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When Gary Clark Jr. is away from the road, the guitarist prefers things out at his ranch, 50 acres of wide-open spaces and horse country just a short drive from his hometown of Austin, Texas. There are trees and clear skies out where he lives now with his wife and three kids, along with the occasional armadillo and white-tailed deer.
Those sessions amounted to the longest period of uninterrupted musical exploration Clark has enjoyed since he signed to Warner Bros. There were no phone calls from the label, no schedules to follow. When things began opening up again, Gary and his band hit the road in mid-2021, leaving their fresh recordings unfinished. His manager, Scooter Weintraub, called him to say that he risked losing the momentum that had just peaked with“So we got real serious last year,” Gary says.
The song's title was suggested by one of its co-writers, cultural journalist Sama’an Ashrawi. Posting online recently, Ashrawi described “Maktub”—written in Arabic as مكتوب—as “a kind of destiny you must work towards, a trek along the cosmos that only ends well if you stay on the righteous path.” “I like taking my camera out and catching an owl swooping down. That’s who I am,” he continues. “I’m chilling, man. I got my toes out. I’m smoking a spliff. I’m watching my kids play in the yard. That to me is the exciting shit. Not the lights and the being on stage. That’s cool, but I don’t think of me as that.”title into an acronym, as a statement on the human condition: Jealousy, Pride, Ego, Greed and Rules, Alter Ego, Worlds.
A kid showed him how to play the riff on Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Others introduced him to distortion and punk-ska, Weezer and Green Day. He became close friends with a neighborhood girl named Eve Monsees, who played him some reverbed-out surf guitar by Dick Dale. Clark had a searing onscreen turn as bluesman Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup performing “That’s All Right, Mama” in Baz Luhrmann’s“It’s no fun to just do what everybody expects you to do,” he says, then leans forward with a grin. “I’m gonna shake it up on you: Surprise, motherfuckers!”
“I was just fed up— a little anger, a little frustration, a little bitterness. It was COVID. Everything was shut down. The news was all on our phone, and we were just living through the phone. So I posted this video, going on this long rant about what’s going on with people shooting people, racism, and haves and have-nots. And Stevie hit me up and he said, ‘I understood what you were saying in your video. I have a song for you.
Midway into the album are two romantic songs of very different moods, beginning with the old-timey jazz guitar of “To the End Of the Earth,” played and sung by Clark alone. It tells a story of idealized romance, partly inspired by a self-titled 1963 album of jazz ballads by John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman.
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