Ace guitarist and longtime Grand Ole Opry member Marty Stuart[1] is one of country music history’s biggest champions, but what Guitar World readers...
Ace guitarist and longtime Grand Ole Opry member Marty Stuart[1] is one of country music history’s biggest champions, but what Guitar World readers really want to know is…
Your new album, Way Out West, was recorded in California and has a definite “desert” feel. Were the songs already written when you started recording, or were you inspired by your surroundings? —Kurt Balmer
It was recorded at [Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers guitarist] Mike Campbell’s studio and Capitol Studios in Hollywood, and it was absolutely inspired by that part of the world.
I consider Way Out West my love letter to the American West; so many of the things that inspired me came from there.
The first two records I bought were a Flatt & Scruggs record and a Johnny Cash record. The Johnny Cash record had a song called “Don’t Take Your Guns to Town,” and it transported me from my little bedroom in Mississippi to the West, and my imagination ran wild. That’s what started my love for the West.
Growing up in the Sixties, whether it was the Batmobile or the costumes Porter Wagoner wore or the music that came from there, California was the home of what a friend of mine calls “custom culture.” It seemed like the promised land.
The first time I went there was 1974, and I fell in love with it. I wanted to write songs that spoke to that place and everything out there that had inspired me. It all begins with a song—that’s the old saying. [Way Out West] began with a song called “Old Mexico.”
You were in Johnny Cash’s band in the early Eighties, when the charts and critics had turned their backs on the