She's in her early 30s, and she has a few gold records on her walls, but these days Terri Clark is looking ahead, trying to assess her eventual legacy.
"When I was 23, the most important thing in the world to me was getting a record deal, getting famous, getting accepted by other people," she said. "Now I only want to please myself. I want to go to sleep knowing I did what I wanted and what I think is my best.
"A music career is so much more than fame and magazine covers. Twenty years from now, where will I be? Will I be in the same league as Steve Earle and Emmylou Harris, or will I be someone who had seven good years in radio and made a few ditties but no one really remembers?"
When you're 5-feet-10 and blessed with good looks and a lovely voice, you're not likely to be forgotten too often, even if your trademark fashion is nothing more glamorous than a cowboy hat, Wranglers and a T-shirt.
'Fearless' course
But Clark is talking about the resonance and longevity of her music, which took a gentle but noticeable turn away from Music Row's prevailing fashions last year.
"Fearless," her fourth album on Mercury Records, is as traditional as any new country coming out of Nashville these days. It's also a departure from Clark's three previous records.
"When I sat down with my co-writers for this record," she said, "I went in telling them to ignore everything they'd heard from me. I didn't want to repeat what I'd already done. So I said, 'Let's just write good songs and not care whether they sound like Terri Clark songs or even whether they're in a certain country format.'
"I felt like I was striving for something on the last album that I didn't quite achieve. So for this one, I decided to go out on a limb and make the record I wanted to make."
That limb wasn't exactly long and precarious; Clark collaborated with can't-miss songwriters like Mary Chapin Carpenter and Beth Nielsen Chapman and covered a sure-fire Emmylou Harris tune.
But "Fearless" was different enough from her previous records that people at Clark's label gave her a slightly funny look when they first heard it.
"There was a little concern about the direction we'd taken," Clark said, "so they tweaked a few things until everyone was comfortable that they could take it to radio."
That new direction was musical and lyrical. This is by far her most personal record, Clark said: "It's the most honest thing I've put out. I really for the first time said what was in my heart."
Adult country
Sonically, "Fearless" is subtle, spare and clean, thanks to the appealing mix of acoustic instruments: harmonicas, accordions, guitars, a bouzouki, mandolin, piano. It's not the flavor of the year in Nashville, which was kind of the point.
"It's a difficult time," she said. "More record labels are trying hard to appeal to teen-agers because, apparently, they have a lot more money to spend on records than I did when I was that age. I'm not sure how that happened.
"Plus, people my age are raising families and working two jobs so they don't have the time to spend listening to CDs. So the record companies are going after the Britney Spears/Backstreet Boys demographic. That's why some country albums are selling 5 million or 6 million copies because they also appeal to the younger listeners.
"The rest of us with a more adult audience may sell around 500,000 copies, but the long-term affect may be that the adults tend to stay with an artist longer. Look at Vince Gill, whose career has spanned a couple decades."
Doing her own thing
She's come back to talking about legacies and histories again, primarily because she feels more inspired to do things her way, now that the establishment in Nashville is unsure of where the next big thing is coming from.
"We backed ourselves into a corner," Clark said. "It became so much about numbers and statistics and radio: You gotta sell this much to make this much back.
"There is a way out of it, though. It's all cyclical. I don't know what will happen to country music as a format, but I'm encouraged by what's going on. There's the alt-country crowd, there's a groundswell of people starting to get into bluegrass, and the Dixie Chicks: There's a band doing something fresh, cool and different who appeal to a mass audience."
Speaking of audiences, she's getting a better look at hers these days, taking her unplugged, acoustic show to small venues: 300- to 700-seaters in the United States and 2,000- to 3,000-seat venues in her native Canada.
"It's very intimate," she said, "It has a real singer/songwriter vibe. If you like Steve Earle or Allison Moorer or Shawn Colvin, you'll like this show.
"It's definitely not the typical mainstream country kind of concert not that there's anything wrong with that."
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