Chicago Sun-Times: K.C. Clifford lives the redemption of her folk music

Saturday, February 13, 2010

You might think that the perfect place to start out as an aspiring singer-songwriter would be Nashville, epicenter of country and American roots music and a city absolutely stuffed with music industry types and other aspiring singer-songwriters. But that last part is actually the problem.

“It took three to four years to start finding out who I was as a songwriter, and Nashville, believe it or not, didn’t help,” says K.C. Clifford. “I mean, it did help to be a sponge and soak up the influence of all these amazing other songwriters. You know, as much crap as comes out of Nashville, there’s also a lot of value there and a lot to be learned. But I’m a girl with a guitar. That’s nothing new there. I felt so ordinary there. It wasn’t until I got outta town and started playing for people who were dry cleaners instead of an audience that was nothing but other songwriters that I finally started finding out who I was.”

Who she is — well, she is another girl with a guitar, and those are indeed a dime a trillion. (Beware this summer’s return of Lilith Fair!) Clifford’s music is everything you’ve heard before, from the carefully chorded guitar to the light lilt of her voice, but she possesses a bare, folksy honesty that makes it difficult to immediately write her off. She’s just square enough not to fit easily into the round pigeonhole.

That’s probably because she’s still finding out who she is, and the ones who still feel like they’re searching for life’s evasive answers are the ones who seem to erect less artifice around their craft. The better to spot those answers by. Clifford’s life story to date is a tale of that quest — always looking for answers, and always doing so through music. It’s lead her from choirs in her native Oklahoma to singing opera in Indiana to Nashville strumming and now back to Oklahoma, where she lives with her husband.

Full disclosure: Clifford and I went to the same junior high and high school in Oklahoma City. She was several years younger, but we knew each of other through our school’s revered choral program. (“Glee” it most definitely was not.) But while I have fond memories of these years, Clifford does not.

“I really tried to get out of Oklahoma, partly because my youth there was hard for me,” Clifford says. “I was not liked, and I was teased a lot. Being very emotional and sensitive — which, in the end, is what makes me a good songwriter — that was rough for me. I really tried to put it behind me.

The teasing — she wasn’t pretty enough, she wasn’t skinny enough, I remember her in tears often — actually derailed her initial dream of being a folkie. Given a guitar at age 7 by her father, Hal Clifford of the bluegrass band Mountain Smoke (where country superstar Vince Gill got his first break), she immediately started writing songs. But it wasn’t long before a youthful dream of stardom was squashed in the schoolyard.

“When I was 10, I announced that I wanted to write songs for a living,” Clifford recalls, “and right away a couple of influential people told me I was too fat to be on the cover of a record, that I wasn’t sexy enough. I understood that I could never conform to that image to succeed in that world, so I pressed down that dream.”

Actually, she channeled it in another direction. After fleeing high school, she headed to the University of Indiana to study opera. (A full figure has never held back an opera singer, after all.) She was a good classical singer, but she wasn’t passionate about it. She wound up switching schools, moving to Nashville, immersing herself in the more commercial world of popular music.

Then she moved back to Oklahoma and — trust me, you don’t hear this said very often — that’s when her career really took off.

“There’s something to be said for being a bigger fish in a smaller pond,” she says. “ It’s such an amazing legacy to even consider myself part of, too: songwriting in Oklahoma. From Woody Guthrie forward, there is a great legacy here. And now, when I play Kerrville [the annual west Texas folk festival], they say, ‘You’re miss Oklahoma, right?’ It sounds so beauty pageant.”

And there’s a delicious twist to that comment. Because now that a slimmer, more physically “suitable” Clifford is a bit of a name in her hometown — her albums sell decently, plus last year her personal story and a song were featured on the reality show “The Biggest Loser” — she occasionally gets to square accounts with her former tormentors.

“Sure, it’s weird to be at a gig and see someone in the audience who was hateful,” she says. “There was a guy who came up recently after a show, a guy from [our high school], and he was praising me and acting quite chummy, and I thought, ‘Oh, yeah, you were not very nice.’ [Laughs] ‘But I’ll take your $15.’ People do come out of the woodwork when they want to take something from you, when they perceive that you have something to give them. The universal thing is, we’re all scared at 14 — whether you’re fat, short, jocky, musical, whatever. It’s what you do with what you’ve got, in the end, that matters.”

What Clifford does with what she’s got is write tight, tuneful folk songs about “Broken Things” and “Generous Friends,” from her current CD “Orchid.” You can hear the opera training in the unwavering, sure-footed confidence in her voice, no matter where she hits on the treble clef. You can hear the Nashville in the fluid, narrative construction of her verses and choruses. And you can feel the very real human pain — and joy — in her plain, unadorned language.

“These are simple stories, but very true-to-life. There’s a lack of b.s. there,” she says, “and I think that’s part of why people like it.”