2017

Fresh off the success of her Big Day In A Small Town album and tour, Brandy Clark tells Helen M Jerome how she writes such outrageously addictive songs, how she approaches intensely personal and taboo topics and how close she’s been to broke. Brandy Clark has been writing for years, for all kinds of country artists, from LeAnn Rimes and Kacey Musgraves to Keith Urban and Darius Rucker. But was there a precise moment she looks back on as her big break? “Definitely,” she says. “I remember the real turning point, when I thought this could really happen. I had toiled away for a long time, and not had a lot of success as a writer. Then Reba McEntire recorded two of my songs [Cry and The Day She Got Divorced] for her All The Women I Am album. She’d cut a song of mine for a previous album, but it fell off, because people usually record more songs than make the record. I mean, I recorded 14 songs for Big Day… and it has 11. But Reba cut those two songs and they both made the record.” And that was it. Brandy was on a roll. Today, Brandy’s ambition is growing and she’s working towards getting her passion project, Moonshine: That Hee Haw Musical, onto Broadway “soon after 2017”, which is another collaboration with long-time friend, Shane McAnally. But before we get ahead of ourselves, if you haven’t already, you should first check out her 2013 debut album, 12 Stories, which had critics reaching for superlatives, and brought songwriting nominations and awards. Now she’s delivered the fine follow-up, Big Day In A Small Town, which contains so much energy, and is crammed with so many ideas, references and characters, that you need several listens to appreciate how well it hangs together, hooking you in and refusing to let go. Having grown up in a town with a population of just 900, you can see that some of it might be autobiographical, and she says that when the song, Big Day In A Small Town was written, she thought, “Boy, that would be a great title for an album.” But she just tucked it away and didn’t really think about it until she was getting ready to make a record again. “I had some ideas swirling around in my head and that was one, and I kind of tried to build around it. I definitely knew that it would be the title and centrepiece of the album.” That was around two years before her producer, Jay Joyce came onboard. Brandy’s label, Warner Bros., set them up to work together, so they went for coffee and just hit it off, agreeing to jump in and make music together. They complement each other, says Brandy, as “Jay is a real genius and is just about the job. He doesn’t get involved in the politics of the business. He just keeps his head down and works. So he was a great guy for me, because it’s just all about the music.” She was able to bring in the songs she already had, as all the writing had taken place before they met. “A lot of times with the producer, you are writing songs for the record with them,” she explains. “That’s just how Nashville works, you get set up to write with people. But I’ve never worked with a producer where we’re writing for the record. Not that I wouldn’t, but I haven’t done it that way yet.” When they started to work together, Jay Joyce asked her to listen to Neil Young’s Harvest, which wasn’t a record that really meant anything to her. But he assured her that there were some songs on that record that would work really well for her sonically, so that’s when she became familiar with Young’s classic 1972 album, and songs like Heart Of Gold, Alabama, and The Needle And The Damage Done. High-concept Country The idea of her own record being an almost-concept album wasn’t a conscious thought, according to Brandy. She certainly hadn’t imagined doing a whole record about her hometown until Big Day In A Small Town was done. And she still claims she’s not yet made a hard and fast concept record: “They’ve always just been loose; and if I keep making records, I think that’s how I’ll keep thinking about them, as loose concepts. But at some point, I think I’d like to make a real concept record.” Her own favourite concept records, she says, are Willie Nelson’s Red Headed Stranger, plus Pancho & Lefty, which is Willie with Merle Haggard. Concept album or not, its title track is a fond love song to the logging town she grew up in: Morton, in Washington State, a place she left years ago, but still has a pull for her. “It’s just going back into where I’m from. To people that I’ve known my whole life and loved.” She stops to consider. “I mean, I couldn’t live there anymore because I’ve been too citified, with having a Starbucks on the corner and that sort of thing, but it’s always nice to go back.” To make all those hometown names and places familiar to the listener, Brandy wanted a map of a small town included in the album artwork. “But I didn’t say I wanted it for the cover,” she insists. “I said maybe the background of the artwork could be a map. So the next day, a guy from Warner Bros. [Stephen Walker] sent over what he’d drawn, with the streets as song titles. Which he really didn’t intend as the cover,” she recalls. “It blew my mind that he came up with it. I was like, that’s the cover right there!” In fact, the whole album feels just as organic musically, although some tracks came from her back catalogue, since she never stops writing. “That’s been really good,” she says, “because there are songs on Big Day… that were written before 12

