Dani-Rae Clark

If you wanna understand Dani-Rae Clark, you’ll have to meet Loretta first. Loretta is a calm, quizzical, quiet pitbull with a lazy eye and a loving demeanor. She’s named for the classic country queen of upstart women, and you better believe that’s by design. If a dog does indeed mimic its owner, Loretta’s comfort in the widest array of venues, in clubs and theaters and dancehalls and dives, serve as a perfect foil for Dani-Rae, who thrives on any stage for any audience. So poignant are their songs that tales of queer and tragic love could melt even the most hardened heart and open the most narrow mind. Their songs are undeniably universal and inclusively human.

A gut punch, an understanding embrace, a hand through your hair, Dani-Rae’s unmistakable songs unite an ever-unfolding breadth of experiences. Their methodically thrifted vintage blouses and dresses are just as much an homage to 40s and 50s country legends like Kitty Wells and Patsy Cline as they are a sleeve to cry on for a friend—or roll up for a fight. They write with a brutal honesty and devilishly coy poetic flair, delivered in their confident, expressive, and absolutely haunting alto.

Dani-Rae’s from somewhere, but who could say where. They came up in Western Canada or Northern Idaho or Southern Arizona. Along the way, they found a family in a circus-like cadre of troubadour musicians by constantly and consistently touring this continent’s highways. Indeed, more than anything, more than anywhere, their enduring home is the bench seat of a Toyota pickup beside Loretta en route to their next gig.

Now in Nashville, this songwriting dynamo has redoubled their drive. A writer of intriguing and intoxicating contradictions, queer stories and characters - ever the center of their musical soul - blossom from vintage country roots. They wear their influences proudly while interrogating the heteronormativity and patriarchy of both the traditional, and far more crucially, the contemporary country world. They’re particularly adept at finding and relating spaces of strange convergence in this life, where murder ballads overlap with a desperate mother’s triumph, or where travelling tunes meet desperate dysfunction miles from anywhere— and hell—where Christmas songs play out through gas station payphones. Their ability to fold uniquely modern experiences into the fabric of timeless and threadbare traditions is where this riveting, exciting, and endlessly unique country singer thrives. Dani-Rae Clark will leave you in stitches, in love, in tears, and indignant. But no matter what, they’ll leave you wanting more.