The McClymonts: Break-up songs are hard to write when you’re happily married
Country music trio The McClymonts capture the authenticity of everyday life in their songs — even wrongs they’ve never experienced.
A few years ago, Brooke McClymont heard an unfortunate yet all-too-common story from one of her girlfriends: after 18 years of marriage, she and her husband were splitting because he’d decided to leave her for another woman. After McClymont had listened to her friend lay out this sad tale with an air of graceful resignation, she couldn’t help but start wondering how she might have reacted in that situation. Soon enough, the songwriter began processing it through her art before landing on a chorus that expressed acceptance punctuated by a sharp barb of rage:
There’s no good way to say goodbye
No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t make you stay
So have a good life, I hope it all works out alright
Oh and in good, good time, I hope you treat her well
And I wish you hell
Importantly, though, McClymont didn’t just pluck that idea from the pages of her friend’s life and use it for her own selfish artistic reasons. That’s simply not her style. Instead, after shaping the song to a point where she was happy with it, she went right on back to her friend. “I played it to her straight away,” she tells Review. “I was very sensitive for her feelings. I said, ‘Look, this is not your whole story, this is parts of it.’ When you’re writing a song, you can elaborate; you try and make it for everybody, to make it as broad as possible.”
McClymont’s instincts were correct: her hurt friend said the song captured her true feelings of betrayal, especially in the second verse, where McClymont sings, “The pictures on the wall I don’t recognise / The stories that they tell turned to all lies …” After he had blown up their marriage, complete with children, the wronged woman was questioning everything about the past 18 years. She told the songwriter, “You said it so well — and it’s true, I do wish him hell.”
This song appears towards the end of Mayhem to Madness, the sixth album by the McClymonts, a country trio composed of Brooke, middle sister Sam and youngest sister Mollie. By their own admission, narratives of heartbreak are among the toughest tasks for the three co-writers to conquer, for a very good reason.
“Break-up songs are really hard for us girls to write because we’re all in happy marriages — which is boring!” Brooke McClymont says with a laugh. “We’re normal, and normal these days seems to be quite boring to read about. With this song, when we play it live, I have to explain it because it sounds like I’m going through it. But most of the time we all try to write about personal stuff that’s going on in our lives. We try to be as real as possible because otherwise you just can’t sing about it — I just find it really disconnects.”
Since the release of the McClymonts’ debut EP in 2006, that sense of connecting with audiences evidently has worked well. With career record sales of more than 250,000 copies, according to their label, Universal, there are few more successful Australian country acts. The family’s music foregrounds strong storytelling with clear vocal melodies and harmonies that are hallmarks of the country genre. Across the group’s catalogue to date, the strummed acoustic guitars of the early work have been gradually turned down in the mix and tastefully replaced by just enough of a pop sheen to attract country-averse listeners without overdoing the gloss.
For popular Australian rock and pop acts, a national tour tends to consist of the capital cities and occasionally urban centres such as Newcastle, the Gold Coast and the Sunshine Coast. Many country acts, however, prefer to go much deeper into the regions, where they’ll happily play for appreciative crowds of about 500 punters each night at theatres and clubs.
Before COVID-19 scuttled the trio’s plans, a tour in support of Mayhem to Madness was to take in almost 30 dates from May to November, starting in Doyalson, NSW, and ending in Burnie, Tasmania. On the live side of country music, there are few bigger draws: only the likes of Lee Kernaghan, Kasey Chambers, John Williamson, Morgan Evans and Keith Urban consistently sell more tickets on their national tours, and the latter two performers tend to play theatres or arenas. The last time the McClymonts went out on the road in support of fifth album Endless, they played 59 shows across two years and sold almost 30,000 tickets.
As with many peers in the genre, the trio’s relatability has become central to a long and prosperous career. Country listeners tend to have a keen ear for sensing and rejecting bullshit or pretence from kilometres away; artists who are thought to be faking an unearned earthiness or attempting a rapid stylistic change are unlikely to make it far.
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Like Chambers, the three sisters from Grafton have leaned on their authenticity in a way that has only endeared them further to their fans. Rather than coming across as a marketing confection, however, the strong sense is that the gap between their public and private presentations is minimal, perhaps even non-existent. That has only become more true as they have each become mothers, with six children — two each — now between them.