With a stunning new album and growing fanbase, The Grahams’ future looks golden. From George Jones and Tammy Wynette to Tim McGraw and Faith Hill, country music has produced plenty of couples who make beautiful music together. With The Grahams, there’s a new duo to add to the list – although Alyssa and Doug Graham are, admittedly, far closer to Gillian Welch and David Rawlings than the aforementioned mainstream country superstars. The young couple have been making a serious impact across North America, the UK and Ireland since they debuted in 2013 with the Riverman’s Daughter album, their mix of striking songs, gorgeous harmonies and subtle, imaginative arrangements marking them out. We caught up with the couple when they were in Portland, Oregon, and found that, for them, living on the road together does not diminish the pleasure they find in love and music. “Considering we seem to spend almost 24 hours a day, seven days a week together, we certainly could get on one another’s nerves,” says Alyssa. “But I’m happy to say that we don’t. We’re doing what we love – making music and travelling – and we feel very grateful to be able to do so.” No Ike and Tina Turner moments, then? “No! Definitely not!” Alyssa laughs. “We’ve known one another almost our entire lives. We first met and became friends when I was seven and Doug was nine. We started dating when we were teenagers and have been together ever since. And we formed our first band when we were at high school. So we’re really comfortable with each other, on and off stage. It’s a really nice way to live – making music and travelling with your best friend, who happens to be your partner in life.” School Holiday Alyssa and Doug’s journey towards the heart of American music has taken several interesting turns since they first began singing together at lunch break. The band they formed at school, Blindman’s Holiday, were a psychedelic outfit who went on to enjoy a degree of success on the jam-band festival circuit. “We grew up loving The Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, Neil Young,” says Aylssa. “They kind of set us an example of what drugs to take!” She and Doug both laugh at the memory and Alyssa adds: “We’d write songs about bugs biting our ankles!” Doug says: “We were so much a jam band! I’d start a guitar solo in one tempo and, by the time I came to finish it, we were in an entirely different time signature!” Alyssa adds: “We toured that band for a long time and went down really well with audiences, but eventually, both Doug and I wanted to go deeper into music.” Doug nods and adds: “It was fun at the time, but both of us felt like we’d said enough musically and wanted to strip things back, simplify things, get away from the big solos and concentrate on the songs.” “We had this run-in with the major music industry in New York City,” explains Alyssa, “and didn’t feel comfortable with what they were offering. So it felt good to walk away. I went to college in Boston and studied music – previously, I was unable to read music and by studying there I not only learnt how to do so, but got seriously schooled in jazz.” Jazz Solo Finishing college, Alyssa and Doug – who had loyally followed her to Boston – returned to New York City, got married and began performing in such noted jazz clubs as The Bitter End and The Cotton Club. Alyssa’s beautiful voice won a recording contract with Sunnyside, a contemporary US jazz label. Her 2005 debut album What Love Is presented her singing original songs alongside covers of jazz standards, bossa-nova numbers and Neil Young tunes. 2008’s Echo album continued this momentum with Graham here being gifted the first opportunity to record Involved Again (a song Jack Reardon had written for Billie Holiday – who died before she could record it – and was so impressed by What Love Is that he gifted the song to Alyssa). Both albums were well reviewed and Graham’s record label obviously hoped to market her towards the huge audience buying Norah Jones CDs. This never quite took and 2011’s Lock, Stock & Soul – while produced by Craig Street (who had produced Norah Jones and Cassandra Wilson) – found Graham shift towards Laurel Canyon-style singer-songwriter pop and is the least convincing of her solo albums. Unsurprisingly, her jazz audience passed on this while the pop crowd stuck with Taylor Swift. Doug and Alyssa took stock and headed south. “Those albums reflect a moment in time for both of us,” says Alyssa. “Doug was with me throughout, always on stage playing guitar. We learnt a lot, but I was never entirely comfortable with being pushed out front. The idea had always been to be inclusive of both of us, but it wasn’t until we wrote the Riverman’s Daughter song that things began to take shape and sound really natural. That got us off to go and live along the Mississippi river for a year and things began to come into place then. The songwriting, our singing, the feel for a traditional American music.” Riverman’s Daughter was released in 2013, its songs and sound inspired by the couple leaving New York City and exploring the Great River Road. Alyssa and Ben write their songs with Bryan McCann – “he and Doug have been buddies since they were eight and played on the same soccer team”, says Alyssa – and here, they conjured up a mythic America from pre-modern times. In a way, The Grahams’ songs on Riverman’s Daughter recall The Band’s ability to write songs that sound like they have existed forever. The sound is also consciously an homage to older American music. “At the time, we were obsessed with The Carter Family, The Louvin Brothers, The Stanley Brothers,” says Alyssa. “We went for a very traditional, retro

