tunesmith

Next week, he’s poised to claim his fourth No. 1 album with “We Don’t Trust You,” his 17-track collaboration with the woozy tunesmith Future.

You think of him as being a tunesmith, but he basically takes a variations approach, developing a gesture in this march atmosphere.

But this music’s composer, Nicholas Britell, isn’t a mere tunesmith, and he doesn’t stop there.

A perennial critics’ favorite who’s been nominated for 10 Grammys, Clark is “universally revered” among her fellow country songwriters, according to Jessie Jo Dillon, one such tunesmith who’s written for George Strait and Maren Morris and who co-wrote five tracks on Clark’s new album.

But with its intricate weave of samples and interpolations, it’s also structurally daring in a way that obviously triggered the academy’s suspicions about “real music” — suspicions foreshadowed in the Grammys’ pretelevised ceremony when Beyoncé’s longtime collaborator The-Dream lost the songwriter of the year award to Tobias Jesso Jr., a more conventional tunesmith known for his work with Adele and Harry Styles.