On the new episode of I Miss…90s Country Radio, Nick Hoffman digs into the music and career of Clint Black, and dives into the career of fiddle player Rob Hajacos, with commentary from Garth Brooks, Clint Black, Rob Hajacos and more. The interview with Garth Brooks, Rob Hajacos and Clint Black is available on-demand here.
Clint Black on “Better Man”
I had a cassette in my pocket and it had “Better Man” on it and a couple of other songs that we weren’t playing for anyone. And with a little trepidation, I didn’t know how the RCA promotion guy was going to take me pulling out my cassette tape and playing something else, but I decided it was worth a shot and I said, “Can I play you something else?” And played a “Better Man.” And at the end of the first chorus, he hit stop on the tape machine. He hit stop and said, “I’ll add that out of the box.” And that changed the whole direction.
Clint Black on “Killin’ Time”
So we’re driving to one of these gigs, talking about just how long it’s taking for this record to get finished and released. Yeah, I was frustrated and anxious about it. And I said, “Well, I hope this thing gets going soon because just killing time is killing me.” And we [Clint Black and Hayden Nicholas] looked at each other. Yeah, that’s the song. We knew. I mean, it was when you hear a line like that.
Clint Black on “Nothing’s News”
He [Clint Black’s father] thought it had to be like Harlan Howard. You had to get hit by a car to write a song about being hit by a car. And he said, “You just haven’t done enough live in to write real country songs”. And I was 22 and unfortunately my dad didn’t know exactly how much living I had done. And in about 20 minutes, I wrote that song in an effort to prove my dad wrong. And it really stands out for some reason, maybe it’s just because it was so focused on proving something about my ability to write a country song. Maybe that drove a little magic into it.
Clint Black on “We Tell Ourselves”
I forget, one of us [Clint Black and Hayden Nicholas] said, “That’s what we tell ourselves.” I thought, “Yeah, we do tell ourselves a lot of things, but I wonder if we could make a song out of that.” We did, and “We Tell Ourselves” became our attempt at a real country rocker that would just start off kind of like a mid-tempo ballad, and end up just burning the walls down.
Rob Hajacos on playing “Much Too Young (To Feel This Damn Old)”
It didn’t work with the other player they had tried. And they called me and I came in and did it and I mean, I missed being in Garth’s world by that much. You know, I almost missed it. It could have turned out a lot differently.
Jimmy Mattingly on Rob Hajacos
I don’t probably ever do a session that I don’t rip something off and he did. Whatever his formula, his brain thinks, it’s on the money. I think he’s played on more hit records than any fiddle player anytime ever.
I think his legacy is that if you’ve got to rock out, if you’ve got to get in there and get some attitude going, go to his playbook. He’s got that.
Jenee Fleenor on Rob Hajacos
I think I heard Rob say one time that he tried to emulate electric guitar players, which I think Rob does an amazing job at that. And you can look at it as he might’ve played the least amount of notes on a song, but by God, it was the most memorable amount of notes.
Rob Hajacos on playing “Boot Scootin’ Boogie”
I wish I knew in my heart how I came around to that. (singing) Yeah. I was so busy keeping my head down and really just trying to come up with stuff, because it was such a busy, lucrative time for everyone, that I don’t remember. I knew that it was good. I just pretty sure I never dreamed for a moment that it would be an iconic piece of music from the nineties.
Clint Black on “Something We Do”
The lyric for that song came from something I read in a book, which was ‘Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.’ The author was suggesting that relationships would be better off if we treated love as a verb, instead of a noun. As a songwriter, I always tended to think of it as a noun or never really thought of it otherwise. That just sat in my brain until Skip [Ewing] and I got together. I had taken that idea and put it into just one line, “Love isn’t something that we have. It’s something that we do.” The hard part was coming up with all the other nouns for… It isn’t some place that we go, isn’t someplace that we fall. We struggled to keep that changing right up until the very last line.
Rob Hajacos on Nashville in the 90’s
I do remember going to work. Ride down 16th or 17th Avenue at 9:30 in the morning to go to a 10:00. You could feel the electricity in the air. It was insane. I mean everybody was making money. Everybody had success. Everybody we cut became a star. I mean the whole vibe was incredible, man. It was really a great time, man. It was really great. I mean I am so grateful
