Brandy Clark & Rosanne Cash - Art of the Storyteller
Originally published in the June 2026 issue of WKCR’s On-Air Guide
On April 9th, I attended something at City Winery that wasn’t quite a concert, but wasn’t a traditional talk either. It was a stop on Brandy Clark’s “Art of the Storyteller” tour, where she interviews various songwriters and alternates with them in acoustic performances, playing different songs from their respective catalogs. I was drawn to this particular date because the guest was Rosanne Cash, the daughter of Johnny Cash and a country music legend in her own right, who set herself apart from her father by incorporating rock stylings into her sound. Clark herself is hugely influential in Nashville, having written for artists like Kacey Musgraves and Sheryl Crow, and also releasing her own brand of country-rock with often dark and sardonic lyricism. Discussing grief, hope, and the intricacies of the songwriting process, Clark and Cash engaged in an intergenerational conversation on the importance of storytelling in country music.
Like any great American songwriters, Clark and Cash paid hefty tribute to their influences during this show. Clark remembered growing up outside of Nashville and being raised on artists like Loretta Lynn and Merle Haggard. This no doubt informed her songs on topics like heartbreak and crime, which often feel more introspective than traditional Nashville songwriting. She also noted humorously that she fell in love with Rosanne Cash’s music long before she knew who Johnny Cash was, and that to this day she thinks of Johnny Cash as Rosanne’s father, not the other way around. Cash countered with a humorous anecdote about recording the song “Tennessee Flat-Top Box”—which she assumed was a public domain tune—on 1984’s King’s Record Shop and later finding out her father had written it. Cash discussed her 2009 album The List, inspired by a list her father gave her when she turned 18 of 100 essential American songs (ranging from blues to folk protest songs to southern gospel). She then launched into her first live performance of the night, which she claimed would be on her personal list: Bob Dylan’s esoteric “Farewell Angelina.”
As Clark began her first song, she joked about singing such a “downer” so early on. She sang “Since You’ve Gone to Heaven,” a track about her father’s death in a logging accident which happened months before 9/11,hence the lyric “Since you’ve gone to heaven, the whole world’s gone to hell.”. Cash remarked that the song was “sad, but not a downer” since it was such a love letter to Clark’s father. It reminded Cash of her own tributes to her father, most notably her 2006 record Black Cadillac which was released in the wake of not just Johnny Cash’s death, but also the deaths of her mother Vivian Liberto and stepmother June Carter. From that album, she performed “The World Unseen,” a beautiful ballad that lifts lines from the Christmas carol “We Three Kings” to describe her spiritual search to connect to Johnny after his death (“Westward leading, still proceeding / to the world unseen”).
During the Q&A portion of the show, I asked Clark and Cash what goes into writing a great country song, and one of their answers was specificity,namely, focusing on particular things rather than general themes. Clark’s song “She Smoked in the House,” which she performed next, perfectly encapsulated this ideology—a rich and detailed tribute to the singer-songwriter’s late grandmother. She claimed the song was like “Grandma stepped down with a cigarette and co-wrote it with me,” with specific references to Folgers cans, “Ford over Chevy,” and, of course, the song’s topic. Cash responded by singing and discussing her smash hit “Seven Year Ache,” a song that presents a portrait of a man attempting to cure his relationship dissatisfaction. While still detailed and specific, Cash claimed the song as more ambiguous in its storytelling, as it sets up a scene but does not necessarily resolve it. She also said, “I have a relationship with that song. It's a person to me now.”
The two songwriters spent significant time talking about how physical media and recording have shaped their careers and their understanding of great music. Cash recalled that when she first started recording, the process was incredibly tactile, and the learning curve for digital production and mixing was steep. She cited Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska (famously recorded entirely on a four-track) as a prime example of the beauty of that old-school recording style. Clark worried about AI overtaking music production, but claimed that there will “always be a place for the real.” She discussed recording her new album with Shooter Jennings, producer and son of Waylon Jennings, who she recalled: “always thinks in vinyl.” According to Clark, Jennings talks about their upcoming record in terms of “side a” and “side b” and keeps a keen eye for album sequencing in a world now run by Spotify playlists. Cash chimed in that it is a good sign that her younger fans keep asking her to sign their physical records at concerts.
Both Clark and Cash debuted songs that will (probably) be on their upcoming albums, each expressing fear and hope for the social and political climate of the United States. Cash played a song she co-wrote with The National’s Matt Berninger, who she praised heavily as a collaborator. The song was a bit difficult to decipher lyrically, but Cash described it as being about “the things you have to walk away from to become yourself.” I most vividly remember a lyric that seemed to refer to religiously motivated violence: “can’t believe what we’ve been doing to each other in the names of things we don’t read.” Clark’s song debut was more straightforward and based on her fears as a lesbian woman in the wake of the 2024 election. The track, titled “If I Get to Be an Old Woman,” contains the lyrics “I hope the god that knows me / will say I did alright.” Noticing Cash’s strong reaction to the song, Clark asked if she could feature on the final version, to which Cash excitedly agreed. That kind of spontaneous collaborative energy defined the entire night, showing the uniqueness and power of Brandy Clark’s songwriting-focused tour.
