Michael Jackson had 12 nods in 1984 and Babyface had the same amount in 1997.
That’s a historic achievement, as it ties him for the second-most Grammy nominations in a single year. In fact, when all was said and done, Batiste actually had more nominations than anybody else, as he racked up an impressive 11 of them: Record Of The Year, Album Of The Year, Best Traditional R&B Performance, Best R&B Album, Best Improvised Jazz Solo, Best Jazz Instrumental Album, Best American Roots Performance, Best American Roots Song, Best Score Soundtrack For Visual Media, Best Contemporary Classical Composition, and Best Music Video. People will feel a little less alone and we'll get through it.When watching the livestream of the 64th Annual Grammy Awards nominations being announced, some viewers noticed that they were hearing Jon Batiste’s name a heck of a lot. People will take the broken pieces of their heart and turn it into art for everyone else who's going through this. But I do think, on the bright side, that there will be some amazing art that comes out of this. I hope this song will provide people some comfort that they will remember who they've lost, or even what they've lost - not even a person, but people feel like they've lost a year of their life. How do you think about it in the context of this pandemic, when people have lost so much, lost loved ones to the disease or their rituals associated with grieving a loved one for a different reason have been affected? How do you place this song in that broader context? There's nothing more beautiful than a well-lived life and somebody that can look back on it and say, "I was this and that and I made some mistakes, but I'd do it all again if I could." This the line in the song that goes, "fast car riding pretty," there's some joy in that. We were all writing about somebody who might've been a different person, but meant the same thing to all of our hearts. Even though it wasn't specifically about Liz's mom or Lori's aunt or Hillary's grandma or my grandma, they were all in there. To me it was most about Liz's mom, but I think we were all drawing from people we had lost, and it was kind of an easy song to write.
You know, we just started writing it about those people. What was the process like? How did the song get built from there? The fact that both of them were so vulnerable, I think, is why the song got written and why it got written the way it did. I mentioned my grandma and my dad - I lost them both several years ago, but when you're sitting there talking to somebody who's just lost a loved one, it brings that all back. That always makes you be able to be vulnerable with your own grief. Do you think it helped, even in that strange Zoom call setting, but to have these women open up and be so vulnerable with their own grief?Ĭompletely. You weren't originally going to bring that idea to the group. I wonder, I mean, that kind of emotion when it happens, it can bring people together in this really intimate space. She put together some ideas and then took them to one of her songwriting sessions. When Clark agreed to contribute a new track to Morning Edition's Song Project series, she wasn't sure what it was going to be about at first, but eventually landed on the idea of putting herself in the shoes of a person experiencing real loss. I really hit a fatigue factor with it, like, wow, when are we going to get out of this?" "When this started, everything that I had on the books, as far as songwriting, switched to Zoom. I need other people to inspire me," Clark says. When you don't get that, it does start to dry up a little bit. "I've seen how many songs have come from me through conversations - like meeting for coffee and talking to a girlfriend and she's talking to me about her marriage, and from that comes a song idea. After her tour got canceled, Clark started seeing people less - a real problem for someone who likes to write about other people. The Nashville artist put out an album in March 2020, right when the pandemic was starting to shut everything down.
Brandy Clark's new track for the Morning Edition Song Project is about processing death and celebrating a life well lived.īrandy Clark is known for her vivid character sketches.