Terri Clark: Life Goes On
It’s been five years since Terri Clark had a song in the Countdown. Of course before that, she had a great ten year run with ten hits and 5 #1s, including “You’re Easy On The Eyes” and “Girls Lie Too.” In 2007, Terri learned that her mother had cancer. Terri took a break from the music business to support her mom. Sadly, Linda passed away last year. When 2011 began, Terri was ready to make a new album, “Roots & Wings,” and it will be released digitally this week. Westwood One caught up with her last week in Nashville.
Talk about the album title: Roots & Wings. When I made this album, I had Canada on my mind. When I lost my mom last year from cancer, I rented a cottage in Canada for a month to tether myself to my roots. It was within an hour of my grandmother, my father, sister, nephew, and lots of friends. I felt the need to tie myself to that, and so I bought a place. I was sitting in this cottage and Northern Girl fell out. So that’s the roots part of this album. The wings part is about the title is about the freedom of doing what I want to do, making the music I want to make, and my mom her own set of wings too so that ties into it as well.
Compare this new record to your previous album: The last record was The Long Way Home, it was more somber, more introspective, because when you’re with someone who’s the closest person in the world to you, and she’s fighting for her life, it’s a perspective check. When she lost her battle, I grieved, but then I also felt like this light was peaking through these clouds. I went through a lot of change and upheaval, and it’s changed me as a person. So with this album, I felt the need to lighten up, and get back to having fun, giving myself to permission to be happy again.
You wrote a lot of the songs with Kristen Hall: That was an accident. She was a founding member of Sugarland, and our houses both flooded in the Nashville flood. Hers was a mudslide, mine was easier to fix. It was right after my mom died, so I let her stay at my house while her place was being fixed. We started writing online while I was in Canada, sending back and forth lyrics. I found that I laugh a lot with her. She makes me cackle. She adopted a nickname for me: Larry, because I’m a tomboy. I would be friends with her whether she could write songs or not.
You dedicate a song on this album to your mom: Smile is a song I got from my mom, I got the title when I was sitting next to her in the hospital. I was crying and thought she was sleeping, and she said, “I want you to smile,” and it really impacted me. The process of letting go, as a parent, and then I had to let my mom go, and give her wings. When I do unplugged shows, that’s the one song everyone wants to talk about.
Now with this new album, will we see more of you? Oh yeah, I’ll be doing a lot of promotion, and then I have a Canadian tour in the fall. I get tired of people asking “What have you been doing.” I’ve been working a lot. I do different types of shows in the states. I do big production in Canada. That keeps things fresh. The unplugged dates have taken off. I can sell them out. I can make jokes and get them singing along. It’s like a big living room party. There’s so much that feels new to me, but also I can go to my home country and have what I had here for ten years. I feel I have a well rounded career. It never gets stale or boring.
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