[music]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Allison Stewart. Brandy Clark is one of Nashville's favorite songwriters. She's been nominated for 11 Grammys, and now she's a Tony nominee for the songs she wrote for the Broadway musical, Shucked. Clark is one of the co-writers of the Boisterous musical, which tells the story of a corn-centric Midwestern town with a crop shortage, but no shortage of corny puns. The show earned nine Tony nominations including for best new musical and best original score.

Shucked star Alex Newell won a Tony for best performance in a featured role in a musical. This year, Brandy Clark also released a new self-titled album produced by another Brandy, Brandi Carlile. Around the album's release in May at the height of Shucked mania, Brandy came in our studio with her guitar to play songs from both projects. I started by asking her to play a song, and she chose, She Smoked in the House, and told us who inspired this song.

Brandy Clark: You bet. This one, it's interesting that I'm singing this right now, just hit me, I wrote this about my grandma Ruth, and today is her birthday. She passed on many years ago, but it just hit me, today is her birthday, so it's very fitting that I would play this song first.

Alison Stewart: Universe had plans for today.

MUSIC - Brandy Clark: She Smoked in the House

Alison Stewart: That was Brandy Clark. Brandy, thank you so much for coming to the studio today.

Brandy Clark: Oh, thanks for having me.

Alison Stewart: We're so excited to have you for the hour. This is your fourth studio album, which is coming out tomorrow. This one's self-titled, even though it's number four. Why did it make sense for this one to be self-titled?

Brandy Clark: I think, originally, the idea for me was to call this record, Northwest, because Brandi Carlile, who produced it, when she approached me about us making a record, she said, "I see it as your return to the Northwest." A lot of people don't know this because I've lived in Nashville for so long, but I'm from Washington State. That was so intriguing to me. I actually went to the Northwest with a co-writer of mine, Jessie Jo Dillon, and we wrote a song called Northwest, thinking it would be the title of the album, but as we got into the record, making the record, it was bigger than just Northwest. This record takes me back to not only home literally, but figuratively, why I ever wanted to make music.

Things are stripped back. I recorded the songs that I just really loved. There were other voices involved in choosing the songs and other voices involved in creating the songs, but these were the songs that I love and that resonated with me. It was actually Brandi Carlile who pointed that out. She said, "This record, all these songs when I hear them, I feel like you wrote them in your bedroom." There wasn't one song that summed it up. I've never had a self-titled album. I think it was my manager who said, "I think this is the time to self-title a record."

Alison Stewart: We actually have the song Northwest pulled. What would you like people to listen for in this track?

Brandy Clark: Wow. I love this track, it's kind of rocking. Here's a funny thing, the second verse starts out with Lewis County logging show. In my hometown they have a logging show every year, logging show. When I say logging show, so many people have said to me, "I love that you reference a Kenny logging show." I just want when people-- if you want to come sing this at my shows, then we can change it to Kenny logging show, but it is Lewis County logging show.

I guess the most poignant lyric to me in this is, "Hickory shirts will pay the bills," because my dad and so many of my friend's dads growing up wore hickory shirts to work, they were loggers.

Alison Stewart: Let's hear from Brandy Clark. This is Northwest.

MUSIC - Brandy Clark: Northwest

Northwest from Brandy Clark's forthcoming album. It's out tomorrow. It is self-titled. It obviously worked for a long time for other artists, written songs for other artists, Toby Keith, Reba McEntire, Sheryl Crow, I can go on and on. How do you know when you want to hold onto a song for you?

Brandy Clark: When the thought of somebody else singing it is one I don't like. When I think, "Oh, I have to have that song for me." I want to point out one other thing about that song that I just realized, when it says, "St. Helen's ash is evergreen," this is the anniversary of the eruption of Mount St. Helen's.

Alison Stewart: All right. There's a third one that's going to happen during the course of this interview, we've got grandma Ruth's birthday.

Brandy Clark: Grandma Ruth's birthday was the day Mount St. Helen's erupted. Anyway, sorry to digress back to that, it just feels, I don't know, otherworldly that those coincidences are happening today. Feels kind of blessed, but when I know-- usually, and a lot of times I know it right when I write it. There are several songs on this record that never got played for anybody because I was like, "That's for me," and there were songs on this record that were written just for me because a lot of days I'm just writing songs.

