Ann Claire is a Honkytonk Princess
Ann Claire is a Honkytonk Princess
Ann Claire is a terrific Country Music singer and
songwriter whose songs such as “Better Girl,” which she wrote with Greg Crowe,
are sung with an earthiness and straight from her heart.
“Greg Crowe is a great friend
and he has had numerous hits including a # 1 with Montgomery Gentry, called “The
House On the Corner of Lonely and Gone” (co-written with Dave Gibson and Bill
McCorvey). Greg is from Mississippi and was one of my first friends in
Nashville. He is someone who took me under his wing. He has been a tremendous
friend and support to me for many years. I wrote “Better Girl,” also with
another guy, Chris Caminiti, who won the NSAI songwriter of the year contest.
Usually, I just write a song and it just comes from me then I take it to Travis
Howard (producer, songwriting collaborator and singer). It is usually half me and
half him, but this song was different. I sat around and talked to both of them
about what I was trying to say and we just talked around the subject for a long
time,
which is how the process sometimes goes, if you are lucky.
They asked me what I wanted to say, because I came up with “six o’clock in the
morning.” It is all true. I was living in L.A. and I had a boyfriend who was
from Dallas. I loved him a lot. He is a dear friend, but it didn’t work out. I
loved him very much and he is a wonderful person, but it just did not work out
for me. This is what happened. We were living together and he took me to the
airport for an early flight to Nashville. It was six o’clock in the morning and
I remember he gave the porter who took my luggage, ten dollars and I just
thought it was the sweetest thing ever. I don’t know why, it really touched my
heart and I thought, not that I wouldn’t do it, but he did it in a way that
wasn’t like my father would do it, like this is ten bucks. He did it in a way,
as in take care of this woman. I was sitting on the plane and I thought, I had
just been through so much and at the time I thought, love makes us better. You
see things in people that make you better and I thought this is something that
is going to make me better for the rest of my life, knowing him, seeing the
generosity and the goodness and the ethics of this person and feeling loved. I
really truly believe that true love is stronger than both of us or all of us and
(I believe in) it might work this time. That is an attitude that we all have to
have in relationships, it might even work this time. I think that we are always
freefalling and we don’t have a net. We always need to (make sure) we don’t have
regrets.
The thought behind the song is, I am just a better person for you. Because of
you, I’m better. That is true today and I feel that is true about everybody that
I have loved. I think that it is true about everybody that you love, not just
romantically, but in general, people that you know as friends, people that you
work with or whatever, they make you better and this is what relationships are
about. I love the song. I love the
chorus. I love singing it and it is so positive to me. It is such a joyful song.
I love having joy in my work and spreading that joy. When I sing “Better Girl,”
live people really get a kick out of it and women especially.
Ann Claire’s journey to a career in music and television, began long before she
was born, when her grandmother, who was born into a Persian royal family, eloped
with a musician and eventually settled in southern California during the 1930s.
“My
grandmother was a rebel, very much like me. She fell in love with a musician, my
grandfather, and a person from a very different background. It seemed like the
wise thing to do was to go somewhere else and to make a new life. Because of
that my father, my aunt and my uncle were all born in California and my
grandparents got to know actors, actresses, singers and songwriters from the
golden age of Hollywood and from the golden age of music, everybody from Loretta
Young (Academy Award for Best Actress in the 1947 film
The Farmer’s Daughter) who was my
father’s godmother. I always called
her Auntie Loretta, as in my great-aunt. I still cherish all of the presents she
gave me. I am Catholic, so she was there for my confirmation and she gave me all
sorts of beautiful presents and I should probably frame. There were many other
artists, Glen Campbell, Kenny Rogers, Hermes Pan who was (the
choreographer and collaborated) for and with Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers,
Bing Crosby and a huge amount of other artists and writers of that genre and of
that time. I guess the late seventies, eighties and early nineties. My first
memory is of my father playing Helen Reddy (Pop), Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers
and that is what I knew.
