Say It Out Loud
Mary Bragg, Secrets To Strangers
Mary Bragg left the producer's chair, went to FAME Studios without a click, and made an album about speaking the hard thing before the answer arrives.
"Here's something I need to say out loud, and I don't know what happens next, but I have to say it!"
That is Mary Bragg, talking to Americana Highways about her new album, Secrets To Strangers. It has no answer attached. The album is the saying.
The record came out October 16 on Single Lock Records. Americana Highways described its subject as communication and "the problems that we all carry, but that we don't necessarily know how to solve." Read that way, it is a record for anyone rehearsing a sentence in a parked car. That listener already knows the answer is not the hard part. The opening line is.
Bragg is a trained producer. This time she gave up the chair. John Paul White and Ben Tanner produced at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals while she worked on the songs. She told the outlet she wanted "to get outside myself, to get back to the meat of collaboration." Her last album, self-titled, came out in 2022. The turn on this one is letting go.
Getting there took a nudge. Jason Isbell's manager, Traci Thomas, told her to go to the Shoals and make a record. Bragg says it has been two years since her first conversations with White and Tanner, and those talks came before anyone went into the studio. In a business where a rollout can outlast the songs it is selling, talking first counts as restraint.
The room was not new to her. She first walked through FAME as a tourist, and she remembers seeing the iso-booths "where Aretha Franklin stood." This time she came with a band: drummer Chad Gamble, bassist Zac Cockrell, and guitarist and keyboardist Jay Gonzalez.
They played without a click track. "We didn't record to a click at all on this record!" Bragg said. She called it a first for her whole career. She described the Muscle Shoals players as professional but patient, the kind who will wait for the magic until it arrives.
One song had its own ideas. Bragg says "Champion Sleeper" lives in two tempos. The verse wanted to sit one way, and then "the chorus wanted to take off." Put that way, it is the shape of a confession: the slow walk up to it, then the lift once it is out.
Saying a thing once is not the same as singing it every night. Bragg said the hard songs are hard on stage. When she played "The Game" live for the first time, a few weeks before the interview, she had to "access some new emotional portals outside of myself to get through it." She was rehearsing for the release shows, where "Champion Sleeper" would be played live for the first time. Her practice is not to dwell on the real circumstances behind a song, because, she said, that gets in the way of connecting with listeners. That leaves the song open for whoever needs it.
Americana Highways wrote that the album delivers its confessions "gracefully," across "a wide range of sound traditions," with "an unmistakable joy" in the music itself. Bragg's own hope was smaller and braver: that some of it would be "converted from confession to triumph."
The last song is called "Speaking different languages," a title that names the problem the whole album circles. It says the thing anyway.
“Here's something I need to say out loud, and I don't know what happens next, but I have to say it!”