I think one of the reasons I'm on this earth is to write songs. I'm writing songs most every day if I'm not doing something like this. A lot of days, I am just writing songs, and they might not be for me, they might be for someone else, but there are those days where I know they're for me.

Alison Stewart: When you're just writing songs, you're put on the earth to be a storyteller and to write down people's stories, whether they're your stories or stories of people you observed or moments that maybe a song can immortalize that otherwise it might be fleeting and no one would never know that this thing happened. I went back and I looked at the release date for your life as a record, it was March 6th, 2020. You've obviously had music come out, not during a pandemic. What difference did you notice in the way people responded to your music?

Brandy Clark: In the pandemic?

Alison Stewart: During the pandemic as opposed to other times when you've released music?

Brandy Clark: I think that people really needed the music that was coming. I mean, people always need music, but it was a different sort of need right then. Now that we're coming out of that pandemic, I think I feel that more now than I did then because one thing that was difficult for me as an artist, and I'm sure I haven't talked about this to a lot of other artists, but I'm sure I'm not alone in this, was we were performing to a computer screen.

For me when the world shut down, I was promoting an album, and so instantly pivoted into doing as much as we could that way. Even some festivals I was a part of, they would send us kits with cameras so we could stream our performance. I didn't realize just how much I need that audience. I need them as much as they need my music.

That was one of the gifts that I learned in the pandemic was, "Oh, wow." I knew I loved that part of it, but I don't think I realized just how much I need that part of it until then. I learned that night, and I think now coming out of this, hearing fans tell me stories of, "Oh, your life is a record got me through the first part of the pandemic." I've heard that from more than a handful of people.

Alison Stewart: What music or culture got you through the pandemic?

Brandy Clark: This is crazy, but at the beginning of it, I had a book club. My whole plan-- I was going to do this book club. I'm just so rockstar that I would do a book club on tour, but I was going to do soundcheck parties and we were going to have a book every month because I'm a voracious reader. We were even going to have coffee. The guy who was playing drums for me was a great barista, and he was going to make coffee during soundcheck. That fell apart, and so we just did the book club online.

So many of the people who were participants in the book club said, "We need to read Untamed, Glennon Doyle." Not the kind of book I would typically read, but that book, really, it got me through. Then there was another book, I think it's called Valentine. I hate that I can't remember that that's for sure the title, but I think it was Valentine. One of my favorite books I've ever read, but those two books, especially Untamed because it really did uplift me in a time where, man, we were all feeling like we were under a cloud.

Alison Stewart: My entire team's eyes just got really big when you said you have a book club because we have a book club called Get Lit, which is a partnership with New York Public Library, and we always have music at our book clubs. We'll be giving you an array next time you're passing through.

Brandy Clark: I would love that.

Alison Stewart: [unintelligible 00:12:32] has been our musical guest, Laurie Anderson, we've had some really amazing people. That's an open invitation.

Brandy Clark: Anytime, you'd let me know because I don't have to be passing through, I can make the trip for it. I love books so much. In fact, I was talking to actually my hairdresser about how I haven't had a book in a while that I couldn't put down. There's nothing I love more than sitting here in this interview and thinking, "I can't wait until I have that hour break so I can open that book up again." She turned me on to a book. It's not a new book, and I'm sure you've probably read it, called Demon Copperhead.

Alison Stewart: We had Barbara Kingsolver on. It's so good.

Brandy Clark: I've never read any of her books, and I don't know why, until now. I'm sure I'm going to have to fight people, but I might be her number one fun. That book, it's riveting.

Alison Stewart: Can we hear another song as we go to break?

Brandy Clark: You bet. This one, do you want the story behind it?

Alison Stewart: Yes.

Brandy Clark: Okay. This is a song I wrote when I was out on a writing trip in LA. I was set up to write with a guy named Michael Pollack who I'd never written with, and I was on the way to the write. When I'm writing with somebody for the first time, I always want to bring in something great, and I didn't really feel like I had anything great. I was in the car, and something happened with another person, and my feelings were really hurt.

I'm sitting there in that LA traffic caught between tears and anger, but wanting to stay focused on the write. I remembered something that a really good friend of mine always says, which is, insecurity is the ugliest human emotion. When someone is mean to you, it's usually their insecurity. Then I started to get past the hurt of what had happened and started to think about my own insecurities and the things in my life that they get in the way of.

