WHAT COULD BE a more fitting emotion for a country music songwriter than heartbreak? For Brandy Clark, the ache and the melancholy of broken hearted songs was what drew her to music for as long as she can remember. On this episode of Mixtape Memoir, we hear how Brandy Clark’s intergenerational upbringing, in a Washington State logging town so tiny that for a while cable tv didn’t reach her house, it was the radio and vinyl collections of her parents and grandparents that fed her a steady diet of the legends: Merle Haggard, Dolly Parton, Tanya Tucker, Loretta Lynn. Her mother was a musician, and multi-instrumentalist, and a guitar was in Brandy’s hands before she turned 10.

Soon began what would become a long journey of first trying to emulate, and then joining the ranks of Music Row’s finest and most respected hit songwriters today for the likes of Miranda Lambert, Leann Rimes, and Kacey Musgraves, and many more. Brandy Clark also emerged as an artist in her own right, but heartbreakingly, the country radio format that she had loved her entire life, did not embrace her own recordings as much as she had hoped and dreamed of. A combination of deeply entrenched programming philosophies and male dominated charts already had odds stacked against her, and by her third album, Brandy decided to abandon pursuit of mainstream commercial country radio, and let her artistic vision lead the way. As fate would have it, her breakup with country radio as an artist (as well as a breakup in her personal life) ended up being a blessing, and brought about her most accomplished, personal, and fully realized album to date. Your Life Is A Record has made Brandy Clark an an eight time Grammy nominee, most recently garnering two for that third album, and its single “Who You Thought I Was”. Brandy may have been born with a broken heart, but sometimes a touch of sadness is just what we need to find our way to true happiness.