Clint Black Knows When There’s a Song In There (Part 2 of 2)

Continued from Part One…

What do you think it is about your gimmick-free, neo-traditional approach to country that resonates so strongly?

Well, the music has to appeal, first of all. My approach is that whoever I’m working with in the studio – whether they’re my band or a conglomeration of my band and others, or completely just session players – they’re a band that day. And my approach is to make a record with a great band and then not gimmick it up. So 20 years from now, if you hear it, you don’t quite know what era it’s from; it’s not trendy. I just want to remain timeless, and I think that’s part of it. I think that’s why we see artists like Zach Top, Riley Green and Cody Jinks making this traditional kind of music and becoming so popular so fast.

And I think the lyrics are really the key. I think you have to touch the heart or tickle the funny bone. You can say something either clever or deep, but it has to be understood on the surface level. You’re not singing to professors of sociology and poetry! [The listener] needs to get it, and get it right away. And then as you live with it, you can discover the layers beneath the lyrics and all of the hidden meaning in there. And maybe even over time, as your life evolves, it takes on new meaning because you’ve lived and now you see it from a different perspective.

2024 has marked the 35th anniversary of Killin’ Time, and your current concert tour celebrates that. With such a large body of work, what do you think it is all these years later that stands out about your debut album?

I think it was “Killin’ Time,” the song, that made such a mark. I’ve heard from so many people how that was the anthem for them in high school, or that it just appealed to them as one of the best country songs. People like “A Better Man” and “Nothing’s News” and “Walkin’ Away” and “Nobody’s Home,” too. There were five hits [four #1 and one #3 – ed.] off of that album, but by an overwhelmingly large margin, “Killin’ Time” just sticks out as the song that people latched onto.

If you could go back in time and give one piece of advice to the young musician named Clint Black, what would that be?

There are so many things I would say; I’ll give you a couple.

The first thing I would say is, “Relax.” I really tried hard to manage the ego and the fear, and just walk through it all as a regular guy. I was a lot more uptight and uncomfortable with fame than I thought I was being. Every five or 10 years, I thought I had it down, and I would look back and think, “I didn’t have it down then, but I have it down now.” I would get better and better at it and look back and laugh at my old self as not being as calm and cool as I thought I was. Because it was overwhelming from my perspective. It was like Elvis; my career just exploded. And everywhere I went, it was an event about me. And I was just trying to breathe and live with being famous.

And the other advice I would give would be: Take enough time off the road to pay attention to the business. There were so many things happening behind the scenes of my own little business of music; if I had paid closer attention, I would have managed it better. There are a lot of singers who don’t think of themselves as the CEO of a business. They have managers and agents all doing things in your name, and not all of them are good. I remember after getting away from my first manager, how many people said things to me like, “Man, I would have never come near you, never invited you to play my event.” I ended up in a lawsuit to get away from that guy. When you’re out on the road playing 125 cities a year, that’s all you can do. So I would have managed things a little better. I would have told my younger self, “You’d better pay attention to what these guys are doing.”

You’ve had a couple studio albums in the last decade-plus; are you still writing?

Yes, I’m still writing. And I still have songs in the satchel that I’ve yet to record. I’ve gotten into a pattern of an album about every five years, so it’s coming up on time to do another one. I’ve made a bunch of new friends through my talk show, and meeting them at the CMAs backstage. I want to do some collaborations with some old friends and new friends, and I’m just now trying to figure that out. And it’s starting to sound really fun.