Guy Clark
Guy Clark
Guy Charles Clarkwas an American Texas country and folk singer, musician, songwriter, recording artist, and performer. He released more than twenty albums, and his songs have been recorded by other artists including Jerry Jeff Walker, Jimmy Buffett, Lyle Lovett, Ricky Skaggs, Steve Wariner, and Rodney Crowell. He won the 2014 Grammy Award for Best Folk Album: My Favorite Picture of You...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionFolk Singer
Date of Birth6 November 1941
CityMonahans, TX
CountryUnited States of America
Anything that happens after I write a song...that's fine with me. It's up to the listener to read into it what they need from it. And that's part of the reason I write like I do, so I can leave the holes in the right places so people can say, 'Yeah, that happened to me,' and they're able to have their own little fantasy about it.
Most of the really good songs are dead true. ... It had to have happened to have the song be there. Every time I've tried to make stuff up it just kind of falls flat. So the majority of my work is something that happened to me, I saw happen to someone else, or a friend of mine told me happened. There is a certain amount of theatrical and poetic license. People are supposed to like it, that's why you're doing it. It's supposed to be fun. It's not brain surgery, it's heart surgery. They're just songs.
If I knew where good songs came from, I'd go there more often.
Music is supposed to be entertaining and if it touches you emotionally, so much the better. Sometimes you do it to save your own life, not anybody else's. That's why I write. I'm not trying to change anybody else's life or the world, I'm trying to keep from blowing my own brains out. That's the real point.
There arent any rules, as far as anything-and that applies especially to writing songs, whatever gets the point across. So youre just kind of brought up to feel-in any field, if you say you can do it, do it. There it is.
And it's just something that's always come very naturally to me. And I built about, I don't know, six, seven, eight guitars in Texas in the late 60s.