Terri Clark first came to notariety in the mid 1990s with her feisty brand of country music.  While working on her current release, her mother became sick with cancer and this event found Terri focusing on what mattered most in both her music and her career.

Toughness and tenderness are two sides of the same coin. The mistake is to think that either view gives us the full picture.

It was the tough side of Terri Clark that the world saw first. She burst into national view in 1995 straight from a grind of gigs on what was then a risky strip of Nashville’s Lower Broadway. Already she was impossible to ignore, not only because of the hat she wore like a cowgirl’s crown but more so because of the impact she made with “Better Things to Do,” the first in a string of 10 singles that cracked the Top 10, including two — “Girls Lie Too” and “You're Easy on the Eyes” — that peaked at No. 1. Rather than play it safe with songs crafted on Music Row, she packed the 12 tracks of her self-titled debut album with 11 originals, many of them edgy with a honky-tonk feel that dared skeptics not to listen.

Since then, Clark has released three Platinum albums — Terri Clark, Just the Same and How I Feel. She has been nominated for four CMA Awards and won eight Fan’s Choice Entertainer of the Year Awards from the Canadian Country Music Association. Through respect earned from her peers, the loyalty of fans and a stage presence centered on her beauty, guitar-hero charisma and that iconic headwear, Clark reinforced the impression she had made as a survivor.

But circumstances have broadened that image. In recent years, Clark has faced two challenges. One was professional, through the end of her long association with Mercury Nashville and the subsequent cancellation of a deal with Sony Music Nashville. Far more difficult was the news that her mother Linda had been diagnosed with cancer.

“My doctor gave my mom an expiration date,” she recalled. “You’re told when you’re going to lose this person. I don’t think there’s any part of you that can’t be affected by that, and that feeds over to your creative output as well. It made me stop and look at my whole life, where I was headed. It also brought to light what you’re willing to accept and what you’re not willing to accept in your life anymore because you realize it’s all temporary.”

For Clark, her approach to The Long Way Home could not differ more from the ambitions she carried with her at 18, when her mother drove her down to Nashville from Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada. “Getting a major-label deal was all I could think about,” she said. “That was my quest. And here I was on my second major-label deal, trying to fit into this tiny little box, chasing these cars they call hit songs. I wasn’t even sure what I was chasing after a while; we were just recording and recording, spending money and trying to find a single that would drive sales for the album so they could put it out.”

With blessings from Joe Galante, Chairman, Sony Music Nashville, Clark left Sony and headed back home to Canada, where she stayed with her mother during treatments. The experience helped flip that coin toward the other side — not so far that initial perceptions disappeared but enough for Clark to present herself with unprecedented candor on The Long Way Home.

This album, released independently in Canada and distributed in the United States by EMI, has plenty of swagger as well as a more reflective stance that comes to those artists who learn from the harder lessons as well as the pleasures of life. “When you are faced with the worst thing you could probably face, it’s going to come out in your songs,” Clark said. “Singing and playing and writing songs have always been my emotional release and escape — a healthy one. So there’s no way you could not see that coming through as a songwriter. It challenged me to dig really deep and write what I’m feeling instead of thinking so much about it.”

The fruits of her labor bloom throughout The Long Way Home, in the raw honesty of “A Million Ways to Run,” which Clark wrote on her own but, she mused, “I think it came from God;” the defiant bravado of the first single “Gypsy Boots,” written by Clark, Jon Randall and Leslie Satcher and presented twice, with full band and in a swampy, down-home acoustic version; and on “Merry Go Round,” whose whimsical waltz-time feel belies the thoughtful message of the lyric: “The trick is to know when to let go.”

“I wrote that with Bobby Pinson and Tom Shapiro,” Clark said. “We did a work tape and kind of forgot about it. About six months later, Tom had a demo session. He was looking for a fourth song and he came across this work tape. Something about it hit him. He put it on this demo session and hired Mallary Hope to sing it because I was on the road. He played it for people — and they’d be in tears by the end. So Tom called me and said, ‘I don’t think we realized what we had here.’”

“‘Merry Go Round’ was certainly a personal song,” said Shapiro, who shared writing credit with Clark on four of the album’s tracks as he had on her first hit single, “Better Things to Do.” “It’s about where you’re at in your career: Do you let go or do you continue? Through the years my tastes have been very commercial; Terri likes songs that have a commercial structure too. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve wanted to say things in my songs too, so we’ve hit at a good place.”

One of the most personal songs on The Long Way Home is “The One You Love,” featuring Vince Gill. Her co-writer, Gary Burr, remembers Clark bringing the idea for the song to him. “She was like ‘I know this is probably deeper than you want to go. It’s probably dooming it to never be on the radio. But this is important to me,’” Burr said. “I’m not sure that art and commerce are ever mutually exclusive, but I assured her that if it was important to her, it was important to me. That was how we started that song, from a position of her being almost embarrassed to ask me to dive in this deep.”

Combining honesty with professional craftsmanship, they came up with a soul-wrenching ballad about loved ones receding beyond the reach of those who ache to help them. “When you write a song that’s close to the heart, my philosophy is that you don’t want to get too specific because you want a song that’s about one thing but you write it in a way that’s about everything,” Burr reflected. “Because of that, I was more interested in the feelings than the details. But we carved as close to the bone as we could without coming up with something she would be totally unable to ever sing.”

As one might expect from Clark, the sensitivity that distinguishes The Long Way Home is balanced by her enduring independence of spirit — again, the other side of the coin. Though she has co-produced before, this marks her first sole credit as producer. And in releasing the album in Canada on her own Baretrack Records label, she assumes more business responsibilities while also exerting greater creative freedom. “I’ve handed over a record that didn’t get A&Red to death,” she said, proudly. “I really made the record I wanted to make.”

And she’s turned an important corner as a writer. “If you look at writers like Bob McDill or Mac McAnally, it’s raw,” she observed. “It’s life experience. A lot of it is adult stuff. Our format is changing; our audience has gotten younger. But a lot of people do want to hear stuff that’s got a little more depth, that’s a little more real. There’s an audience for everything, and if you’re willing to seek it out, you’re going to find it.”

© 2010 CMA Close Up® News Service / Country Music Association®, Inc.

On the Web: www.TerriClark.com

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