Singer-songwriter on how her screen character launched her fame
Australian-born, Nashville-based singer-songwriter Clare Bowen became famous playing Scarlett O’Connor in hit TV series Nashville.
The show proved perfect preparation for Clare, 34 – a survivor of childhood cancer – to launch her own solo career, which is now in full swing with her new enchanting self-titled debut album.
“Nashville really was a dream come true,” she says. “I think being in the entertainment industry is something you have to love. If you don’t, it will eat you alive. I love telling stories so much – the high-pressure stuff goes along with it. It might be hard work, but it doesn’t feel like that because you’re getting to do exactly what you love every day.” Working on the series brought her into the orbit of two of the most revered musical mentors and producers in modern Americana, Buddy Miller and T Bone Burnett. “I was very lucky that I got to work with some really marvellous people,” she says. “Buddy Miller, my greatest musical mentor, is the one who taught me how to use a microphone. “I remember T Bone sitting down with me one day, and he said, ‘You never felt like you belonged anywhere, have you?’ I said, ‘No’. He went, ‘Well, you belong right here with us. We all feel the same way too’. “It was just the loveliest thing, and just something that I’ll never, ever forget him teaching me.”
With her debut album – in preparation since the series took off five years ago – Clare now gets to tell her own story.
“In Nashville, there was a lot of art imitating life. But thankfully Scarlett and I do not have the same life experience. I’ve had my fair share of troubles, but not like things that she experienced.
“And I guess that’s just a testament to working on a drama series. I get to leave the drama at work. I don’t bring it into my home.”
Home is with her husband, guitarist and co-writer Brandon Robert Young.
Clare says: “We met on the Bridgestone Arena stage in Nashville in front of about 17,000 people, singing If I Didn’t Know Better together.
“I needed someone to sing a duet with in a hurry. Brandon very kindly turned up with 24 hours’ notice, and sang the song through with me twice in the dressing room, then we went out and performed it.
“From the moment he walked into my dressing room, it was like something tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘Don’t you take your eyes off that boy’.
“It probably took us a year to be brave enough to even hold hands.”
Clare’s self-titled debut album is on sale now.
In 1970, this was the final album pairing late folk guitar innovator John and his often overlooked partner and then wife Beverley.
Now rereleased on vinyl, it’s a platform for Beverley’s talent. She’d already been recognised by Paul Simon, who offered to marry her to get a green card. On classics such as Parcels, the roughhouse beauty Sorry To Be So Long and Primrose Hill, Bev radiates soul, but her talent was hidden until comeback The Phoenix and The Turtle in 2014, five years after John died.