“People who come to our shows know our story; they all know we’ve got kids, we’re not shy on social media about showing our kids,” says Mollie McClymont. “I think that’s all my personal social media is — me and my kids — because that’s my life. So I think it’s just a natural progression, and the beauty of country music is that everyone is going through the same stuff, the same stories, and most people that come to our shows are mums; they’re grandmas; they’re pregnant and about to have their own kids. I love sharing our story in that sense.”
It’s unsurprising, then, that the subject of child-rearing has begun to appear in their songwriting: the penultimate track on Endless was named Don’t Wish It All Away, a touching reminder to cherish the various stages of a child’s development: “You can’t stop time, days will always roll on by / And before you know it, you realise that nothing stays the same.”
And the lead single for the new album, I Got This, is a reminder for parents of all stripes that the job of caring for young lives is always worth it: “I’ve never quit when I’ve wanted to / You can’t when people rely on you / It’s not as easy as I once knew / Yeah I got this, I got this.”
Given the single was released in mid-March — just as the shape of about 25 million Australian lives was shrinking to the size of their homes because of restrictions on movement and social gatherings — I Got This took on a secondary meaning as an ode to self-empowerment and motivation for McClymonts fans in isolation, whether they were parents suddenly thrust into the role of home-learning teachers or just simply trying to keep their spirits up each day rather than slipping into dark moods.
As well, the gradual shift in their sound has not gone unnoticed, even by some who know the musicians well offstage. “We’re always trying to reach more people, and I’ve even had girlfriends call me with the new songs that are out — I Got This and Open Heart — and they’re like, ‘I just love this, Mollie! You were so country before — now it’s just cool!’ I’m like, ‘That’s a backhanded compliment — but thanks!’ ” says the youngest sister. “We’re not the same as we used to be, and I guess people are getting on board — and hopefully more people start to find out who we are, and start liking it.”
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Wish You Hell is a song that Brooke McClymont had been kicking around for a few years. It was considered for album No 5 in 2017, but the jigsaw piece didn’t slot into that particular puzzle, possibly because that album contained another song in a similar vein.
“On Endless, we had Unsaveable: Mollie’s friend found out her fiancee had cheated on her, but they were trying to save it, rather than walking away. We were like, ‘Let’s write about that!’ ” Sam McClymont says with a laugh. Read the wrong way, the middle sister’s laughter at this memory could come off as a little ghoulish, as if the trio were revelling in the misery of another. Through another lens, though, it’s evidence of an artist recalling the rush of blood that led to a breakthrough — the sort of hard-earned moment of creative clarity that makes all the false starts, dead ends and unproductive writing sessions worthwhile:
Her heart was always so full of love
Warm like the summer afternoon sun
How do you trust after what’s been done?
Does she stay or does she run?
From that kernel of an idea — Mollie McClymont’s friend sharing her gutting experience of being betrayed — came a discussion that led to some meaty questions: can you save the unsaveable when something so awful happens? Or can you find the good in it and make it better again? “Not everything that happens like that is doomed,” says Sam McClymont. “I think there’s a lot of room for redemption, moving on and pushing past those things. I think you can find different elements to stories like that as well.”
These are the queries that writing Unsaveable threw out into the world, and that is one of the ways in which art helps us to ponder and better understand ourselves and the people around us, by smartly packaging it all up in a four-minute song beautifully sung by sisters whose harmonies are wrapped together more tightly than a pre-COVID hug. Great art takes common sentiments and expresses them in a new way, so that it may connect with an individual in a deep and unexpected way.
“There’s only so much we can all talk about, just like they say there’s only so many chords you can use to make a song — yet look how many millions of songs there are in the world,” says Sam McClymont. “They’ve got the same topics of love, or heartbreak, or joy, or having children. But songwriters just have a way of saying it that little bit differently — from their own perspective or someone else’s — to hit you in a different way.” To the sisters, one of the greatest attractions of songwriting is also one of its biggest challenges. It’s a task they’ve been tackling head-on for 14 years and counting, and the beauty — and frustration — of it is that there’s no clear answer. Still, it’s a question worth asking: how can you use words, chords and melodies to say something original that makes a listener connect with it, and want to hear the song over and over again?
Mayhem to Madness is out on Friday, June 12, via Island Records/Universal. The rescheduled McClymonts national tour begins on September 4 in Goulburn, NSW, and ends on January 30 in Ballarat, Victoria.