Plenty of songwriters could find pathos in a pawn shop. A small-town staple full of other people’s heirlooms, hawked at bargain prices—it’s an easy vessel for tugging heartstrings. Brandy Clark understands this. “No one goes into a pawn shop on the best day of their life,” she joked while introducing a new song, called “Pawn Shop,” at a recent concert. And yet, her ballad pleasantly averts expectations. It’s at once tragic and kind of pathetic, filled with conversational asides to remind you that this isn’t just any pawn shop: it’s a specific one, with a specific address (Charlotte Avenue) where her characters—a recent divorcee and a failed musician—choose to unload their well-loved possessions. “Someone told me it costs a lot,” she sings. “Man, ain’t that the truth.”
A dejected mumble turned into a sweeping chorus, it’s a prime example of the Washington-born country songwriter’s gifts. Her lyrics are so sharp and conversational that it often takes a minute to realize just how much she’s saying. Take, for example, her 2013 song “Stripes,” where a woman assures her cheating partner that she’d risk spending the rest of her life behind bars to enact her revenge—only thing is, she’s not crazy about the wardrobe change: “I hate stripes,” she muses, “and orange ain’t my color.” Clark’s characters often find themselves in these situations, caught between fantasy and humdrum reality, rehearsing their comebacks as they study their own disappointed expression in the mirror. Even when she worked behind the scenes, penning songs with artists like Miranda Lambert and Kacey Musgraves, her distinct voice always came through: “This ain’t my mama’s broken heart” went the chorus to Lambert’s hit single co-written with Clark, and the message was clear: that song had already been written. It was her turn now.
Clark’s third album as a solo artist, Your Life Is a Record, furthers her search for new stories, even if the emotional territory is more familiar. It’s a break-up album, less focused on wordplay and punchlines than universal truths. And while her songwriting continues to avoid the obvious path, her arrangements decidedly do not. Produced by Jay Joyce, an in-demand Nashville figure who’s worked with Eric Church and Keith Urban among many others, the album bursts with orchestral flourishes and horn sections, swelling to symphonic extremes that can feel distracting during the ballads and pointedly ironic on the lighter fare. The latter approach suggests the ornate, tragicomic work of Randy Newman, and indeed, the man himself lends vocals to a song called “Bigger Boat” that would fit seamlessly in his own repertoire. For Clark, it’s more of a stretch, especially considering the way her two previous albums—2013’s 12 Stories and 2016’s Big Day in a Small Town—paired intimate stories with textures to match. She now challenges herself to locate her characters in more dramatic settings, where their small-town worries feel colossal and cinematic.
It’s a goal she alludes to in the opening “I’ll Be the Sad Song,” where she introduces the metaphor of life as a long but purposefully structured album. In that context, many of these songs might represent those moments when you just need to lose yourself in the sound. Even more than the attempts to soundtrack those helpless feelings (“Love Is a Fire,” “Apologies”), the best moments are when Clark fights through the heartbreak to find her own footing again. In a standout called “Can We Be Strangers” (as in, “We struck out as lovers/We struck out as friends”), she sings over a lush, easygoing groove about the perspective that comes once you’ve moved past missing the good times and you’re just trudging through the bad ones. Clear-eyed and defiant, it’s a breakup song for when you’ve worn out all the old breakup songs and you’re just ready to get moving again.
A similar epiphany takes place in “Who You Thought I Was,” the album’s glowing centerpiece and one of Clark’s finest songs to date. It was inspired by an award-show speech from John Prine—another idiomatic writer concerned with our least romantic types of tragedies. When the 73-year-old icon found himself faced with a standing ovation, he addressed the crowd: “Well, I’m John Prine…but I’d like to go back to being who you thought I was.” His joke suggested a career-long discomfort with acclaim, but Clark sings of a more intimate dynamic. In the verses, she unfolds a lifetime’s worth of aspirations—to be a rock star, to stay young forever—and realizes that the closest she came was simply being in the presence of somebody who saw the best in her. It’s a sad realization, sung in the aftermath of a breakup, but she pairs it with the record’s most surprising and uplifting arrangement. Even when the words sound like the end of the road, the music pushes her to believe that maybe next time, she’ll get it right.
Buy: Rough Trade
