Brandy Clark Sings ‘Bigger Boat’ on ‘Corden’
Brandy Clark was the musical guest on The Late Late Show With James Corden on Thursday, beaming in remotely to do a quick interview and perform an acoustic version of the song “Bigger Boat.” The track originally appears on Clark’s 2020 album Your Life Is a Record as a duet with Randy Newman.
Like her duet partner Newman, Clark takes a wry look at chaos and discord in America on “Bigger Boat,” borrowing the famous line from Jaws as a way to escape natural disasters and political turmoil. “We can’t agree on who should be captain, so we can’t keep this thing afloat,” Clark sings, accompanied by a second guitar player on a recording studio floor.
In a pre-performance interview with Corden, Clark touches on her YouTube quarantine series You Can’t Come Over (But You Can Come In), book clubs, and how her love of Jaws led to writing “Bigger Boat” with Adam Wright.
“It was during the time of the California wildfires, we were getting all kinds of floods down South,” she says. “Our country’s very divided as far as the right and the left and I thought, ‘That’s the way to write this song.’ It’s sad to me how relevant this song has become. When we wrote it, I thought nobody under 40 is really gonna get this idea. And in The Handmaid’s Tale they used that line in an episode, and brought it into this century.”
Clark’s third studio album Your Life Is a Record was released March 6th via Warner Bros. and reunited her with producer Jay Joyce.