My father is a very, very
gifted pianist and composer. He is Classically trained, but he has written Pop
and he writes mainly R&B now. He was trained by Geoffrey Saba who is a very
famous Australian concert pianist. Music was in him, because of my grandfather,
his dad, the person that my grandmother ran away with. He would make a lot of
mixed tapes of Country Music for all of us girls and cousins. Every summer he
would play mainly Country, but a little bit of Michael Jackson with Phil Collins
mixed in, Earth, Wind & Fire, some great R&B acts. That was my education in
music and he was the person who first taught me piano and who taught me about
the structure of the commercial song and he had my sisters and me writing songs
for him in his home studio. My dad
was friends with Stewart Copeland (drummer
and backing vocalist) of The Police. He was very much into the Brit Pop and
Rock thing in the eighties and nineties, but he always had more of a Country
vibe and he was always more lyrically oriented.
He tried to teach us about saying something meaningful and even when I
was a very small child. He would play for me a song like Helen Reddy “I Am
Woman,” or whatever it was and he would tape me singing it back and he would
talk to me about the story and about what everything meant. Neil Diamond as well
was a big influence on us. Dolly was a big influence and we would talk for hours
about “Coat of Many Colors,” or what it all meant and so the idea of songs being
stories was ingrained in me since I was born. When
I started writing songs I just couldn’t even understand a song without a story.
My dad was very concerned that we understood the meaning of the story. It was
fascinating and he also gave each one of us the chance to hear our own voices,
not only with singing, but with our lives today. I think of my father and the
joy that it has brought to my life and I really feel that I have a right to
express myself and that is because of him,” says Ann Claire.
Ann Claire has moved grown
men to tears with her song “Good Enough,” a ballad about the relationship
between a father and his son. It is about learning to say I love you to your son
and about letting him know how proud of him you are. The song is more than just
a story, “This song is my favorite song that I have ever written in my life. If
I die today “Good Enough,” will be what I leave to this world.
I would be happy if more people
would hear that. It has touched so many people and it has touched so many men
that I know. Travis and I talked for many years about his father who was always
putting him down and he was not supportive of his music. It has been something
that, knowing him the way that I do, I know it left him with wounds and while we were making the record I thought about it and it is really
difficult to explain, because you have a personal relationship with someone and
it bleeds into the work. One day I thought about my mother and she is a person
who speaks eight or nine languages, she has a degree from Oxford University and
she is a critical thinker. She is not in the realm of Country or Folk and she is
not a creative writer. Whenever she
heard anything that I wrote, whether it was poetry or music she would pick it
apart and that was my thing to go to as a child when I was not feeling great or
when I was trying to express myself, so that was a wound for me that really
resonated. Originally I had written a song about being good enough for your
parents. The first verse was about a young man who wasn’t good enough for his
dad and the second verse was about a young woman who wasn’t good enough for her
mom. I took the song to Travis on a Tuesday afternoon and I was wearing a
nightie from Walmart, no makeup and I was hung-over quite frankly (she laughs).
I called him and I said, I am ready to write this. I am warning you, I am
wearing a nightie from Walmart, I have no makeup on and I am hung-over. He said
perfect, come on over! I went over there and I lay down on the couch, while he
listened to the little demo that I had written. He got out his guitar and we
just wrote the song. (she starts to sing) ‘You
need to know I love you,’ that was me, because he was very, very resistant
to that. He wanted to say something like, he wanted to something, something,
something and I said no Travis, it is ‘You
need to know I love you.’ He was very resistant and I think it is because it
is still a wound that resonated in some way with him. I said that’s it, A it
rhymes and B it’s truth. He was okay fine and we did that. We wrote the first
verse and the chorus and I said what about the second part of the story, this
guy grows up and what does he do? He said go home and write the second verse, so
I did. I went home and I wrote about how he walked into the house where he grew
up and he saw all of the toys and the little fire truck and the cycle went on
and he looked at his own son and he said it is time for me to change and I am
not going to let this go on anymore. I am going to break this and I am not going
to be this person who is a hateful person that doesn’t have the courage to tell
the truth and to be kind. I sent it to him and he was like, well you did it,
good job (she laughs). It just turned
out to be a marvelous song and we are both very proud of it.
We are planning to write
some more in the next few months and I don’t know if the no makeup Walmart
nightie thing will (happen again), but Travis is such a down to earth person
that he definitely feels more comfortable with people being themselves,” she
says.
