – and that’s why she’s our pick for #WCW!
1. Hard Working Woman: Clark was born in Morton, Washington – a small working class town within miles of Mt. St. Helens. Growing up in such a small, logging community (approximately 900 residents) taught Clark that hard, and often dangerous, work earned a meaningful living. She earned her keep by working at a lumber mill and a fencing yard, and found inspiration from hard working people, like her father, who died early in her life from an on the site logging accident, and her mother who worked in human resources within the same company.
2. The Storyteller: Clark discovered that crossing paths with everyday people from varied backgrounds provided her an avenue in which to write songs. The eccentric people, starting with her grandmother, offered the singer the opportunity to write songs or “tell stories” about these people whom she refers to as “characters”. This was the beginning of her debut EP 12 Stories, which included songs about the various characters she’s come across, such as the bored housewife who escapes her dull life by rolling a joint on the kitchen table in “Get High” to the woman who dreams about killing her husband, but wouldn’t be caught dead in the standard orange jumpsuit in “Stripes”.
3. The Songwriter: Before her latest album Big Day in a Small Town, Clark was writing songs for artists such as Reba McEntire, Kenny Rogers, Sheryl Crow, and Darius Rucker. Some of her successful hits were “Better Dig Two” for The Band Perry, “Mama’s Broken Heart” for Miranda Lambert, and “Follow Your Arrow” for Kacey Musgraves, which won the 2014 CMA Award for Song of The Year (Clark co-wrote three songs on Musgraves’ Same Trailer Different Park, which won an ACM for Album of the Year and a Grammy for Best Country Album). Her success lead to opportunities to open for Alan Jackson, Jennifer Nettles, and Eric Church as well as landing TV performances on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, The Late Show With David Letterman, and Late Night With Seth Myers.
4. Empowering: Clark is one of a small number of openly gay country singers, and while she feels very included within the country music family, she hopes that as time goes by, people will be more accepting. She’s stated that she had been passed over quite a bit throughout her career, feeling that it was because she didn’t fit the norm – she’s over 30 and not a size 2. But she feels that’s why her music resonates deeply with her fans: she’s real.
5. Her Voice: Clark’s voice is the vessel holding the depth and raw emotions of all those years working in Morton, WA, the stories of the eccentric people she’s met through the years, her struggles outweighed by her desire to make it in Music City, and her honesty of who she is as a person.