Clint Black on Dodging Country Music’s New Rules for ‘On Purpose’ Album
Ten years have passed since Clint Black released Drinkin’ Songs and Other Logic. In that time, backwards ball caps have replaced the cowboy headgear that Black, Garth Brooks, Alan Jackson and their peers preferred when they galloped onto the charts as country music’s fabled “Class of 1989.”
Absences this long can seem inexplicable if not alarming to longtime fans. From their perspective, Black’s return with his latest album, On Purpose, is a welcome surprise but also a cause of some apprehension. Will he be able to reclaim his space in music’s much-changed terrain? How will his music resonate today?
“I saw this email from a publisher,” Black recalls. “At the bottom, where the signature was, it said something like ‘shaping the sound of country music.’ That stood out to me because I’d always thought the artists were shaping the sound of country music. I always shaped my music. To RCA’s [Black’s first record label] credit, they released my albums the way I made them.
“But I think that the country music culture is being shaped by a new generation of label heads on Music Row,” he elaborates. “I was in a studio when someone got a call from one of the other labels. The head of the label would call the producer and say, ‘This sound isn’t working. We want it to be more like this. We want it to be more like that.’ He wouldn’t even talk to the artist! That kind of schooled me on how it normally goes now.”
Nobody butted in on Black as he was cutting On Purpose — and it shows. The sound harks back to the stone-country feel he championed as a leader of the neo-traditional movement with Brooks, Jackson, George Strait and Randy Travis. Guitars twang rather than shred. Even the upbeat songs are laid-back. Melodies stand out, tailor-made for Black’s down-home, often emotional expression. And rap interludes? Forget about it.
“We all used to joke that it won’t be long before people will rapping in country music — and then it actually happened,” Black says. “We had those huge, string-and-chorus-laden sounds in the Sixties, the Owen Bradley and Chet Atkins stuff. Now country music is much more aggressive. It’s brought a lot of fans to country music, but it’s also pushed a lot of fans out.”
The lyrics, more than the music, point to what Black has been doing since 2005 — namely, living and learning. “Time for That” reminds workaholics that they might be “on track for a heart attack.” This decidedly grownup message recurs in “Better and Worse,” which advises listeners to not “push too hard, lean too far, thinking I can have it all.” [Watch Black sing the clever tune for a special Country Now performance, filmed at Nashville’s Blackbird Studios, above.]
Walter Cronkite nostalgists will agree with Black’s complaint on “Still Calling It News” that media blowhards’ “focus on the pointless is blurring my view.” And it’s hard to imagine any country bro eulogizing his favorite semi-adult beverage as an “international language” much less rhyming “Shanghai, China, North Carolina, Philippines, New Orleans.” But that’s what Black does on “Beer.”