Julie Clark gives the skinny on her folk music Ann Wood Banner Staff "Can I be hired as the lesbian Carole King? Can I have that job?" Julie Clark asks over the phone from her Virginia home.
Now that she's quit her day job as a marketing manager, is writing a second album, and is traveling the U.S. promoting her first, she could be just that. Especially since the opening track, "Precisely (What You Need)," off her first record, "Feel Free" (2003, Great Big Records), is something King could've written herself. The strumming acoustic guitar and vocals very much resemble that of King, Carly Simon or even James Taylor. And these comparisons are no accident — the 39-year-old musician was raised on and inspired by '70s folk music.
She's bringing that sound to town during Women's Week, and will perform with bassist Jesse Willoughby and drummer Bart Weisman at 2 p.m. Thursday at Vixen, 336 Commercial St., Provincetown. Clark will play again with Willoughby at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday at The Schoolhouse, 494 Commercial St., Provincetown. Tickets are $15 for any of the shows.
Clark began playing guitar when she was 12 years old, and in seventh grade her music teacher encouraged her to enter a high school talent show. She wowed the crowd — and is now wowing critics. Every song on that first record has won some kind of award. She was named Kerrville New Folk Winner, took first place in the Great American Song Contest and received 10 honorable mentions in the Billboard World Song Contest, all in 2004. She was also named Folk-Acoustic Artist of the Year at the Virginia Music Awards.
"I'm a pretty careful song crafter," she says, when talking about why she hasn't put out a second record yet. "I'm kind of anal, I guess, so I just want to be able to take some time with it."
That's the reason she's quit her job — to perfect those songs for that sophomore release. She doesn't have a title, doesn't tell us what's driving that new album, but if her first record is any indication, it's replete with longing. But it's not that typical love she's looking for (she's found that and "illegally" married her long-time girlfriend some years back), but acceptance. Not acceptance as a lesbian living in Virginia, but society's acceptance of fat people — and perhaps the self-acceptance of a fat woman now living in a skinny body. Clark was 350 pounds before dropping 200 pounds through laparoscopic gastric bypass surgery, diet and exercise.
"And it's been dramatic," she says. "I came from that longing and living through the outside of things. Certainly outside of social acceptance and romantic acceptance from my past. … I'm not trying to make [the pain of the past] go away, but I see that it sure comes into my work a lot."
Clark laughs, saying that she married when she was still overweight and has "never been free in a single sense." She isn't worried about it, she says her marriage is "really a no refunds, no exchanges type of situation." But that doesn't mean she doesn't look at other women or think about other women. She penned a song called "I'd Do Them All If I Could."
"Certainly and obviously at the heart of it is … the attraction for all these people in the world that I'd sample if I could," she says, adding that her wife just laughs it off.
Clark thinks that she may have been overweight because her mother pushed against it — she admits that she's willful and stubborn, which works well in the music world.
"I had a real power struggle with my mom over my weight. [She] wanted to control it out of me, threaten it out of me [by saying that] no one will love you, no one will want you," she says. "She was trying to achieve positive change but it didn't work with me."
Clark says that her mother was right — society doesn't love you when you're fat. You can feel that longing for sexual acceptance in the "Naked Song," in which she sings, "You see I want you in the worst way,/ I imagine your body/ pressed against mine so sexy/ as ya touch me so gently./ These are the thoughts that fill my mind./ I wanna tell you all these secret thoughts of mine." She'll tell us this about them in song this week, even if there's nothing secret about them anymore.