This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

She smoked in the house, burned holes in the couch, lipstick circled butts in the ashtray.

In 2020, the New Yorker published an article with a headline,

No one is writing better country songs than Brandy Clark is.

Those songs have been performed by the likes of Reba McIntyre, Miranda Lambert, Casey Musgraves, Leanne Rhymes,

all the biggest artists in country music. And Brandy Clark herself is one of the top songwriters in

Nashville, often co-writing with Shane McAnally. But growing up in the state of Washington in a town

of just a thousand people, Brandy Clark's first musical partner

was her mother. You know, I never realized that everybody's mom couldn't play a bunch of

instruments. You know, my mom, we always had a piano, and I remember some of my earliest

memories of her, she played the harp and the hammered dulcimer, she could just

pick up an instrument and learn it. So, you know, if there was a song on the radio that we loved,

she could, she could play it. She played by ear really well. And then later on, we were in a band

together. And a lot of my first songs I wrote with my mom, I did have a knack for that. And the

original songs that our band did, people gravitated

towards. And so that was really what got me to move to Nashville.

After making it there as a writer, Clark's first album performing her own material was called

12 Stories, a record that staff writer Emily Nussbaum describes as a masterpiece.

Emily is a fan of country music,

and she sat down with Brandy Clark to talk about her newest album, which is called, logically enough,

Brandy Clark, and it's been nominated for five Grammy Awards. Here's Emily.

...