Cadillac Three frontman Jaren Johnston tells Paul Sexton about the moment he realised that the country and rock worlds were coming together. It was in February this year when The Cadillac Three’s repeated UK visits – eight in two years by that point – were rewarded with their biggest audience yet one sizzling night at the Electric Ballroom in Camden. Frontman Jaren Johnston saw two worlds collide. “I saw a Travis Tritt t-shirt and a Pantera t-shirt at the same show,” he laughs. “That’s when you know you’re doing something different.” Bassist, steel guitarist and dobro player Kelby Ray joins in with the memory, underlining how the band have created a scintillating subdivision of Southern rock with deep country roots. “You could see it in the ages of the crowds over there,” he beams. “We had kids from 20 to 65, it was all over the map. You get those old Skynyrd and ZZ Top fans, and then the younger fans.” As Ray points out, the band’s live UK audience had increased six-fold from their first visit in 2014, when they sowed the seeds of their following at London’s Barfly. In the summer, they rocked the Ramblin’ Man Fair, and in November, their stature will likely take another giant leap forward when they return for an eight-date tour of Britain and Ireland. They’ve become such adopted Brits that Johnston has even been considering getting a flat in London. “Chrissie Hynde’s one of my best friends,” he says without a whiff of name-dropping. “She lives there, and she always comes out and hangs. It’s just been such a cool thing to see that whole thing grow, kind of by accident. We weren’t forcing anything, we just literally did what bands do, you put a record out and kids reacted to it. “We were always infatuated with Tom Petty and bands that came over there and did what they do, and people appreciated it, and they kept going back. When we did the first trip and saw how cool it was, and how we sold the first show out in, like, 10 minutes, we were blown away. So we were like ‘alright, this is a commitment, two times a year if not more’. Monetarily speaking, it hasn’t been easy at the beginning, but it’s paying off now.” That upcoming schedule will continue with dates in Germany, Holland and Spain, in a European run that’s wrapped around a never-ending domestic tour. Every night, they’ll play the hell out of both their earlier anthems and the brilliant sophomore album Bury Me In My Boots. The Cadillac Three are doing something seriously right. After a brief but warm hello with the band backstage that night at the Electric Ballroom, we sat down for a face-to-face with Jaren and Kelby on Tennessee time, while they were completing the album at Nashville’s celebrated Blackbird Studio. As we spoke, drummer Neil Mason was hard at work downstairs adding a final percussion part to what’s become a landmark record for the band. Bury me in my boots Released in early August, Bury Me In My Boots shows the band’s distinguished and in-demand songwriting chops reaching a new plateau. A mature successor to the debut record released in the US, in the first of several incarnations, in 2012, it upped the ante by debuting comfortably inside the mainstream Top 40 on both sides of the Atlantic. TC3’s serrated sound references everyone from Kings of Leon to Lynyrd Skynyrd, with healthy ingredients of an upbringing that embraces country, rock and roots music of many stripes. But more than anything, Bury Me… is clearly the sound of a band with courage in their convictions. “It shows how we’ve grown over the last five years, since we recorded that first album in a week,” says Ray. Adds Johnston: “It’s a nice little salad of where we come from, as far as having recorded that first record so fast. We wrote the songs for that first record in four or five days, and we just put it out. That’s what bands do. We didn’t have anybody telling us we couldn’t do it. “So this is after three and a half years of touring extensively, and starting to live life on a bus, and writing songs in the back of the bus and kind of living that ‘Almost Famous’ life, where everybody’s always got a guitar, there’s always a beer, there’s always a girl, and you’re always going somewhere. I think this is a nice little mix of the last few years of living that life.” Not that Johnston, Ray and Mason have tried to fix anything that wasn’t broken. “As far as production goes, it’s still just the three of us playing, with somebody hitting the record button,” says Jaren of their inspiringly live studio technique. “Nothing’s changed, but every band wants to grow. “Graffiti and White Lightning were a step in the right direction, but there are some other cool songs, like [album closer] Runnin’ Red Lights. It shows a more…” he stops short of using the word mature, but goes on: “I’m not just singing about booze and fighting and trucks. I’m a little older. Things get a little more nostalgic and you start looking back on your life. I’m married now, I own my house and we’re living life, and it’s a crazy lifestyle. So I think a lot of those stories are in these songs.” That’s why he didn’t quite make it to the word “mature”. The band’s conversation, like their lyrics, is peppered with references to good-natured good-timin’. They proudly play what they deftly describe in one of the album’s many singalong moments as the Soundtrack To A Six Pack. But in the very next song, the aforementioned White Lightning, they can switch gear and sing sincerely about a girl who “stole my heart faster than a heat-seeking missile on a mission”. Abbey Road studios Graffiti, an advance rider for the album when it appeared as a single

