Rocktober '10s Song #6: "When My Train Pulls In" by Gary Clark, Jr. (2012)

As a student of popular musical history and lover of the blues, I love it when younger generations carry the blues torch.  It's one of those things that gives me faith in humanity.  I remember sitting on my couch and my old condo in 2011.  A friend was over, and we had just discovered Gary Clark, Jr.  As luck would have it, he was playing not too far away, at Space in Evanston, that night.  As unluck would have it, there was no chance we were going to be able to get to the show to see much of it, if there were even tickets available.  But the point is, we thought he was awesome, and that feeling hasn't changed in the twelve years since then.

Clark, like many blue-based guitar wunderkinds, is from Austin.  He has been playing the guitar since he was 12 and got pretty damn good pretty damn quickly -- to the point where the Austin mayor declared May 3, 2001 to be Gary Clark, Jr. Day in Austin.  Clark was 17.

He released his first album that year and then another in 2004, but then took six years to release his self-titled EP that kind of introduced him to a broader audience.  Since then, he's taken his guitar talents all over the world, recorded with the likes of Alicia Keys, Foo Fighters, Booker T. Jones, Tom Morello, and Childish Gambino, among others, and released three full length studio albums.

I'm going with "When My Train Pulls In," off of 2012's Blak and Blu, which was Clark's major label debut.  The album went to #6 on the Billboard album chart and #1 on the Billboard Blues album chart.  The song is a blues-based slow burner that starts with a fuzzy riff.  I've always like Clark's voice as well.  Like many great blues singers, he sounds older than his years.  But most importantly, he absolutely shreds at various points in the song.