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
We're gonna play you some songs we know and some we don't. But we're pretty good at it. We have no set list, no agenda and no fear.
I have no reason to sit home and write songs all day without going out and playing for the folks. And I have no reason to go play for the folks unless I'm writing new songs so they can sort of feed off one another. And I just try to do the best I can.
I hear this song and I think, Man, this is ... great. This is the best I ever heard this. I forget I'm the one singing.
I've gone a year and not written a song just because I couldn't think of anything. But I always come back to it because there's always that little buzz you get when you do something well and sing it out loud to the public. And people clap and tell you how great you are.
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.
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.
I see you're wearing glasses. I never saw you play with glasses before.
It's just something I've always done. In South Texas, the first guitar you get is a Mexican guitar. And the first one I got, the first thing I did was take it apart.
Darrell is really good in the studio. I mean, he has a real working knowledge of how the process works, and what sounds good coming back over tape, and how the stuff works together.
Chris is the engineer down at the studio where we do these things. And he's just such an integral part and he has such a marvelous ear. Also it turns out, we didn't know, but he's a pretty good fiddle player.
All gut strings. That's just the first kind of guitar I played, it was a nylon string guitar. And to me, it's the purest form of guitar making, and I just enjoy doing it.
Well, I had a fiddle that I really can't play, so I loaned it to Darrell. But yeah, he's from another planet.