Month: March 2020

All I Know is I Loved You: Brandy Clark and the search for story

.Reading time 8 minutes.

brandy clark your life is a record review

Brandy Clark’s characters are the heroes in their own stories— and most of them seem to know it. In an older song called “Soap Opera,” Clark cast the everyday affections and indiscretions of small-town America as a serialized daytime drama, each of the locals quite confident that theirs is the starring role. Her new album is called Your Life is a Record, its very title suggesting a similar conceit: “If your life is a record/ people and places are the songs.” Love and loss don’t always present clean narratives, but Clark’s characters turn again and again to familiar structures and storytelling beats, seeking to impose some order and make some sense of life’s mess and sprawl.

With Your Life is a Record, the mess Clark’s trying to make sense of is a break-up. She wrote the album following the end of a longtime relationship, something she acknowledges right from the jump. Wistful opener “I’ll Be the Sad Song” interpets joys and sorrows through the sequencing of classic vinyl; “they’ll all make sense when they’re together,” Clark says, because every devotee of the album format knows that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Addressing her ex, Clark mines grace notes from a relationship that ended in disappointment: “I’ll be your sad song/ your ‘good love gone bad’ song/ the part of your heart that’s bittersweet.” 

Not everything on Your Life is a Record is as intensely vulnerable, but even its moments of broad comedy benefit from Clark’s thoughtful deployment of familiar tropes and storytelling structures. Take the movie-quoting “Bigger Boat,” which uses Jaws allusions and a riotous Randy Newman cameo to advocate unity in an era of political fracture: “We’re springing a leak, we’re coming apart/ We’re on the Titanic, but we think it’s the Ark.” It’s only a notch or two subtler than Newman’s classic “Political Science,” but in an era of learned deafness there may be no recourse but the megaphone. 

Newman’s gleeful cynicism is a welcome treat, but his presence on the album also feels symbolic: On Your Life is a Record, Clark dramatizes her sharp songwriting and chiseled short stories with thoughtful orchestrations for strings and brass, grounding the album not just in the countrypolitan lushness of Bobbie Gentry records but also in the orchestral sophistication of Newman classics like Good Old Boys and Sail Away. Produced with warmth by Jay Joyce (Miranda Lambert, Eric Church), Your Life is a Record is as burnished and evocative as a watercolor landscape; horns swell and trill in boisterous swagger on the casually profane “Who Broke Whose Heart,” but more often they are hushed and romantic, whether in the glowing embers of “Love is a Fire” or the mournful billow of “Apologies.”

The buried lede here is that Brandy Clark has now made a trilogy of albums that are consistent in their clear-eyed, observational songwriting, but distinct from one another in their overall aesthetic: 12 Stories is stripped-down outlaw country, Big Day in a Small Town a pristinely polished bid for the mainstream, Your Life is a Record a canny update of those emotionally nuanced singer-songwriter mainstays to which Clark now turns for solace. These albums work together as companion pieces, attesting to the singularity of her songwriting talent and the breadth of her vision: Each one is undeniably a Brandy Clark album. Each one sounds markedly different from the other two. And each one is excellent. You’d no sooner part with one than you’d toss out a piece from your matching dining room furniture set.

The throughlines are Clark’s affinity for detail and her sense of the high stakes of seemingly trivial moments; you’ll hear both of those things in “Pawn Shop,” one of the peaks of the new album, where a divorced woman and a failed musician both head to the secondhand store (and not just any store, but the one on Charlotte Avenue) to hawk their wedding ring and beat-up guitar— items that once instilled great hope. (“It ain’t stolen, it ain’t hot/ someone told me it cost a lot/ Man, ain’t that the truth.”) There’s also “Bad Car,” where the Check Engine light is as certain as death and taxes, but a mom holds tight to her clunker because of all the good times and bad times it’s carried her through (including the first time her kid ever said a cuss word). Such intimate moments provide grounding for a song like “Long Walk” (as in, “off a real short pier”), where Clark tells off a middle-aged mean girl with bars that would make any battle rapper envious: “Well I’d give you grace but whey even bother/ ‘Cause after all, you can walk on water.”

Clark’s levity is a healthy diversion from the album’s more reflective core, which turns again and again to its romantic postmortem. “Who You Thought I Was” feels like the album’s fulcrum, testifying to how the stories we tell about ourselves can ebb and change and eventually evaporate altogether. When she was young, Clark confesses, she wanted to be a cowboy, a circus performer, the next Elvis Presley; with time she wanted only to be someone worthy of love and devotion. It’s a sweet sentiment, and the brutal set-up for the album’s most gutting twist of the knife: “There’s a lot of things I used to want to be/ til you stopped loving me.” When our narratives so easily go up in smoke, it makes you wonder how useful they really were to begin with. Maybe that’s the point of “Who Broke Whose Heart,” where there are a lot of possible reasons why good love went bad (“was it you were never good enough for my dad/ and I could never live up to your mom?”), and ultimately none of them really seem to matter: “All I know is I loved you/ so fuck the rest.” Sometimes there’s no story you can tell yourself to help things make sense; and yet Brandy Clark’s proven once again that it’s a worthy pursuit just the same.

