Brandy Clark didn’t set out to make her latest album, Your Life Is A Record, which released Friday (March 6). But sometimes the right collection of songs just falls into place.

“A lot of things changed for me between my last record and this one,” Clark says. “There was a big regime change at the label and for the first time I was put with an A&R team, with Lenny Waronker and Jeff Sosnow, I started playing them songs and they weren’t familiar with my catalog, so I played things that were written before both my first and second records, and newer songs, too. When I turned in ‘The Past is the Past,’ which is now the last song on the album, they called me and said, ‘I feel like you’re ready to make a record again.’”

For the past seven years, Clark has balanced being one of country music’s most sought-after songwriters and one of its most respected singers. Clark began releasing her own music with 2013’s 12 Stories on the indie label Slate Creek. In addition to the critically lauded album, that same year brought CMA and Grammy nominations for “Mama’s Broken Heart,” which Miranda Lambert turned into a hit. A year later, Kacey Musgraves’ “Follow Your Arrow,” which Musgraves co-wrote with Clark and Shane McAnally, and which featured lyrics about same-sex relationships and smoking marijuana, made history when it was named CMA Song of the Year.

In 2014, Clark transitioned to a major label, signing with Warner Music’s Los Angeles office and making a case for country radio airplay with the songs from her first major label release with 2016’s Big Day In A Small Town, an album filled with nuanced, exquisitely detailed songs.

With Your Life Is A Record, Clark turns those keen observations on herself, rummaging through the emotional wreckage of a fizzled-out longtime relationship, most pointedly on songs like the stark “Apologies” and “Who You Thought I Was.” She re-teamed with producer Jay Joyce and settled in to record at Joyce’s east Nashville studio Neon Cross.

“I had gone through a breakup of a long relationship and didn’t realize how much I was writing about that until it was time to make a record. Jay got a batch of songs from me and the label and he said, ‘This is a breakup record.’”

Both were intent on crafting an album that revisited, but also expanded upon, the singer-songwriter aesthetic of her first two albums.

“I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to challenge a guy like Jay Joyce, who is known for more electric, heavier sounds, to cut an all-acoustic album?’”

Rounding out an intimate studio quartet were multi-instrumentalists Jedd Hughes and Giles Reaves (best known for crafting albums of space music, including 1992’s Sea of Glass, as well as work with several rock bands).

“I didn’t know Giles before this album, but Jay had such a strong feeling that this record needed Giles. He said, ‘You can give him a safety pin and he can make music with it.’”

With a bedrock of music and vocals laid down, Clark and Joyce wanted to up the ante. Clark suggested strings. Joyce wasn’t keen on the idea—at first.

“I’m a sucker for strings on a record,” she says. “Jay was like, ‘Ugh, strings are hard to cut, and you need a lot of them in a room to sound great.’ But then he suggested the Memphis Strings and Horns [with Lester Snell handling arrangements]. And I trusted him with that—I trust the producer. I feel like they are the last songwriters on a song.”

The collaboration with Memphis Strings and Horns began with a handful of tracks, including “I’ll Be The Sad Song” and “Better Boat” (which features vocals from singer/songwriter and seven-time Grammy winner Randy Newman, who also composed for films including Monsters Inc. and all four Toy Story movies).

“We never met them, we just sent them the basic tracks and they would send back their take on it,” Clark recalls. “It made me cry when I heard ‘I’ll Be The Sad Song.’ Jay was really adamant that we not go over there because he didn’t want us to influence their choices, but they listened to my first two records to get a sense of who I am. As much as a leap of faith as it was for me, think it was maybe a bigger leap of faith for Jay.”

The result is an album that draws inspiration from Dusty Springfield’s Dusty in Memphis and Shelby Lynne’s I Am Shelby Lynne, the latter of which Joyce played on.

It wouldn’t be a Brandy Clark album without songs where emotions can spin on the minute detail of a lyric and Your Life Is A Record includes several gems, such as “Bad Car,” featuring guitar work from Brothers Osborne’s John Osborne, and “Pawn Shop.” The song, which she wrote with Troy Verges, was originally intended for Big Day In A Small Town.

“I’ve always been intrigued by pawn shops; I had an uncle who owned a pawn shop. I was reading a Stephen King book—I think it was Rose Madder—and in the book there is a pawn shop scene and the guy at the counter says ‘I’ve got the job of telling people that what they have isn’t worth what they think it is.’ I didn’t know exactly what to do with it so I took the idea to Troy and it resonated with him.”

Though much of the album deals in heartache, there are moments of levity, like the deliciously snarky “Long Walk,” where she takes aim at a snooty acquaintance. “Bigger Boat,” penned by Clark and Adam Wright, takes a bird’s eye view of politics and classism, infusing it with her signature wit.

“I feel like you can get a way with a lot with humor. I loved the movie Jaws and I thought it’d be great to write a song called ‘Bigger Boat’ about the state of the world and not take a side on it, just comment on it. I’ll play it for right-wing republicans and far left democrats and they love it. I feel lucky that we landed that one and that Randy Newman came in to sing on it.”

Not only did the artist and movie music composer sing on the track, he nearly landed a writing credit.

“The line, Give me that hammer/Somebody hold my coat, he put that line in because it had said The sh**’s been hitting the fan a little closer to home, and he changed the line. He was like, ‘I think my line’s better but I’m not like some of those rappers, I’m not going to need writer credit on this.’ I kind of wish he had wanted writer’s credit because then we could say we wrote a song with Randy Newman,” Clark says.

