While the current pandemic has found musicians off the road from tours and students taking classes from home, Liddy Clark is experiencing both. The Texas-born singer-songwriter is currently living in Los Angeles and attending USC’s Thornton School of Music, just a few blocks from where she lives. With the “shelter in place” order, classes have moved off campus since March 11, but she is still completing her internship remotely for the Recording Academy, focusing a lot of her time on the MusiCares relief fund helping musicians who have lost their livelihood due to COVID-19.
“It’s nice that they’ve teamed up with a lot of the different companies like Spotify, Apple Music, and others to try to help these musicians. I think it’s a good project to be working on right now,” says Clark.
She isn’t letting the pandemic stop progress on her current project, her first full-length CD, yet to be titled.
“Obviously I can’t do live performances right now and I can’t go out and see other people perform live,” she says, “but I recently got some equipment to start my own home studio here, so I’m finishing up recording my current album and that’s been going real well; in the past few weeks, I’ve been doing overdubs on a few songs.” So far she’s recorded about 13 songs at this point for her first project since the 2018 EP Testing the Waters.
“I’m still trying to decide what I want to include. So far it’s a lot of songs that I’ve written over my past few years throughout college. A lot of them are solo writes, which is not what Nashville is used to. I still love co-writing, but I feel like a lot of songs that I write by myself are more deeply personal. I wanted this project to deep dive into my psychosis for the past two or three years of college and getting through that.”
She says that having turned twenty-one last year, she feels freer to write about more adult themes, “just feeling more vulnerable and open and honest about things and not just being a pretty picture.”
Clark got her musical start at about twelve, when she moved with her family from Texas to Parkland, Florida. About the time she was starting a new school, she learned from her grandmother’s ancestry project that she was related to Pocahontas.
“I decided the way I to make new friends was to participate in the school’s talent show and sing “Colors of the Wind” as a tribute to my ancestor. I realized I had a natural ability to hear pitch and musicality, so I decided to start vocal lessons and music theatre. “I played Annie at least three times,” says the redhead, “and I loved musical theatre so much.”
Around the time she turned thirteen and got her first guitar, she developed her interest in song writing.
She says, “I start carpooling to school about a 40-minute drive, and they only listened to country music on the radio. I hadn’t really listened to country music much since I moved away from Texas. My dad listens to old classics radio, and mom doesn’t really listen to anything but top 40. But when I started listening to country music, I was intrigued by the songwriting, by the honesty of all of it. That’s what drew me to county music and still does to this day.”
She says she’d classify her country sound as “very West Coast,” even though she likes to listen to all kinds of music. “I try not to think of the genre when I write. I just write and categorize it later. It’s West Coast breezy—since I live out here now—and it’s pop-influenced.”
Asked about her cover of Dua Lipa’s “New Rules” released just about a month ago, as part of the Turn Her Up project, which promotes equal female airplay, Clark said, “In certain areas of music we are making a lot of progress. In country music right now, two of the top five are females, which is well deserved; they’re really good songs. But the whole top 40 country isn’t necessarily as equality-based as I hoped it would be by now. And it’s not because songs coming out by women these days are not good. There are so many good songs by women these days—and there have been all along.
“I think some people are stuck doing things the way they’ve always been done. I think the real trailblazers who will last after this quarantine and throughout the rest of the music business are people that are looking forward and seeing what trends are coming up. And female equality is a really positive trend in our business.”
Clark has had the opportunity to open for several major performers in the country music industry, including Chris Stapleton, Scotty McCreery, Jake Owen, and Joe Nichols.
When asked what female artists she would like to play and write with, she said she had lots of heroes in the industry. “There are so many I love, obviously, like the female greats. Shania Twain, Carrie Underwood, Martina McBride, and Taylor Swift are some of my favorites. And some of my new favorites are coming out now—people like Maggie Rogers, Julie Michaels—and I’m really loving a lot of Selena Gomez’s new music. There are so many great women coming out with music right now, and honestly, I’d be honored to work with any of them.”
She already has some great musicians working on the new record, including Katy Perry and Kelly Clarkson, and she enjoyed watching them track live sessions back in January.
She noted that women support each other in the country music world, noting, “I think we really do want to help each other. I’m in group chats with some of them, and we talk about new releases and how difficult it can be to be a woman in the music industry, but it’s really nice to have a community to fall back on.
While some musicians are setting up online performances during the pandemic, right now she’s working on schoolwork, recording, and writing. “I’ve just been focused on productivity during this time. I might consider an online performance once things have cooled off a bit. Right now there’s a lot of pressure to fill up our free time. I may have some anxiety, but right now it’s so important just to focus on mental health.
“I try to focus on doing some productive things every day and giving myself time to relax and to acknowledge this is a tough time in the world. It’s important to take a step back and just breathe and relax.
Liddy Clark isn’t one to shy away from tough times. She wrote “Shot Down (Stand Up)” in response to the Parkland, Florida, school shooting in her hometown. She says, “So many things that motivate me to write. My dad calls me a social justice warrior—Living in California will do that to you—but I write about things that are important to me, like what’s happening in my hometown and in the United States. It’s important for me to be able to talk about that and not feel like I have to hide myself away from the people that listen to my music and only sing songs about love and heartbreak.
“We need those songs, obviously; there’s a reason most of the songs on the radio are about love and heartbreak, but there’s room for songs about something more—things that people don’t necessarily want to talk about all the time—but we need to talk about them.” And music, Clark says, can be a better way to address the hard topics.
While waiting for life to get back to normal, Liddy Clark will have time to hone her craft, to write new songs about important matters, and to finish her CD, working with producer Mark Siegel, which she hope to accomplish by the end of quarantine, at least by July. It’s a good situation, she says. “It works. The vibes are there.”
In the meantime, she’s waiting to see what happens next. She still has shows on the books but May and one moved from April to August in Nashville. And while re-scheduling may be complicated, as spring tours move to fall and overlap with shows already scheduled, she anticipates some co-headliners, which could be great for fans.
Liddy Clark has reason to be optimistic: “I’m very excited about the art that’s being created during this period. I fell like there is going to be a lot of good music. I can see 2021 as a great music year.”