Writers at The New York Times made a list of the “30 greatest living American songwriters” — and it features an artist from Washington state.
Country/Americana heavy-hitter Brandy Clark was named in the wide-ranging list of illustrious songsmiths, which includes musical greats like Stevie Wonder, Paul Simon, Jay-Z, Taylor Swift, Dolly Parton and hip-hop innovator Young Thug.
The Grammy-winning, Tony-nominated Clark was spotlighted alongside two of her frequent collaborators and ace behind-the-scenes songwriters, Shane McAnally and Josh Osborne. In the early 2010s, the trio became something of a three-person wrecking crew on Nashville’s Music Row, where talented workaday songwriters clock in for collaborative sessions to pen hopeful hits for country stars and up-and-comers.
“Brandy Clark, Shane McAnally and Josh Osborne are Music Row pros par excellence, brilliant practitioners of the time-honored tradecraft: crisp hooks, witty wordplay, brisk storytelling, songs that click and whir like little machines,” The New York Times wrote. “They are also disrupters of tradition. For the past 15 years or so, they have been part of a loose collective — including star performers like Kacey Musgraves and Sam Hunt, and a number of other behind-the-scenes writers and producers — whose work has jolted country, pulling the genre in new directions stylistically, sonically, even politically.”
Clark moved to Nashville as a 21-year-old, leaving her beloved Morton — a small Lewis County logging town — to chase her country music dream. A decorated artist in her own right, the 17-time Grammy nominee broke out with her first two solo albums, 2013’s “12 Stories” and the follow-up “Big Day in a Small Town” — the latter particularly informed by her blue-collar upbringing in Morton. These days, she splits her time between Nashville and Malibu.
As Clark’s solo career was gaining steam, Kacey Musgraves’ 2013 hit “Follow Your Arrow” (written with Clark and McAnally) became one of the crew’s signature early successes. Here’s more on Clark & Co. from NYT:
“All three writers grew up in modest circumstances far from big cities, and their songs display sharp class consciousness. ‘Broke,’ a Clark-McAnally-Osborne co-write from Clark’s 2016 album ‘Big Day in a Small Town,’ has tight, funny rhymes (‘The white left the picket, the fleas left the hound, yeah / And even the crickets have moved into town’) that speak more eloquently to the economic anxieties of the white rural underclass than countless Op-Ed disquisitions on the topic. That song’s twangful snarl — wonderfully sung by Clark, a star recording artist in her own right — is a reminder that these insurgents are also preservationists, capable of delivering old-fashioned pleasures to please the purists.”
The New York Times created the list by polling more than 250 musicians, critics and other industry pros, and six “Times-affiliated critics” debated the results over “several hourslong sessions.”
