Songfacts®:

• "She Smoked in the House" is Brandy Clark's heartfelt homage to her late grandmother, Ruth, and the era she inhabited. Over acoustic guitars, piano, and drums, Clark fondly reminisces about the full spectrum of her qualities, both endearing and unconventional.
• Clark captures the memory of a woman who unabashedly smoked indoors and saved the butts in old coffee cans - something you just don't see these days (heck, good luck even finding an ashtray). Furthermore, she was very frugal, removing mold from cantaloupe and cheese, and buying everything on credit from Sears.
  
  "I used to write a lot in the car. I would take drives out to Leiper's Fork in Nashville when I was blocked, and songs would come to me. That song came when I was driving around and really on a Merle Haggard kick," Clark told Billboard. "I was missing my grandparents and he always takes me back to that - I got stuck on 'Are the Good Times Really Over' for weeks - that would be the only thing I would listen to."
• Clark started crafting a sweeping anthem that would encapsulate the essence of her generation. She wrote multiple verses, but none of them resonated with her on a deep emotional level. "I kept thinking, 'What's wrong with this song?'" she said.
  
  Then Clark remembered something country songwriter Mark D Sanders ("I Hope You Dance," "She Had Me At Heads Carolina") told her early in her career. "He said, 'If you want to be general, you must first be specific.' And honestly, the song was really about my grandma, so once I locked in on that, there weren't a lot of throwaway lines. I can't believe the texts that I've received from people who say, 'She cut the mold off of cantaloupe - that's my grandma, too.'"
• For Clark, the biggest gift with "She Smoked in the House" other than honoring her grandmother's memory, is the people who have reached out and told her the song reminds them of their grandma or mom or even themselves. "I thought this one was just for me this," she told UK newspaper The Sun, "and it's turning out to be for everyone."
• "She Smoked in the House" is the seventh track on the singer-songwriter's fourth album, Brandy Clark. She recorded the album at Rick Rubin's Shangri-La studio.
  
  "It was amazing," she told The Sun. "The coolest thing about that studio, other than you walk outside and there's the Pacific Ocean, is that only one project can be worked on at a time there. So, you are in a cocoon with the music and everyone working on it."