LITT MAGAZINE

Terri Clark
“Real. Organic. Actual instruments.

“It’s who I am, where I’ve been, what I’ve done…
“This, to me, brings the singer/songwriter thing that’s so much a part of me
and puts it through the larger, louder Pain To Kill aesthetics.
And, because of the touring and the way I am,
it’s not just seamless, but it finally makes me feel unified.”
 
  With The Long Way Home, Terri Clark emerges as her own woman. A platinum-selling artist, a hard-charging performer, a CMA Female Vocalist of the Year nominee, the 8-time Canadian Country Music Association Fan’s Choice Entertainer of the Year assumes true ownership of her music: making an album to her own truth – and the result is a record that captures the tides of adult lives, great passions and the struggles that mark our journey.
  “People aren’t getting anything from country music the way I think people should, the way I did,” says the woman who used to tie her guitar to her wrist to take the bus to an afternoon shift playing for tips at Nashville’s storied, but at the time squalid Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge. “Poverty, sobriety, drinking, loss, hurt, redemption, fear, desire…
 “You know I’ve put on a lot of miles literally – and in terms of all that’s happened in my life. The more I was looking at what I was doing, the more I thought: let’s do something really novel, let’s tell each other the truth.”
“You wanna scream, you wanna cry
You want someone to tell you why
All the hope that’s in your heart is not enough
You hit your knees, you shake your fists
Oh, it’s the deepest wound there is
When you can’t help the one you love…”
  Three years earlier, Clark found herself signed to Sony/BMG on the verge of the next phase of what had already been a stellar career. Then her mother Linda was diagnosed with cancer. The woman who’d driven her then18-year old daughter across the Canadian border to pursue her dream of writing and singing country songs was suddenly facing the fight of her life.
  In that moment, everything about the dark-haired beauty’s priorities shifted.
“When the most important person in your whole life… when the doctors tell you they’re going to be taken away, it pulls you up short,” Clark allows. “You don’t think about expiration dates with the people you love, but that’s the reality. And that kind of thing makes you get very real very very fast.”
  Pausing, Clark smiles and acknowledges it even made her reconsider the songs she was being asked to sing. “I wasn’t connecting with what people wanted me to record. It felt like I was on an assembly line: nothing new, nothing fresh or true to me – and it seemed like the fire was going out.
“After facing this thing with my Mom, some things in my own life, how could I be limited to what I was recording based on a notion? That would leave so much of the growth, so much of me on the table. I realized I wanna be a grown-up dealing with adult issues and deeper things, the things that really really matter… Not in this heavy way, but in a way that puts people in their lives in a real way.
  “All those things add up and really make you think about what you’re doing, what a privilege this is – and the responsibility to your fans. And if you’re being honest about what matters, how can you make music that doesn’t matter? I’ve had some great songs for where I was, but if I was still recording things like ‘When Boys Meets Girl,’ that would be tragic.”