Clay Walker on Staying Alive and Urgent New Single ‘Right Now’
From 1993 to 2009, Texas-born Clay Walker enjoyed a nearly unbroken streak of Top Five singles, including six Number Ones. The singer, whose material often showcases his rich, romantic vocal style, scored his last major hit with “She Won’t Be Lonely Long” in 2009, and looks poised to return to the charts — and perhaps country radio — with the brand-new “Right Now.”
Walker’s first release in three years, “Right Now” was a collaboration with veterans Shane Minor and Wade Kirby and is currently enjoying airplay on SiriusXM’s the Highway. In spite of Walker’s absence from terrestrial radio, the song is undoubtedly well-suited to today’s fickle market. With a sweet, soulful vibe and a message of romantic urgency, the singer who landed back-to-back chart-toppers with his first two singles, “What’s It to You” and “Live Until I Die,” has what he believes couples will refer to as “our song.”
“Wade asked me what I was looking for,” Walker tells Rolling Stone Country of the origin of “Right Now.” “I said something like a song I had out a long time ago called ‘This Woman and This Man’ [a Number One for Walker in 1995], but modern-day. I’m a person that likes one- or two-word titles and I think it was Wade’s idea to repeat the phrase, ‘Right now, right now.’ We just had a really cool groove going.
“This one seemed to be the one that stuck out among women,” Walker continues. “Of course, I’m a sucker for women, so…[laughs]…that’s how it became the first single.”
Walker, who has been with his wife Jessica for 10 years and married for eight, says the song’s urgency reflects his personal experience with her, noting that the best songs are what he considers “memory makers.”
“I am a ‘right now’ kind of guy,” he explains. “When I first laid eyes on my wife, I knew that she was the one and if I didn’t do something about it right now, it wasn’t going to happen. It’s a take-action kind of song. I think it’s really going to get to the heart of people who are passionate and are in love. There’s nothing like a song to make you remember when.”
The single is the first from an upcoming LP that Walker has completed and plans to release in two to three months. Rather than work around the timetable of a major label to issue the single and then potentially wait a year or more for a label to get an album out in the marketplace, Walker is taking the bold step of releasing the single with the hope of capturing a label’s attention.
“Terrestrial radio,” the 46-year-old Walker acknowledges, “seems to be a little bit jaded to what they call ‘older’ artists. I’m by no means old. You can come to one of our concerts and the front five rows are nothing but 18- to 30-year-olds screaming their heads off. . . . I think that’s the best way to judge [an artist]. Who’s at the shows and how do they react? It’s pandemonium. I’ve always been a believer that one day this industry will wake up and realize that that actually matters the most.”