With his love of folk evident on his latest solo album, punk spokesman Greg Graffin reveals the links between the genres. It may not always be obvious, but punk rock and country music are closer cousins than first appearances would ever suggest. Forget the surface: the roughness, rips and snotty aggression on one side; the old-school, down-home familiarity on the other. Authenticity, passion, the basic premise that anyone can get involved and embrace their creativity, whatever their background; these are the foundations of both genres. This is what gives them both their spark. It’s why Johnny Cash, the Man In Black, the outlaw’s outlaw, is seen by so many in both camps as the ultimate rock star. It’s why Willie Nelson crosses boundary lines with the slightest flick of his trademark plaits. It’s why Dolly Parton, with her laser wit, social conscience and fearsome intelligence, is roundly considered one of America’s greatest living badasses. And while those people have been clasped to the studded bosom of many a moshpit warrior over the years, it goes both ways. Punk rock, after all, is now moving into middle age, the original angry young things of the late 70s turning into the respectable musical elders of the 21st century. It’s no wonder leading lights of the scene are looking further back to their roots and exploring music outside of their own career springboard. Take Greg Graffin, frontman of revered Californian punks Bad Religion since their inception in 1979. His new folk solo album, Millport, draws on the music he grew up with, the Grand Ol’ Opry songs his mother listened to on the radio when she was a child in Indiana: traditional Appalachian music infused with fiddle, banjo and guitar and a sense of deeply American tradition being handed down through the ages. It’s a beautiful thing. “If it’s a good country song it still can be whittled down to an acoustic guitar and you can sing it around the campfire,” he says. “And believe it or not, it’s been our criteria in punk as well. Most of our songs are written on guitar or piano and then you take them in the studio and you adapt them to the genre. So consequently you can find me singing punk songs on acoustic guitar as easily as I do with folk music. As an artist is it feels very natural to play both of them.” Bad Religion are the quintessential Californian punk band. Their lyrics take on themes of social responsibility and political discourse, but their harmonies are pure west-coast sunshine. But when we call Graffin, he’s holed up in his farm out east in upstate New York, looking out at a damp, dark, misty winter’s day. Millport is named after a nearby town, a real Anywheresville, USA, providing a strong home base for its rich metaphors for American life influenced by the likes of Doc Watson and Clarence Ashley. “Some people say ‘well, that’s not what Greg’s really known for’, but the truth is I’ve been playing this sort of music since I was a kid,” Graffin says. “I now have three albums that are solo projects of my own, and I don’t get to make as many of these albums as I’d like to. “People ask me how I learned to sing punk, and the truth is I didn’t, I learned how to sing this old-time music, this folk style, and if you blend that with rock, you’ve got something that just happened to be springing up in Southern California in the 70s when my family decided to move out there. My vocal delivery has always been very authentic, I don’t try to sound like anyone. Early reviews for Bad Religion all said, ‘sounds like folk music’. And I didn’t really like being accused of being a folk singer, but the truth is that’s how I learned how to sing. I didn’t listen to Johnny Rotten.” Integral Identity Having grown up alongside peers such as Black Flag, Circle Jerks and The Adolescents, Bad Religion have gone on to influence everyone from Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder to Iron & Wine’s Sam Beam. Again, it all comes down to credibility and honesty. “Everyone’s voice has a uniqueness,” says Graffin. “And so many singers try to disguise that uniqueness so they can sound like someone else. That turns me off right away. If I were ever on one of those shows that Simon Cowell hosts, I would be dismissed in the first round. And that’s true of every great singer that I know.” The songs themselves combine a nostalgic mournfulness with a tongue-in-cheek humour. While opener Backroads Of My Mind aches with a longing for home and roots, it’s also a self-mocking look at the physical and mental changes in an ageing singer. A take on Nashville songwriter Norman Blake’s Lincoln’s Funeral Train, meanwhile, looks to history to try and make sense of the seemingly unprecedented problems facing America. “Lincoln’s one of our great heroes, but people forget his real impact internationally came after he was gone,” says Graffin. “His presidency was so tumultuous. If you think our country’s divided now, you should think of what it was when Lincoln took office. “He had to sneak into Washington DC on a nighttime train and no one was told he was arriving, because there were lynch mobs waiting for him in Baltimore. He stole away to the White House from Springfield, Illinois avoiding cities where there were hostile people waiting to lynch him, literally. The country was never more divided and he presided over a terrible four years. “This song commemorates his funeral train that went from Washington back to Springfield, and to me the image of a train is one of the great American images. It’s what connected this country and brought us into the modern era. I just think it’s a great reminder. During these current political struggles it’s good to remember how bad things got, remember how essentially we’re all connected. I