Brandy has penned smash hits as a songwriter like “Better Dig Two” by The Band Perry and “Mama's Broken Heart” by Miranda Lambert and then was approached about doing her own album. Annie Reuter at radio.com wrote a great article on the album's backstory and how it almost never got released:

Country singer-songwriter Brandy Clark almost never released her GRAMMY-nominated debut album 12 Stories.

“Had it been up to just me it wouldn’t have happened,” Clark admitted to Radio.com last year. “At the time, I wasn’t looking to make a record. I thought that my chance at having an artist career had passed me. I was really focused on songwriting and didn’t even entertain that idea.”

“Emilie Marchbanks, who was at Fitzgerald Hartley [management company], approached me about making a record, and I honestly thought she was playing a joke on me at first, because I didn’t know her and she was really funny,” Clark recalled with a laugh. “She was so over-the-top about her passion for my songs and my singing, and I just thought, ‘Am I on Candid Camera?'”

Marchbanks and her team then introduced Clark to producer Dave Brainard, who spent the next six months working with Clark on whittling down the song list from 30 to 12.

Original Article HERE