''Big Day in a Small Town'' is the second studio album by American

country music Country (also called country and western) is a genre of popular music that originated in the Southern and Southwestern United States in the early 1920s. It primarily derives from blues, church music such as Southern gospel and spirituals, ...

artist

Brandy Clark Brandy Lynn Clark (born October 9, 1975) is an American country music singer-songwriter. Her songs have been recorded by Sheryl Crow, Miranda Lambert, the Band Perry, Reba McEntire, LeAnn Rimes, Billy Currington, Darius Rucker, and Kacey Musgrav ...

. It was released on June 10, 2016, through Warner Bros. Records. The album was nominated for Best Country Album and the album's second single, "Love Can Go To Hell", was nominated for

Best Country Solo Performance The Grammy Award for Best Country Solo Performance is an award presented at the Grammy Awards, a ceremony that was established in 1958 and originally called the Gramophone Awards. According to the 54th Grammy Awards description guide it is design ...

at the

59th Annual Grammy Awards The 59th Annual Grammy Awards ceremony was held on February 12, 2017. The CBS network broadcast the show live from the Staples Center in Los Angeles. The ceremony recognized the best recordings, compositions, and artists of the eligibility year ...

Background

Two of the album's tracks were previously recorded by other artists: "Homecoming Queen" previously appeared on '' Feels Like Home'', the 2013 studio album by

Sheryl Crow Sheryl Suzanne Crow (born February 11, 1962) is an American musician, singer, songwriter and actress. Her music incorporates elements of rock, pop, country, folk, and blues. She has released eleven studio albums, five compilations and three ...

, and "Three Kids No Husband" previously appeared on the 2014 album '' Numbered Doors'', by its co-writer

Lori McKenna Lorraine McKenna ( Giroux; born December 22, 1968) is an American folk, Americana, and country music singer-songwriter. In 2016, she was nominated for the Grammy Award for Song of the Year and won Best Country Song for co-writing the hit sing ...

. The track "Daughter" features Clark's close friend and collaborator

Kacey Musgraves Kacey Lee Musgraves (born August 21, 1988) is an American country singer. She has won six Grammy Awards, seven Country Music Association Awards, and three Academy of Country Music Awards. Musgraves self-released three solo albums and one as Texa ...

on harmony vocals.

Critical reception

''Big Day in a Small Town'' received highly positive reviews from

music critics Music journalism (or music criticism) is media criticism and reporting about music topics, including popular music, classical music, and traditional music. Journalists began writing about music in the eighteenth century, providing commentary on w ...

. At

Metacritic Metacritic is a website that aggregates reviews of films, TV shows, music albums, video games and formerly, books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted average). Metacritic was created by Jason Dietz, Marc ...

, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album has an

average In ordinary language, an average is a single number taken as representative of a list of numbers, usually the sum of the numbers divided by how many numbers are in the list (the arithmetic mean). For example, the average of the numbers 2, 3, 4, 7 ...

score of 84 out of 100, which indicates "universal acclaim" based on 5 reviews.

Stephen Thomas Erlewine Stephen Thomas Erlewine (; born June 18, 1973) is an American music critic and senior editor for the online music database AllMusic. He is the author of many artist biographies and record reviews for AllMusic, as well as a freelance writer, oc ...

AllMusic AllMusic (previously known as All Music Guide and AMG) is an American online database, online music database. It catalogs more than three million album entries and 30 million tracks, as well as information on Musical artist, musicians and Music ...

states: "Songs rarely come much better than these." ''

Rolling Stone ''Rolling Stone'' is an American monthly magazine that focuses on music, politics, and popular culture. It was founded in San Francisco, California, in 1967 by Jann Wenner, and the music critic Ralph J. Gleason. It was first known for its ...

Will Hermes Will Hermes (born December 27, 1960 in Jamaica, Queens, New York City) is an American author, broadcaster, journalist and critic who has written extensively about popular music. He is a longtime contributor to ''Rolling Stone'' and to National Pu ...

calls it "music tooled alternately for stadiums and songwriting circles, commercial and public radio, line-dance bars and coffee shops." Additionally, it was the ''

Spin Spin or spinning most often refers to: * Spinning (textiles), the creation of yarn or thread by twisting fibers together, traditionally by hand spinning * Spin, the rotation of an object around a central axis * Spin (propaganda), an intentionally ...

'' "album of the week" and called "fantastic; often a superb piece of recorded music" by reviewer Alfred Soto. ''

The Boston Globe ''The Boston Globe'' is an American daily newspaper founded and based in Boston, Massachusetts. The newspaper has won a total of 27 Pulitzer Prizes, and has a total circulation of close to 300,000 print and digital subscribers. ''The Boston Glob ...

''s Stuart Munro wrote: "If you're looking for alternatives to mainstream country, Clark is still providing one... you just have to keep listening beyond the first two tracks to find it."

Track listing

Writing credits source: BMIBMI Repertoire Search for CLARK BRANDY LYNN
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Personnel

Credits adapted from

. Musicians *

–

acoustic guitar An acoustic guitar is a musical instrument in the string family. When a string is plucked its vibration is transmitted from the bridge, resonating throughout the top of the guitar. It is also transmitted to the side and back of the instrument, ...

