There are several popular images of Gary Clark Jr: the hipster bluesman; the guitar prodigy who made Eric Clapton want to play again; the political firebrand who channelled his experience of the American South into 2019’s triple Grammy-winning album This Land; the devastated Black man who gave an incendiary response to George Floyd’s death at the hands of a white police officer in Minneapolis in 2020. “We just want to wake up in the morning, go and make the most out of what we can, get what we can for ourselves and for our family, and go the f**k back home,” he posted on Instagram at the time. “That’s all.” And of course there’s the most familiar, wellmeaning if somewhat reductive label: ‘the saviour of the blues’.
“People get that really wrong about me,” the 40-year-old Clark tells us. “Although I appreciate that, it’s my roots. But if you go back and listen to my old records, I’ve always been incorporating different styles and genres and ideas on all my records. I’ve always been that way. I think people have this vision of like: ‘Well, I thought that guy was gonna be the next Hendrix.’ That wasn’t really what I was setting out to do.”
He pauses, chuckling. “Or that I take myself real seriously. I think people think I’m serious all the time.”
In light of such impressions weren’t entirely surprising. The messages in that record were unflinching, uncomfortable,serious.
