Dwight Yoakam
Dwight Yoakam
Dwight David Yoakamis an American singer-songwriter, actor, and film director, most famous for his pioneering country music. Popular since the early 1980s, he has recorded more than twenty one albums and compilations, charted more than thirty singles on the Billboard Hot Country Songs charts, and sold more than 25 million records. He has recorded five Billboard #1 albums, twelve gold albums, and nine platinum albums, including the triple platinum This Time. In addition to his many achievements in the performing...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionCountry Singer
Date of Birth23 October 1956
CityPikeville, KY
CountryUnited States of America
My music is very personal. I've created it in solitude. I face a white wall and beller. I like that sound - the expression of loneliness. That's what it's all about.
Music's the one thing I try not to analyze. I don't want to destroy the magic that has always been there for me.
I've always been just kind of consumed by my own thoughts.
I'll never quit playing country music, or at least acknowledging it, always, as the cornerstone of what I am.
Ironically, the success I've experienced at country radio has left me ostracized from pop and other formats of radio.
As a writer, I always tend to take the liberty and the great artistic luxury of a composite form of writing.
As an artist, you have to maintain focus and eliminate the distraction of second-guessing yourself based on the opinions of others.
Country music originates with the colloquial, rural aspects of white America. It's really, truly, rural white America's blues.
However you arrive at the ability to ignore self-doubt - if you can acquire it or possess it or find it or discover it - move beyond self-doubt.
I embrace country music because of love, a love of what I came from.
I live out of cans a lot. But I try to indulge only in healthy canned food.
I can't escape being born in Pike County, Kentucky, grandson of a miner, Luther Tibbs, and his wife, Earlene, and traveling as a child up and down Route 23 between Kentucky and Columbus, Ohio, where I was raised, experiencing life via working-class people. Nor do I want to escape.
At the end of the film Val suggests there may be a way to rejoin the living, when he says, 'Let's see if we're able to live among the living, walk among the living.'
It varies from song to song, although Buck Owens and I recently collaborated on writing a duet together and am looking forward with a great deal of anticipation to recording that track for the new studio album.