Earlier in her career Ann Claire twice turned down record deals and once a
television program that would have gained her considerable notoriety and made
her very financially secure, but as she says, “but
it wasn’t what I felt would take me to where I needed to be.”
For a while, when she was younger, it did not appear
that Ann Claire was destined for a career in music, as she was accepted to Yale
University’s drama program and neither of her parents was supportive of her
pursuing a career in the entertainment industry. Her father had seen enough
people he knew in the arts who struggled and had their hearts broken and he did
not want to see the same thing happen to his daughter.
“My grandparents were
living in Southern California and I was accepted to the film program (at the
University of Southern California). I love film and I am very, very grateful
that I was able to get a liberal arts education through the lens of film and
through the history of film, which I think pretty much is the history of the
world. I have a minor in sociology, which taught me so much about women’s
studies and which has helped in me in life. Everybody who was in that program
had to volunteer and to get involved in the community. I was teaching in the
joint education program in south central (Los Angeles). I got to teach drama in
very low income, disadvantaged neighborhoods and that exposed me to people that
I would never have met or have known if it had not been for that. I am very
grateful for my education. I graduated with (honors) and I was on the dean’s
list. I was in the theatre program before I switched. My minor was in theatre
and I switched to sociology. I think I was just curious about the world at that
age. I wrote a play that got an A Plus and it was produced at school. That was
great and it confirmed that I have an ear for dialogue and art and in knowing
that I went ahead with getting an education. I went up to San Francisco and I
studied at the American Conservatory of Theatre, which also involved singing and
fencing and other kinds of things to develop on stage confidence and voice. It
was a tremendous experience for me. I really credit that program for giving me
the confidence to do what I do today,” says Ann Claire.
The current album Honkytonk Princess
took a long time to finally arrive on the music scene.
“Yes it was very long and
arduous and I definitely pissed a lot of people off, because I pulled a Barbra
Streisand on that. She (Streisand) said in this interview before there was auto
tune and all of this, if I didn’t like one note on a record, I just wouldn’t put
it out. That is how I felt and it wasn’t ego for me, I just wanted to give the
best to the people who had supported me. The first iteration of this record it
was Travis who produced it and he is an amazing writer and a great support. He
is a really talented creative producer. Maybe I simply wasn’t up to the job at
that time or maybe I had confidence issues. I brought in another producer who is
very close to me and like a brother to me, Max Abrams. He is a Princeton
graduate from a very different background. He has been in The
MuzikMafia
and he still works for
John Rich (Big & Rich). He is a very gentle soul who really coached me along in
another kind of a way and so what I got from the mixture of Travis and Max was
the beauty of the songs that I wrote with Travis and the confidence to sing them
like I meant what I was saying. Yes, it took much, much longer than it should
have and I have gotten a lot of flak from people. The record came out in
February (2012) and according to everybody that I know, I should have already
put out another record.
I am going to (release another record) in March and it
is called Plan A. This is the first
time I have ever told anybody about this record, but it talks about never giving
up on Plan A. I’m not going to Plan B. It’s not happening. It is about rising to
the occasion and being the best that you can be whereas this one has some fun
songs, party songs on it, but it is just a little bit stronger. Some of the
songs on Honkytonk Princess, as much
as I loved them, they are very sad songs and they reflect the past more than
(the new record),” she says.
Ann Claire and Travis Howard decided to cover Canadian
singer and songwriter Amanda Marshall’s hit song “Dark Horse,” and recorded it
as a Country duet. They trade verses and harmonize on some lines. Seldom do
covers of hit songs fare well when panned by the critics, because the listener
is already biased, but this writer is a huge fan of Amanda Marshall and of this
song and the duet by Ann Claire and Travis Howard is spectacular. Howard’s vocals
are gravelly and Claire sounds like she should be wearing a cowboy hat. What
grabs you about this song is the dynamic between Ann Claire and Travis Howard and
is a similar dynamic that existed between Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton on
stage.
Perhaps what you need to know most about singer and songwriter Ann Claire is
what she said at the end of our conversation, “I
think the goal is to stay really grounded and really connected to the work and
to the people around you and remain humble and grateful for that opportunity.”
Please
visit
Ann Claire's website.
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