His new album, “This Land,” has quickly emerged as his most successful, critically and commercially.
Guitarist and singer Gary Clark Jr.’s third album, “This Land,” melds political narrative with Clark’s rock sensibilities in its title track. By Geoff Edgers Geoff Edgers Reporter covering movies, museums, comedy, music and pop culture Email Bio Follow March 27 at 12:00 PM HAYS COUNTY, TEXAS — One morning in February 2018, for reasons he still can’t or doesn’t want to fully explain, Gary Clark Jr. got so mad that he punched a cabinet. This was no love tap.
That the source of Clark’s temper remains a secret is no surprise. In this age of confession and confrontation, the singer is a throwback to a time when a new album arrived with a sense of mystery instead of an instant Genius annotation. “That was just one day,” he says. “That doesn’t happen every day. My life is great. I’m surrounded by love.”
“It is just basically experimentation,” Clark says, demonstrating with a George Benson clip he’s loaded. “On this hard drive, it would just say the name of the song, and it wouldn’t tell me who the artist was. So a lot of that I didn’t know who it was, and I had to Shazam it.” Again, Clark wrote most of the music, but he collaborated with Sciba and others on some of the lyrics. He also took Sciba’s advice that they use another drummer, Brannen Temple, instead of playing himself. The music on “This Land” is hard to label, jumping from the charged reggae of “This Land” to the acoustic blues of “The Governor” to “Feed the Babies,” which could be the great lost Curtis Mayfield song.
Clark has worked over the past decade to strike the right balance on creative control of his albums. “Within a day and a half or so, I’m walking down the hallway and he’s in there playing,” his father says. “Wait a minute. Is that the radio or is that him? I called my wife up and opened up the door, and there he was playing note-for-note Jimi Hendrix.”
The public first met Clark in 2007, when director John Sayles cast him as a young musician in his film “Honeydripper,” but his musical breakthrough came in 2010. Guitarist Doyle Bramhall II, a fellow Texan and respected producer, suggested Clark to Eric Clapton for his Crossroads Guitar Festival. The short set changed everything.“I remember seeing him and thinking, ‘Look at this guy, he’s a bad ass,’ ” says Weintraub, who was working on the festival with Clapton.
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