Gary Clark Jr. on New Album: ‘I Was Very Aware of the Sophomore Slump’
Gary Clark Jr. walks into Arlyn Studios in Austin, Texas, like he, if not owns the place, could navigate it blindfolded, walking backwards and playing a gnarly solo.
This is not a surprise. The 31-year-old Clark, blues guitarist, lifelong Austinite and increasingly famous recording artist, has just spent a year and change in this deceptively small studio working on and off to finish The Story of Sonny Boy Slim, the follow-up to his Grammy-nominated 2012 studio album, Blak and Blu. (The killer, self-explanatory Gary Clark Live appeared in 2014.)
“I really wanted to just come back home and be in the studio, hang out and go back to my house,”said Clark, fedora pushed back on his head, wearing a V-neck white T-shirt and jeans.
Which is to say that Blak and Blu was an L.A. album, recorded in Tarzana and produced by industry heavy hitters such as “Real Slim Shady” co-writer Mike Elizondo and longtime Green Day helmer Rob Carvallo. There were stabs at rock, rap and R&B mixed in with the electric blues on which Clark made his bones.
Sonny Boy is a pure Austin product, written and recorded at Arlyn, produced by Clark with his live engineer Bharath “Cheex” Ramanath and Arlyn’s chief engineer Jacob Sciba.
From the screaming solos on “Grinder” to the stomping funk on the almost Prince-ly “Star” to the acoustic gospel (!) on “Church,” everything on the tracks we previewed sounds of a piece, the product of an artist who can play almost anything he picks up, working with a tight, trusted crew.
We head into a control room at Arlyn. “These guys,” Clark says, gesturing to Sciba and fellow engineer Joseph Holguin, who are cueing up the finished songs, “put [in] a lot of hard work to let me be in this room and let loose.”
Clark good-naturedly urges me to take a rolling chair near the board. (Apparently, I am sitting in his traditional spot on the control-room couch: “I just wanted you to move,” he says with a grin.)
Begun in March 2014 and mixed and mastered just this past May, Sonny Boy was written and recorded in between Clark touring on Blak and, oh, yeah, having a baby son named Zion with his partner, model Nicole Trunfio. (You might have seen Trunfio on the cover of the Australian edition of Elle, suede coat open, nursing Zion.)
“I found that I can’t write on the road,” Clark says. “That doesn’t work for me.” So starting last March, he headed into Arlyn with little more than ideas and grooves. “I basically came in here with the bare minimum,” Clark says. “First two weeks, I just banged around, sat on the drums, played bass.”
