Brandy Clark on the Antiheroes of New Album ‘Big Day in a Small Town’
“That’s Naomi Judd. Naomi Judd! Can you believe it?”
Brandy Clark is standing in the country section of East Nashville record shop the Groove, holding up a vinyl copy of Conway Twitty’s 1983 LP Lost in the Feeling. On the cover, Twitty, looking dapper in a tuxedo, has a soft-focused dame with parted lips and arched eyebrows gazing longingly at him from behind — apparently, this is none other than the raven-haired Judd, nearly unrecognizable in a Nashville-goes-noir haze. “I’m going to have to buy this,” she says, adding the album to her stack.
It’s no surprise that Clark is the keeper of quirky factoids such as this — she could beat anyone at classic-country music trivia, 10 times over — because you don’t develop one of the sharpest, most imaginative voices in the genre today without a firm grasp on its roots. She certainly knows her Judds: their greatest hits album was the first record her mother bought her as a nine-year-old girl growing up in rural Morton, Washington. With a population barely topping a thousand, it’s the very kind of place that inspired her new album, Big Day in a Small Town, where kids ride their bikes to the store alone and private lives are public gossip.
“I might wear a rock & roll t-shirt from time to time, but mostly all of my stuff is over here,” says Clark, rifling through the stacks — though today her shirt is solid and red, accessorized by a necklace stamped with the words “Girl Next Door,” her first single from the new record. And it’s true. There’s nary an album or artist in here she doesn’t have a comment or backstory about, or that doesn’t inspire a personal tangent, from the Waylon Jennings LPs (“I’m reading his biography right now”) to Loretta Lynn (“‘Coal Miner’s Daughter’ and ‘Sweet Dreams’ were what made me want to be a singer and a songwriter”) to a Willie Nelson’s Stardust (“I remember this at my house growing up”).
“My grandma used to say, ‘There are two kinds of music: country and western,'” Clark says with a laugh, then frowning as she finds the entire Merle Haggard section picked dry. But she lights up again as she stumbles upon something else. “Oh, George Strait! One of my favorites. For. Sure.” She flips it over and reads the entire track list out loud. Clark bought a record player fairly recently and has been working on her collection, and created a special vinyl version of Big Day in a Small Town, complete with interstitial storytelling vignettes based on things like how her uncle once shot a stoplight and ended up in jail for a night (“my grandma wouldn’t bail him out”), to lace the songs together.