Clark has included some deeply personal work on her new album, Roots & Wings. Not only is the album by Terri Clark the artist, but Terri Clark also is in charge of the label, and Terri Clark also served as the producer of the album. Sometimes, an artist producing themselves is a sign that they want to venture off in another musical direction, that’s not so with Clark. She just likes to color outside of the musical lines – on both sides.
“Exactly,” she says. “I can do it all, right? I feel there are many different layers and facets of me as an artist, a singer, a vocalist, and as a writer, and I like to be able to express all of those things. To have an album where every song cohesively sounds like the next one isn’t that interesting to me. I like to mix it up a little bit. There’s everything from the wall-to-wall Country to the folk-roots feel of ‘Flowers In The Snow’ and ‘Beautiful Unbroken.’ Then, you’ve got something like ‘Lonesome’s Last Call,’ which is extremely Classic Country. It sounds like something you would find on Willie’s Place on Sirius / XM. I’ve always loved Classic Country, and on all of my Mercury records, there was always a song that stood out as dirt Country. I wanted to put one of those on this album.”
In a similar fashion to Conway Twitty’s “Hello Darlin,” which spent ten years in a shoebox before he recorded it, Clark had been holding on to the song for a while. “I wrote the song twenty years ago with Jim Rushing, so it’s been kicking around in my catalog since I was twenty-one years old. I’ve always admired him as a writer, and was a big Ricky Skaggs fan.” (Rushing wrote several of Ricky’s top radio hits, including “Cajun Moon” and “Thanks Again.”) “That song has been around for a really long time. It produced itself. It was easy. You just know what you have to do with a song like that. Stuart Duncan is on it, and Sonya Issacs, it’s one track that it seems every person I’ve talked to media-wise who has the record, they always bring that one up.”
Clark co-wrote nine of the album’s tracks, collaborating with former Sugarland member Kristen Hall on four of them. “Kristen and I kind of knew each other through mutual friends, and we got to know each other a little bit better,” she said. “When the flood in Nashville happened, we got really tight as friends. She ended up staying at my house when I was out of town because she had a mudslide in the backyard. It was really unsafe for her to be there. In the process, we started writing songs, and just sort of fell into this groove. She’s my go-to-guy now. If I come up with a great idea, I’ll call her. I love writing with her. She’s so much fun, and she’s become the kind of friend that that I would have if she was in the music business or not. She’s a good person, and it’s a fun process. We actually wrote ‘Northern Girl’ online. We traded back e-mails and MP3 files, and 90% of the song was written without either of us being in the same room. When we do get into the same room, it’s even better. We have a really good time. It’s not hard. It’s not like work. It’s so much fun. “
Another track the two penned together was the 80s sounding “Breakin’ Up Thing.” Clark says it’s one of her favorites. “I love that song. It’s one of my favorite tracks. Kristen came up with the idea. She was parallel parking one day, and she said ‘I’ve got this backing up thing down.’ She stopped and said ‘Oh! I’ve got a great idea.’ The thing I love about it is that it has an old Ronnie Milsap thing about it, a “No Gettin’ Over Me” kind of groove, but it’s also fresh and today. I love it because it’s the same kind of Country that I was listening to as a kid. It feels that way to me.
She also tips her famous hat to a classic song from her native country, with “We’re Here For A Good Time,” which is not to confused with the current, similarly titled single from George Strait. “That’s a cover from a band called Trooper that was very famous here in Canada. They had a huge hit on that song back in the 1970s. it still gets played on Classic Rock stations up in Canada. Every time I heard it, I just thought it would make a great Country record. The song is more of a sentiment than anything, and the melody is hooky. The thing I wanted to do was to make a big sounding record out of it. I doubled up my vocal, and had seven acoustic guitars, a loop, and a party chorus at the end.” She says as an artist, recording it might have been simple enough, but from the producer’s chair, it was a different matter entirely. “I spent a lot of time producing that record. I spent ten minutes singing it, and ten days producing it. I spent a lot of time with a producers’ hat on that one – more than anything on the record.”
Clark knows as an independent artist, the odds can be against her – at least on this side of the border. “I hear several things that could get played on the radio. “The One” is one of them. Then, there’s “Wrecking Ball.” I don’t see any reason why either of those couldn’t, but the challenge with U.S. radio, is that I’m my own label now. I’m not on a major label that employs a full promotion staff to call radio, and go out there, and really get you played on the radio. In order for that to happen, I would have to go out and hire independently, and that’s extremely expensive. And, that’s just taking a chance that they would play it. So, it’s a double-edged sword for me, you know, I’m damned if I do, damned if I don’t. I still get lots of airplay in Canada. ‘Northern Girl’ just went to # 1 there last week as the most-played Country track. Then, there’s satellite radio, and videos. I try to stay connected to my fans by using every other kind of medium that I can because I am missing that link to U.S. Country radio right now.”
However, the business doesn’t completely revolve around radio airplay – at least like it once did. “It has changed so much. The entire model for the music business has changed. You can either go with it, or do something a little bit different. I’m doing a series of ‘Unplugged; shows here in the U.S. That’s how I’ve been doing it here, just going out with a bunch of guitars, a stool, me, and a stomp box.” She says the shows have gone over quite well. “I sit there for two hours, and talk about my life. I play the hits, I play covers, I play new songs, talk about the writing process, and crack a lot of jokes. There’s a lot of self-deprecation going on during that show. I have a lot of fun, and the audience participates as much as I do.”
The emotional centerpiece of the record is the tear-jerker “Smile,” which Clark says stemmed from one of the last conversations that her mother Linda had with her before her death from Cancer in April 2010. “My mom actually said those words to me during the last days she was here. I had tried to stay as strong as I could during that three-year process, but one day, I just lost it. She was in the hospital bed, and I thought she was sleeping. She looked over and said ‘I want you to smile.”
As hard as it’s been, that’s what Clark is trying to do. “That’s part of the reason that for this album, I’ve lightened up some. I want to smile. I want to live for the moment, and I want to have fun. I see a little more light popping through the clouds. Now that it’s all behind me, now that it’s all over – all the sitting on the edge of your seat stuff, wondering what the next step or CAT scan is going to say. When it’s over, there’s a big exhale, and you grieve, and you remember everything that your mom raised you to be. You become that person again, and you stay true to yourself. That’s something that I’ve really embraced, and it has manifested itself into this record with me, too. I think ‘She wants me to smile, so it’s very important that I do.”
For more on Terri, check out www.TerriClark.com!
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