As President and CEO of SoundExchange, Michael Huppe wants to make sure that the organization’s identity and mission is clear. Beyond paying out royalties, SoundExchange works to ensure fair market rates for creators’ works by being a leader in the music industry’s participation in the Copyright Royalty Board’s rate procedures, and works to hold digital music services accountable by conducting audits and pursing legal action when necessary.

Under Huppe’s leadership, SoundExchange has distributed more than $6 billion in digital performance royalties and expanded its operations to serve both the recording and publishing communities.

“I think a lot of people sort of vaguely know what we do, but they don’t necessarily know the specifics,” Huppe says. “We pay out a lot of money to about 50,000-60,000 people, but there’s so much more that we do for the industry that I want to convey. We are constantly fighting to make sure creators get paid more fairly across the board, including publishers, songwriters, producers and artists. We advocate for higher rates, to try to get [creators] paid more fairly abroad. Through audits and things, we try to make sure people in the ecosystem on the services side are paying when they’re supposed to pay. I don’t want people to view us as just this entity that sends them checks once a month, but by everything else that we’re doing to try to make the industry a better place for artists and songwriters.”

MusicRow recently sat down with Huppe to talk about all that SoundExchange is doing to advocate for creators, and what he wants Nashville creators to know.

1) SoundExchange is heavily involved in the current WEB V proceedings that will determine the rates for non-interactive streaming.

Huppe: Every so often we go to a tribunal in Washington D.C., the Copyright Royalty Board, that sets the rates for the next five years of  webcasting or satellite radio. Now is the time to talk about all this because we are in the middle of one of our big rate setting hearings. There will be a decision made by the end of the year on what commercial web casters pay to stream recordings on the internet. That’s another thing that we’ve done over time. We’ve consistently fought to get the rates up so the creators are paid fairly. We had a record decision two years ago, where overnight the rate for satellite radio went up almost 41%, which is really pretty amazing. Dec. 31 of one year they paid 11%, and on Jan. 1, the next day they paid 15.5%. That’s just sort of a sign of all that we do to try and make sure creators get paid as fairly as they can be.

We collect hundreds of millions of dollars a year and it’s really amazing the impact that a rate change could have. It’s a fraction of a penny for every stream, but that money adds up. We paid out almost a billion dollars last year on all of our royalties and we’ve calculated that a roughly one hundredth of a cent change in the rate can mean $15-$20 million more a year, and $80-$100 million over the five-year term. Little changes in the rate can make a big difference to what creators get paid.

2) SoundExchange has created Music Data Exchange (MDX) to help labels and publishers share information more efficiently.

Huppe: A lot of records get released and they’re still working on the publishing. The publishing doesn’t get cleared for 8-12 months, and interestingly enough, the more successful the record, the longer it takes for the publishing to get cleared. I’m not here to place blame on why that happens. We’re agnostic. We’re in sound recordings and we own a publishing company. We’ve worked for producers, so we love them all. The industry should not operate so that some of the frontline product routinely goes to market when you haven’t gotten the clearances. So we developed another tool called MDX where everybody can go and get a lot of these clearances on new releases to help solve that problem.

I would love for people, when they think of SoundExchange, to think “They’re just trying to make things work better. They’re trying to make the industry work better.” If the whole industry works better, everybody benefits, including all the people we pay. That’s something that drives us every day.

3) In a recent filing with the United States Trade Representative for its annual “Special 301” review of intellectual property rights protection, SoundExchange says that six countries (the United Kingdom, France, Australia, Japan, the Netherlands and Canada) deny full national treatment of American producers and performers.

Huppe: American music is the best music in the world, and it is the most popular. When you’re traveling around the world and you hop in a cab or go in a restaurant, chances are you’re going to hear American music. We are constantly fighting to make sure that American creators get paid fairly around the world. There is this concept called “national treatment,” and it’s a specialized term, but what it basically means is this: when a country rewards creators for their creative work, they shouldn’t discriminate against someone because of their nationality. In the U.S., we don’t do that. We treat everybody fairly. If we collect royalties from satellite radio, we will pay you the same whether you’re French or American. If we collect royalties from internet radio, we will pay you the same whether you’re Spanish or American. What we’re simply asking for is that we get the same courtesy around around the globe.

These just happened to be six countries that we are asking the U.S. trade rep to take a look at, but really it’s countries around the world. We’re just asking for fair treatment. Don’t discriminate against us in your country. You should treat American performers and American record labels the same way that you treat your own.

There are lots of countries that do give us national treatment—Brazil, Spain, Germany—they claim they don’t discriminate against American repertoire and we’re simply asking for the same treatment across the board.

4) SoundExchange has a free database of ISRCs [International Standard Recording Codes] available on their website.

Huppe: There are a lot of silos in the industry, there are many data challenges. It’s sometimes hard for people to know where they’re played. It should work better as an industry. So we bring tools to the table that remove friction and help the industry work better. One example is [our ISRC database]. The ISRC (the serial number of the recording) is great idea in principle, but as it’s rolled out, it’s very hard for people to use because there wasn’t a central place to go find the number in the recording. We have the best sound recording database in the world and we have made our codes available to everybody on our website. Why? Because that helps make commerce flow better.

5) All recording artists should be signed up to SoundExchange.

Huppe: If you are a recording artist or label, you should be signed up for SoundExchange. It’s free and we get money for anybody who is streamed on any of the platforms that we collect for: satellite radio, internet radio, Music Choice on your cable, even some of the business services, like DMX. This music is the backbone of their entire services; it’s what they base their entire business model on. They should operate their business, but there’s immense wealth being generated on the services and more of that really needs to trickle down to the creators—labels, artists, publishers, songwriters, all of them. They need to participate more in this wealth creation because they’re why everybody goes to these services.