Black's bar-friendly album pokes at cowboy clich & eacute;s

The artist said he wanted this album to be a return to his roots.
By JOHN BENSON
VINDICATOR CORRESPONDENT
After testing the contemporary country market with his 2004 album "Spend my Time," Clint Black has gone back to his roots. Luckily for him, he didn't stray too far from home.
His latest effort "Drinkin' Songs & amp; Other Logic," which features his traditional country style, finds the singer-guitarist having fun again with a familiar sound and style.
"It was a way for me to challenge myself just to make an album that stays in a box," said Black, calling from his home in Nashville. "It felt like going full circle back to my Texas honky tonk roots would be challenging and energizing and it was. It's not easy to say 'This is the kind of record I'm going to make' and then you go in and actually make it."
The kind of record Black wanted to make was, well, a drinking album filled with bar room-friendly material that, whenever and wherever it gets played on a jukebox, "you know you're going to raise up your longneck to it."
While in theory there may be some controversy about writing an album around drinking, Black said his intentions were based more on cowboy cliches than creating a soundtrack to a case of beer.
'Stereotype'
"It's all part of the stereotype -- drinking song and crying in your beer -- and there is a lot of responsibility," Black said. "I drink responsibly. We've all lost friends who didn't and we've matured and know how to enjoy drinking and not go and hurt somebody. And that's a good thing. It's kind of an American pastime and as long as you're not singing about 'Hey, I got bombed on a fifth of Jack and jumped in my truck' -- that's when I think you're really flirting with disaster."
Black admits there were plenty of longnecks and other spirits enjoyed during the writing sessions for "Drinkin' Songs & amp; Other Logic."
"There was some drinking involved, although I don't remember it," laughed Black, who said the songs had to pass the morning-after hangover test. And most did, including the dancehall swing-based "Heartaches," the western-themed "Code of the West" and the raucous "Longnecks & amp; Rednecks."
Family
At 42-years-old with wife-actress Lisa Hartman and daughter Lily Pearl, Black's life is much more complicated than in the past. Family affairs aside, the country star left his longtime label home RCA Records a few years ago to help found new label Equity Records, where artists own their music, earn money from the first CD sold and start earning stock in the company after a certain threshold of album sales is met.
Said Black, "Nobody else out there -- indie or major -- offers that to an artist, so I think for anyone standing there free from their deals, it's a real sweet deal." Already the label is working with new artists Little Big Town and Carolina Rain.
No matter what his future record sales may be, Black knows his bread and butter remains the concert stage. This summer he's sharing the limelight on a co-headlining jaunt with Dwight Yoakam. You can see the two elder statesman of country music Saturday at Blossom Music Center; however, Black isn't quite sure he's achieved this esteemed status.
"Sometimes people will make me feel that way, young artists will tell me what my music meant to them and stuff like that, but I still feel young," Black said. "I look around at guys like Willie [Nelson], [Merle] Haggard, [Eric] Clapton and Paul McCartney ... my buddy Eric Idle has 'Spamalot.' Here are people whose careers have seen many of the peaks and valleys and still they're in their 50s and 60s and having some of the biggest moments in their lives. So, I like to think of myself as having plenty of that left to go before I'm the elder statesman."