Brandy Clark, A Vivid Storyteller, Finally Tells Her Own
One of the more remarkable features of Bobbie Gentry's recordings is their lavish embroidery of down-home sensibilities. In the studio, she often framed already refined portraits of rural people and places with extravagant orchestration; Gentry's vision made her storytelling feel more like theatre.
Brandy Clark's third album, Your Life is a Record, brings her unpretentious virtuosity into focus through similar means. For the better part of the last decade, she's been cited as an emblem of Nashville songcraft and sought out as a co-writer, thanks to the earthy but exacting quality of her vignettes. Now her compositions have finally been given the orchestral treatment. With the arch, subtle and largely acoustic performances of a four-piece combo — Clark on guitar, uber producer Jay Joyce, master picker Jedd Hughes and electronic musician Giles Reaves on various instruments — they are sumptuously enhanced by the addition of the Memphis Strings & Horns.
Depicting blue-collar stoicism has always been one of Clark's strengths. That's a thread through her new compositions, too. "Bad Car" is a rumination on the private milestones witnessed by a junkyard-bound heap. "The Past is the Past" hangs modest hopes for stability on a break-up receding from the present. The self-improvement aspirations aimed at a long-gone lover in "Who You Thought I Was" are