I thought, "Wouldn't that be something to write a letter to insecurity?" That's where this started. Michael and I wrote the song, and then when we sat down to make the record, Brandi had the idea of, "Could we make this a duet?" I loved that idea. She had a very specific female artist. She wanted to be my duet partner on it, but she said, "I'll sing it today while we're recording it."

We sing it and it was magic. I knew it was magic in the room, but then when I took the board mix and was listening that night, I thought, "Oh, I'm in trouble because I want this to be--" Brandi and I love the magic that's going on between us. We're similar age and come from a similar space and we have similar insecurities, and it just feels so real for us to sing this.

The next day, I had this whole argument to try to get her to do it. I said, "I just want it to be you and me. It just touches me." She said, "Oh, buddy, that's all you had to do is ask." On the record, it's our scratch vocals. Of course, she's not here today, so I'm going to just do it as a non-duet, but it's called Dear Insecurity.

MUSIC - Brandy Clark: Dear Insecurity

Alison Stewart: That was Brandy Clark. We're going to take a quick break, and we'll have more with Brandy Clark and hear all about her work on the hit musical, Shucked. This is All Of It.

[music]

This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart, and we're back with singer-songwriter and now Broadway vet, Brandy Clark. She's now a Tony nominee this season for her work on the Broadway musical, Shucked, a project she and her longtime songwriting partner, Shane McAnally, began more than a decade ago. Shucked is about a tiny town that is rocked when its main cash crop suddenly fails. Everyone panics when all the corn in Cobb County mysteriously begins to wilt, it means Trouble with a capital T that rhymes with C and that stands for Corn. These folks realize they're shucked.

A headstrong girl named Maizy heads to the big city, Tampa, obviously, in search of help. She recruits a corn doctor, as in the ones on your feet, to come back with her, and he has a shady agenda and a mint-green leisure suit.

Clark co-wrote the music and lyrics for the show. Here's a number where the locals explain to the city slicker visitor what they really care about. Here is a clip of the song, We Love Jesus.

MUSIC - Original Broadway Cast of Shucked: We Love Jesus

Feel Good Production has been a surprise hit of the season winning over critics and audiences alike. Lin-Manuel Miranda posted about it the other day, "I haven't laughed this hard at a musical since Avenue Q." Brandy Clark is with me in studio. Shucked began as a very different kind of project.

Brandy Clark: It did.

Alison Stewart: It had a Hee Haw origin story.

Brandy Clark: Yes. The way that Shane McAnally and I got involved was Steve Buchanan who used to run the operation, I guess it was Gaylord that was operating. He was interviewing teams of songwriters to potentially write the Hee Haw musical, and he really wanted the musical to feel authentic to country and roots music, so he wanted to use actual Nashville country songwriters.

We met with Robert Horn, the book writer and he chose us. Actually, it's funny that you would play We Love Jesus because he chose us just based on a song Shane and I had written on my first record 12 Stories called Pray to Jesus. He said, "I want this. This is the tone." Shane and I knew how to do that. We started working on it. It became very evident very quickly that Hee Haw just did not test well with Broadway audiences, so the show became Moonshine: That Hee Haw Musical.

We opened it in Dallas in I think 2015, 2016, got mixed reviews, and the show fell apart. Then Steve retired from the opera, and so we thought it was over. Then Robert Horn won the Tony for Tootsie. He wrote the book for the musical Tootsie. He had all of this attention on him and people want to know what he wanted to do next. Lucky for us, he said, this show, and so we kind of started over.

A new producer, Mike Bosner, came in, brought in Jack O'Brien who's a legend, directed Hairspray among many, many things. Jack really inspired us to write an almost completely new score. We happened upon Shucked. I remember there were some different titles flying around, Cobb County USA, all this, and then somebody came up with Shucked and it just stuck and we became the corn musical. It's crazy. I've never been involved in something that has been so overwhelmingly joyous as this show and this process.

Alison Stewart: What do you know about making theater now that you didn't know before and you could never know from the outside?

Brandy Clark: Wow. Well, someone told me when I stepped into this, musicals aren't written, they're rewritten.

Alison Stewart: Interesting.

Brandy Clark: I believed them, but not to the extent that that's really true. I think all of us, except maybe Robert, if somebody would have told us in 2012, "Hey, it's going to be 10 years for you guys to get into a Broadway rehearsal room," I don't know that we would have jumped on that train, and so I'm glad they didn't. We didn't know that part because it took every day of those 10-- For Robert, it was longer than 10 years, but for Shane and I, every day of those 10 years to get to where we got it.

