Brandy Clark, Jerrod Niemann Producer Talks Grammy-Nominated Studio Magic
“I like delusion,” says Dave Brainard, sitting in his Nashville studio, which is hidden in a building behind an Off Broadway shoe store, right off Music Row. Not uncommon in such spaces, the walls are adorned with framed records and various guitars, including a stunning 1956 Gibson LG that was a gift from Jerrod Niemann. It’s 10 a.m., early by creative standards, but he takes it down and strums a few chords anyway. “Coffee?” he offers, before adding, jokingly, “or Adderall?”
It’s not that the producer, responsible for Brandy Clark’s Grammy-nominated LP, 12 Stories, is out of touch with reality (or dependent on stimulants) — he just chooses to gamble on worthy acts that scare him a little, rather than banking on a sure thing. More than once he’s done records for little to no initial compensation, just because he felt so compelled. “Voluntarily delusional, maybe,” Brainard tells Rolling Stone Country. “I’m a champion. A believer. Crack the whip — let’s dream. Let’s manifest this thing.” His business manager has scolded him for this more than once.
Brainard moved to Nashville in 1999, and he wasn’t born into the music business — rather, his familial legacy was a military one, with a sergeant father and a Korean mother who just happened to love Kenny Rogers. Playing guitar in high school, he worshipped rock and hair metal — with the locks then to show it — but, after one year at the University of Nebraska, he visited the barber for a nice crop and joined the United States Air Force Band.
“It was there I learned all my scales and my theory,” he says, “and I met a guy in town who was local and gave me the country bug. We’d take trips to Nashville, and I started to see the complexity in things that were so simple, and what you could do with three chords.” Brainard would often experiment with a home eight-track digital recorder and “matured,” as he puts it, into loving country.
