The Anger Inside Gary Clark Jr.

The singer-guitarist felt stuck creatively and typecast as a bluesman. To move forward, he had to free his sound and tap into the rage he felt living in Trump’s America.

- Patrick Doyle

It’s already past midnight, but Gary Clark Jr. wants to keep going. The guitarist is standing in the center of a darkened room at Arlyn Studios, an unmarked building hidden behind a housing development in South Austin. Clark has been hard at work all night teaching his band anew song, “This Land,” taking breaks only to smoke spliffs and sip 90-proof whiskey. Clark counts yet another take of the song — a thunderous blues stomper marked by synth-bass and a hip-hop beat — before unleashing a flurry of wah-wah notes on his Gibson SG. He howls about living on “50 acres witha Model A/Right in the middle of Trump country,” next to a neighbor who “can’t wait to call the police on me.” He closes his eyes for the chorus: “Nigga, run, nigga, run/Go back where you come from.” ¶ Clark wants to get “This Land” right because he considers it the most important song he’s ever written. “It’s about being black in America, in the South,” he says. Clark wrote it after a confrontation with his own neighbor near his new 50-acre ranch outside Austin, where Clark lives with his wife, model Nicole Trunfio, and their toddlers, Zion and Gia. One day, Clark drove over to tell the neighbor his donkey had wandered onto Clark’s property. “He was very disrespectful to me in front of my kids,” says Clark. “And I don’t play with that shit. He started saying, ‘You don’t live here. There’s no way you could live here. Who really owns this place?’

“It pissed me off,” says Clark. “I got a good chunk of property. I worked my ass off to be able to buy a place that my people can enjoy and run around — and to have this guy question me?”