Let it Break You: The Lone Bellow lay their burdens down

.Reading time 7 minutes.

half moon light

One of the central implications of Christian faith and practice is that death doesn’t have the final word. In “The Eastern Gate,” a traditional Christian hymn, believers look forward to the joyful reunions that await them on the other side of the curtain— reunions with Christ, reunions with saints who’ve already crossed over into glory. An instrumental version of this hymn winds like a river through The Lone Bellow’s Half Moon Light, snippets of it appearing as a brief introduction, an album-bisecting interlude, and then as a quiet coda. It threads its way through songs about death, loss, and sorrow, bearing quiet witness; encircling these tenderhearted songs in otherworldly hope, watering them with God’s kindness. 

There is enough heaviness on Half Moon Light to fuel several forlorn singer-songwriter records, not to mention their accompanying press cycles. Two members of the core trio lost grandparents while this album was gestating, and one checked into substance abuse rehab. Oh, and have you turned on the news lately? It seems sometimes like nothing lasts forever, except “The Eastern Gate” wonders if maybe some things do. Perhaps its presence here is to bookend these temporal murmurs with glimpses at the eternal. It’s also worth noting that these instrumental snippets were played by singer/songwriter Zach Williams’ grandmother, at her own husband’s funeral. So maybe their inclusion here is to remind us that pain and loss are what thread us together as people, families, communities. We weather grief, we long for all manner of things to be made well, we do it together. May the circle be unbroken.

Befitting its somber subject matter, Half Moon Light is a quiet record, notably lighter on actual bellowing than any previous Lone Bellow release; Williams mostly sticks to a lower register of whispers and croons, a deep well of understated charisma. The Brooklyn group can still dole out cathedral-ceilinged eruptions of U2-style catharsis, as they do in the volcanic “Count On Me,” but much of Half Moon Light is twilit and slow-burning; there is something of a Cowboy Junkies/Trinity Sessions shimmer to it all, a similar midnight allure. The album was produced by Aaron Dessner of The National, whose work is textured but also warm, approachable, consoling. Many songs are built from acoustic guitars, pianos, and loops of wordless vocal harmony; some also have spritely horns and careening drums. The band members themselves (Williams, Kanene Pipkin, Brian Elmquist) soften their folksy austerity with soft-rock hooks and easeful melodies; imagine them as the small-batch, artisanal alternative to Little Big Town’s mainstream populism, both groups approaching acoustic roots music by way of Fleetwood Mac succor. Within the album’s after-hours glow, there exists a wide spectrum of moods: “Good Times” strikes up the horn section and leans into rowdiness, “Just Enough to Get By” is a salty blues. “Enemies” comes on soft as a whisper, and “Wonder” has the gentle sway of a campfire rag.

These songs investigate different ways of coping with grief, though they never wallow in it. Along with recent albums like Over the Rhine’s Love and Revelation and Elbow’s Giants of All Sizes, Half Moon Light is fundamentally concerned with processing, and it balances the heaviness of its witness-bearing against moments of light and grace. And so you have a song like “Count on Me,” where tribulation is the refiner’s fire (“let it break you/ let it help you lay down what you held on to”) and friendship is more valuable than silver and gold (“you can count on me if I can count on you”). And “Just Enough to Get By,” where Kanene Pipkin grits her teeth and voices feminine stoicism through mirthless jokes (“if silence is golden/ I know a lot of wealthy women”). You also have “Good Times,” which spins tall tales as a way to rhapsodize life lived in its fullness; it’s a song written for a season of mourning, reminding us that there’s also a season for revelry (“let no good time slip away”). Though the world of Half Moon Light is darkened by death and decay, rumors of glory are whispered along its periphery; in “Wonder,” Williams surrenders the hopelessness he’s harborded in his heart (“take the sorrow and the poison, I dreamt that I might need”). If despair is bondage, this song is a dream of freedom. The wispy, featherweight “Martingales” is even more direct in its prescriptive advice: “If yesterday’s too heavy, put it down.”

Half Moon Light is introspective, but that’s not to say that it’s insular. In “Illegal Immigrant,” which combines “Where the Streets Have No Name” atmospherics with dusty harmonica, Piper voices a mother’s quiet promise to find the child from whom she was taken; its a gentle witness to our evil days of border separations, and also to the more universal feeling of being a stranger in a strange land. But the record’s deepest well of compassion comes in “August,” a bleary-eyed gospel song written for the late Scott Hutchinson of Frightened Rabbit. He was a friend of the Lone Bellow crew, and the song wrestles to make sense of his shocking death: “Woke up and my mouth was dry/ Gotta get to the bottom of this.” It’s a song laid bare by grief, its only consolation the thin promise that “there is love all around you.” All that’s left after that is the sound of a piano playing an old Christian hymn; sorrow and hope, echoing through time.