, lead vocals,

background vocals A backing vocalist is a singer who provides vocal harmony with the lead vocalist or other backing vocalists. A backing vocalist may also sing alone as a lead-in to the main vocalist's entry or to sing a counter-melody. Backing vocalists are us ...

* John Deaderick – keyboards *

Fred Eltringham The Wallflowers is an American rock solo project of American singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Jakob Dylan. The Wallflowers were originally a roots rock band formed in Los Angeles in 1989 by Dylan and guitarist Tobi Miller. The band ...

–

drums A drum kit (also called a drum set, trap set, or simply drums) is a collection of drums, cymbals, and other auxiliary percussion instruments set up to be played by one person. The player (drummer) typically holds a pair of matching drumsticks ...

Keith Gattis Keith Gattis (born May 26, 1970) is an American country music artist, songwriter, guitarist and producer. Gattis has released two studio albums and charted one single while signed to RCA Nashville on the ''Billboard'' Hot Country Singles & Tra ...

–

guitar The guitar is a fretted musical instrument that typically has six strings. It is usually held flat against the player's body and played by strumming or plucking the strings with the dominant hand, while simultaneously pressing selected string ...

* Jason Hall – background vocals *

Jay Joyce John Joseph "Jay" Joyce is an American record producer, songwriter and session musician. In the 1990s, Joyce, with Chris Feinstein and Brad Pemberton, recorded and toured as Iodine and began working as a record producer, working with artists suc ...

–

banjo The banjo is a stringed instrument with a thin membrane stretched over a frame or cavity to form a resonator. The membrane is typically circular, and usually made of plastic, or occasionally animal skin. Early forms of the instrument were fashi ...

, guitar,

organ Organ may refer to: Biology * Organ (biology), a part of an organism Musical instruments * Organ (music), a family of keyboard musical instruments characterized by sustained tone ** Electronic organ, an electronic keyboard instrument ** Hammond ...

, background vocals *

Shane McAnally Shane McAnally (born October 12, 1974) is an American country music singer, songwriter, and record producer. Originally a solo artist for Curb Records in 1999, McAnally charted three singles on Hot Country Songs, including the No. 31 " Are Y ...

– background vocals * Pat McGrath –

resonator guitar A resonator guitar or resophonic guitar is an acoustic guitar that produces sound by conducting string vibrations through the bridge to one or more spun metal cones (resonators), instead of to the guitar's sounding board (top). Resonator guit ...

* Rob McNelley – guitar *

– background vocals *

Josh Osborne Josh Osborne (born c. 1980) is an American songwriter with several number-one singles to his credit. Early life Josh Osborne was born in Pike County, Kentucky, and raised in Virgie, Kentucky. Osborne grew up on US 23, renamed Country Music Hig ...

– background vocals * Dave Roe –

bass guitar The bass guitar, electric bass or simply bass (), is the lowest-pitched member of the string family. It is a plucked string instrument similar in appearance and construction to an electric or an acoustic guitar, but with a longer neck and ...

*Morgane Stapleton – background vocals *Forest Glen Whitehead – guitar, background vocals Technical personnel * Paul Cossette – assistant engineer * Jason Hall –

engineer Engineers, as practitioners of engineering, are professionals who Invention, invent, design, analyze, build and test machines, complex systems, structures, gadgets and materials to fulfill functional objectives and requirements while considerin ...

, mixing * Chris Johnson –

photography Photography is the art, application, and practice of creating durable images by recording light, either electronically by means of an image sensor, or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film. It is emplo ...

* Jay Joyce – engineer, mixing, producer * Pamela Littky –

portrait photography Portrait photography, or portraiture, is a type of photography aimed toward capturing the personality of a person or group of people by using effective lighting, backdrops, and poses. A portrait photograph may be artistic or clinical. Frequentl ...

* Dan McCarroll – A&R * Melissa Spillman – production assistant * Caleb VanBuskirk – assistant engineer * Stephen Walker –

art direction Art director is the title for a variety of similar job functions in theater, advertising, marketing, publishing, fashion, film and television, the Internet, and video games. It is the charge of a sole art director to supervise and unify the vis ...

, design,

illustration An illustration is a decoration, interpretation or visual explanation of a text, concept or process, designed for integration in print and digital published media, such as posters, flyers, magazines, books, teaching materials, animations, video ...

s * Cate Wright – A&R

Commercial performance

''Big Day in a Small Town'' debuted at number eighty-two on the US ''Billboard'' 200 chart with 8,100

equivalent album units The album-equivalent unit, or album equivalent, is a measurement unit in music industry to define the consumption of music that equals the purchase of one album copy. This consumption includes streaming and song downloads in addition to traditio ...

; it sold 7,400 copies in its first week, with the remainder of its unit total reflecting the album's

streaming Streaming media is multimedia that is delivered and consumed in a continuous manner from a source, with little or no intermediate storage in network elements. ''Streaming'' refers to the delivery method of content, rather than the content i ...

activity and

track Track or Tracks may refer to: Routes or imprints * Ancient trackway, any track or trail whose origin is lost in antiquity * Animal track, imprints left on surfaces that an animal walks across * Desire path, a line worn by people taking the shorte ...

sales. As of August 2016 the album has sold 15,500 copies in the US.

Chart performance

Release history

References

{{Authority control 2016 albums Brandy Clark albums Warner Records albums Albums produced by Jay Joyce