Alison Stewart: When you were writing the music for Shucked, what part of your experience as a country music writer was helpful, and then what part of it did you have to put aside to write a musical?

Brandy Clark: Oh, that's a great question. It was the same thing, storytelling. I think my strength as a songwriter is storytelling, whether I'm telling someone else's story or my own, but what Shane and I both were great at was telling lifelong stories in three minutes. We have two and a half hours to tell the story. We need to tell little bits and pieces of that story from different perspectives, so I think we both got better at that at telling just a little bit of the story.

The other part that we didn't know upfront is how much the story was going to change, and how when it would change, it would require us to maybe go back and either rewrite or just write nine new songs. There's so much of that, and you're working with a team, you're working with not only a director but a choreographer, a music director who we have a guy named Jason Helland is our music director, and a woman named Sarah Ogilvie is our choreographer, and they have been intrical in the process. We wouldn't have these songs without those two people.

Sometimes there were things that Sara needed that Shane and I would have to figure out how to do in a song, and there were things that the stage needed that Shane and I had no idea how to do that Jason Helland would know how to musical eyes and bring to life.

Alison Stewart: Now, on the flip side of writing songs for musicals, there's a song in here which I heard right away and I thought, I could hear this on country radio in a second. Do you know which one I'm going to say?

Brandy Clark: Somebody Will?

Alison Stewart: Yes.

Brandy Clark: Everybody says that, and I don't know why that is. I always hear-- not to cast it, but I'm going to. I always hear Blake Shelton singing it. That's who when I hear it. We wrote that song specifically for Andrew Duran who plays the character of Bo. I remember we were having a reading and Jack felt like we needed a new song for Bo, something to toughen him up, and that's what we wrote.

Alison Stewart: Let's hear a little bit of Somebody Will from Shucked.

MUSIC - Andrew Durand and Original Broadway Cast of Shucked: Somebody Will

That’s Somebody Will from the musical, Shucked. My guest is Brandy Clark. There's a nod to the multicultural casting in the play, the Diversity, gender, race, sexual orientation. There's a non-binary Black lead, yet this all takes place in a part of the country that might be called Marica. [laughs] What do you think is the subtext of the show beyond the really hilarious punns, the toe-tapping tunes?

Brandy Clark: I think it's that the corn is a euphemism for growth, and the corn dies because the town is stuck in their ways and they don't want to let outsiders in and outside ideas in. I think the underlying message is that you need to be open to new people and new ideas even if they don't look like you or sound like you. I think really the overriding message of the song, and it's my favorite song of the show called Maybe Love, is that Maybe Love just needs a little love, and maybe if we would treat people who are different than us with love first instead of hate or indifference, we might be able to grow some corn.

Alison Stewart: Before we got on the air, we were talking about-- I told you that I went to see it and people were dressed up, that we had some [unintelligible 00:29:24] shirts, a little bit of cosplay going on. Have you heard this? You've heard the same, yes?

Brandy Clark: Oh, I've seen it. The first night of the first preview, there was a guy that was there in a corn costume, and then the next night, I see a few more corn costumes, and then a couple of nights later, this girl walks in in a carrot costume. I just love that. I was sharing with you before, to me it's taking on a very rocky horror picture show sort of cult following which I never would have guessed, and it makes me so happy.

Alison Stewart: You've been kind enough to agree to play one of the songs from Shucked.

Brandy Clark: Yes.

Alison Stewart: What are you going to play?

Brandy Clark: I'm going to play a song called Friends. This is actually a duet. I'm not going to sing it as a duet clearly, but it's between our two lead women, Mazie and Lulu, who are played by Caroline Innerbichler. Then, as you mentioned, we have a non-binary lead in Alex Newell. I cannot sing this as well as either of them, but I'm going to give it my best.

MUSIC - Alex Newell, Caroline Innerbichler, and Original Broadway Cast of Shucked: Friends

Alison Stewart: That was Brandy Clark live in our studios performing songs from her self-titled album, as well as music she composed for the hit Broadway musical, Shucked. Coming up next hour, more live music from artists in our studios. We'll speak with singer-songwriter Noah Kahan, as well as hear performances from the bands, The Heavy Heavy and The Revivalists. This is All Of It.

 

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