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MC: Being in Austin had to have an impact as well.
Clark: Oh, yeah, sure. When I first started playing guitar and running around in Austin, around Sixth Street––that’s the main hot spot for live music in town––I was soaking up all kinds of things. I was a teenager, so it was a very influential period. But my mom said something to me; she told me that “even when you’re with all those people running around crazy downtown, keep a place for Jesus. Keep playing in church. Keep playing gospel music, too.” I listened to her––most of the time. (laughs) That was great advice.
MC: Do you have a natural inclination toward any one of the styles you play in? Like you said, the blues is your root. Is it challenging to go in the other directions?
Clark: Actually, that stuff, for me, is a lot easier. That’s the kind of stuff I was influenced by. I was into Curtis Mayfield stuff, Otis Redding, Motown and Stax type of albums and then Prince, Ready for the World, stuff like what was what I was playing when I was a kid. So those melodies, those sounds, were in everything I was listening to.
I started diving into the blues when I got to be about 12, and I was already writing––well, not really writing at that age. I didn’t know what it was called; making noise, maybe. But the R&B and soul stuff kinda came first, so I don’t really think of it as one thing being easier or harder to approach than the other. It’s all part of my musical influence, a natural progression. I soaked everything up naturally.
MC: The “Third Stone From The Sun” / ”If You Love Me Like You Say” pairing is quite epic. What’s the story behind that track?
Clark: That just kind of came from jamming. I used to play this gig every Monday down in Austin. We would play from 10 to 2 in the morning, so there was lots of space to fill. We’d play some sort of straightahead set for a while, then go on break or whatever and come back and go, “Now what are we gonna do?” “I dunno––get up there and mess around,” and we’d just kind of experiment and jam out, start off doing something in E, and we didn’t plan anything.
I’m pretty good at being a horrible bandleader by not telling the band what I’m about to do. So that (song) was one of those times I just kind of went off; they followed me, and it turned into this 20-minute thing. I kept doing it with a few different bands over the years, and I guess it just developed into what you hear and what we threw down on the record.
MC: How did you wind up working primarily with Mike Elizondo?
Clark: His name had been around. I’d seen him play with Doyle Bramhall. I heard the stuff he did with [Dr.] Dre on the Chronic 2001 album. I remember his bass being some of the coolest lines I’d ever heard; it was funky, lowdown, had a good pocket, a good groove. I was talking with my manager Scooter [Weintraub] and said, “What do you think about Mike Elizondo as a producer? I love what he does. I would love to be in a room and experiment with him for a bit.” So I walked into the studio and we started talking immediately about sounds and different artists we liked and that we had in common. I was like, “Yeah, let’s do this.”
