★★★★★
Whether you find yourself enjoying Clint Black's When I Said I Do depends wholly on whether you're a fan of his vast collection of hits. Released exclusively to Cracker Barrel Old Country Store and iTunes, When I Said I Do is a collection of re-recorded versions of love songs which hold a special meaning to Clint. While most of these songs were hits, some of them were once 'just' album cuts...
- www.roughstock.com
2013-08-16
★★★★★
It's not surprising that Clint Black's third album, The Hard Way, makes a stylistic tip of the hat to '70s singer-songwriters Jimmy Buffett, Dan Fogelberg, and James Taylor. After all, hasn't Black sat back and watched onetime close rival Garth Brooks shoot to crossover superstardom by mixing his own traditional country soundwith those same pop elements? What's far more unexpected on this long-awaited follow-up to PutYourself in My Shoes (1990) is the album's somber, reflective mood...
- ew.com
2011-03-03
★★★★★
Clint Black, who's been
as creatively stale as a year-old Communion loaf, hauls out the
big guns on his sixth album of new material, Nothin' but the Taillights, writing with
Matraca Berg, Marty Stuart, and Steve Wariner; dueting with
Martina McBride; and picking with Chet Atkins and Mark Knopfler.
Problem is, he needs all that window dressing: Other than the
spirited title tune and a bluegrass ballad with Alison Krauss,
this is the dullest set of songs since, well, his last album....
- ew.com
2009-06-12
★★★★★
Sixteen years into his career, Clint Black returns to the simplicity ofbarroom songs that informed his heroes Haggard, Nelson, and Jones. WhileDrinkin' Songs & Other Logic occasionally delivers a wincing lame line ("It's not that kind ofclass that made Budweiser"), Black works his magic on the dance floor.There he evokes the best of old-fashioned honky-tonk and Texas Westernswing, even as his rhythmic shuffles make him the Ray Price of hisgeneration.
- ew.com
2009-06-12
★★★★★
The heroes of Clint Black's songs are young men in a hurry. On themillion- selling Killin' Time, Black's 1989 debut disc, they wereobsessed with making better men of themselves and walking away fromfailing romances when it looked like the jig was up. But more oftenthan not they were merely traveling in circles, fraught withindecision...
- ew.com
2009-06-12
★★★★★
When Clint Black jumped out of the box with Killin' Time in 1989,
he looked as if he'd soon own the store. He was the premier hat act,
with good looks, terrific neotraditional songs about calloused
factory workers and bruised lovers, and a pure Texas tenor that broke
in all the right places. But that was before Garth Brooks and all the
other go-for-broke cowpokes...
- ew.com
2009-06-12
★★★★★
In today's brave new Nashville, artists fall into neat categories: the docile crooners, like Randy Travis and George Strait, who sing pretty and pretty much toe the line; and the hell raisers, like Steve Earle and John Anderson. But, lucky for us, twenty-seven-year-old Clint Black doesn't fall into one of the neat categories. Neither choirboy nor hellion, he writes and sings about battered hearts, broken dreams and tortured emotions with an unflinching directness...
- www.rollingstone.com
2009-06-08
★★★★★
If you were Clint Black and your debut album remained Number One on the country charts for twenty-eight weeks, you might ask, "What next?" On his follow-up, Put Yourself in My Shoes, Black provides the answer. He continues staking out eclectic turf and, with his co-writer Hayden Nicholas, advances a point of view that is rather uncommon in the country mainstream ? tender but unsentimental, tough but courageous enough to admit vulnerability.Against producer James Stroud's uncluttered aural backd...
- www.rollingstone.com
2009-06-08
★★★★★
Country music is for those old or repressed enough to care deeply about monogamy--one-on-one love in all its passion, comfort, consternation, impossibility, and routine. That's why I doubt the Nashville hunks have siphoned much support from Nirvana, Madonna, or Public Enemy--their targets are Richard Marx and Bryan Adams. Still, this is a sad one...
- www.robertchristgau.com
2009-02-27