Brandy Clark – Your Life is a Record (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 39:08 minutes | 489 MB | Genre: Country
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Warner Records
Few artists understand the human condition like 6-time Grammy nominee Brandy Clark. Working again with acclaimed producer Jay Joyce, Your Life is a Record takes her unerring eye for detail and a genre-melting sense of melody to examine personal truths, revelations and emancipations with wit, grace and compassion. Working with just four acoustic-based musicians, intimacy was the goal. Memphis strings and horns, guest appearances from Randy Newman (“Bigger Boat”) and guitarist John Osborne color in the sketches – creating a depth to what is easily Clark’s most revelatory record yet.
Brandy Clark’s third album opens with a stunner: “I’ll Be the Sad Song,” a ballad carried by sweeping strings and melancholy trumpet. It’s a little bit country, a little bit Dusty in Memphis, and a whole new style of Americana. Credit goes not just to Clark, whose songwriting has long been smarter than most. Producer Jay Joyce layers on instrumentation, much of it courtesy of the Memphis Strings & Horns, that acts as Clark’s equal. High-hat clicks and jaunty horns offer a sarcastically joyous counterpoint to the kiss-off lyrics of “Long Walk” (“Take a long walk off a real short pier, take a cinderblock with you as a souvenir”). Sad piano and buried-deep bass imbue the regrets of “Apologies.” Flute, of all things, adds mischief to the delightful Randy Newman duet “Bigger Boat.” There’s plenty of dark humor as well as exceedingly human pain, as on “Pawn Shop”—starring an old guitar as metaphor for tarnished dreams—and the lush “Can We Be Strangers,” with Clark sighing “I don’t want to hate you or even care enough to.” – Shelly Ridenour
Tracklist:
1. I’ll Be the Sad Song (3:58)
2. Long Walk (2:40)
3. Love is a Fire (4:02)
4. Pawn Shop (3:51)
5. Who You Thought I Was (3:09)
6. Apologies (3:23)
7. Bigger Boat (feat. Randy Newman) (3:34)
8. Bad Car (3:03)
9. Who Broke Whose Heart (3:03)
10. Can We Be Strangers (3:29)
11. The Past is the Past (5:00)
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