The Anger Inside Gary Clark, Jr.
The singer-guitarist felt stuck creatively and typecast as a bluesman. To move forward, he had to free up his sound and tap into the rage he felt living in Trump’s America.
By Patrick Doyle
It’s already past midnight, but Gary Clark Jr. wants to keep going. The guitarist is standing in the center of a darkened room at Arlyn Studios, an unmarked building hidden behind a housing development in South Austin. Clark has been hard at work all night teaching his band a new song, “This Land,” taking breaks only to smoke spliffs and sip 90-proof whiskey. Clark counts yet another take of the song — a thunderous blues stomper marked by synth-bass and a hip-hop beat — before unleashing a flurry of wah-wah notes on his Gibson SG. He howls about living on “50 acres with a Model A/Right in the middle of Trump country,” next to a neighbor who “can’t wait to call the police on me.” He closes his eyes for the -chorus: “Nigga, run, nigga, run/Go back where you come from.”
Clark wants to get “This Land” right because he considers it the most important song he’s ever written. “It’s about being black in America, in the South,” he says. Clark wrote it after a confrontation with his own neighbor near his new 50-acre ranch outside Austin, where…
