CMT Blog: Archive

Guy Clark's spooky new song, "The Guitar," freaks me out. When he played it last night (Sept. 23) at a sold-out record release show for Somedays the Song Writes You, you could hear the audience gasp at the story's revelation, which I won't spoil here. That rarely happens in Nashville. During a recent phone interview, I asked if he and co-writer Verlon Thompson knew the song would take such a dark turn. "No," he replied. "I don't know if that's a dark turn or not." When I informed him that it always gives me chills, he just laughed. Laughed!

Asked how the song came about, Clark said, "We were teaching a songwriting class up in Jorma Kaukonen's Fur Peace Ranch and the only way I ever went about something like that was just, 'Well, we're all going to write a song.' So we did and that's what came out. We just wrote it and it didn't have that melody, but we were trying to sing it. And I never thought about it again."

Years later, somebody in the class e-mailed Thompson asking for a refresher on the melody -- and the song caught both of its writers off-guard, even though they wrote it.

"Both of us just flipped out," Clark says. "It was like, ‘Wow, you mean this has been laying there for four years?' Verlon picked up a guitar and just played that chord progression and started speaking it, and there it was."

In the second half of his show at the Belcourt Theatre, Clark offered a slew of familiar older tunes -- "The Cape," "L.A. Freeway," "Desperados Waiting for a Train," "Homegrown Tomatoes," "The Randall Knife," "Stuff That Works," "Out in the Parking Lot" and "Dublin Blues." In my humble estimation, "The Guitar" can be played proudly amid any of those classics.