Dwight Yoakam walks into the frame like he’s wandered out of a spaghetti western and straight into a soundstage with his tight jeans, perfect hat, and posture that says he’s seen some things but isn’t about to talk about all of them. “Which camera, Kyle?” he jokes. The man’s done enough movies to know angles. And, as he tells it, the trick is to forget about them.
“The key to being a good film actor is forgetting about the camera,” he says. “Once you remember where your mark is—Spencer Tracy had a great line about that—you just walk across the room, say to yourself, ‘Mark, mark, mark,’ and then forget the damn thing.”
Yoakam’s been forgetting cameras for decades now, bouncing between honky-tonks and Hollywood soundstages like it’s all the same gig. In Under the Dome, he played a small-town inmate named Chester “Chumley” Milligan and—true to form—ended up blurring the line between acting and music. “They had me sing ‘Who’ll Stop the Rain’ in a jail cell,” he says. “I’d never covered a Creedence song before, but after that scene I thought, well, hell, I’ve done it live on CBS now. Might as well cut it properly.”
He did, of course. And like everything Yoakam touches, it came with rules. “You’ve got to make it your own without trampling the sacred ground,” he says. “I’ve covered songs my whole career, but I don’t touch the ones that are so iconic you can’t escape the original fingerprint. I didn’t do ‘Fortunate Son.’ I didn’t do ‘Bad Moon Rising.’ Leave the ghosts their space.”
He laughs and immediately contradicts himself. “Then again, I did cut ‘Ring of Fire.’ Twice.”
That contradiction—reverence versus rebellion—pretty much sums up Yoakam’s entire run. He’s a preservationist with a punk streak, a guy who can talk Buck Owens and T. Rex in the same breath without blinking. “When I made Guitars, Cadillacs, I wanted to pay tribute to the culture I was born into—the late-’50s, early-’60s Bakersfield thing. The rhinestones, the state-fair jackets. All of it came from utilitarian cowboy gear—piping on sleeves, the yoke on shirts, leather gauntlets. It was function before fashion. Then the rodeo shows made it showbiz, and it stuck. It’s a birthright of the music.”
Yoakam’s careful to point out that the cowboy in him isn’t exactly a cowboy. “I’m Appalachian by birth,” he says. “Born in Kentucky, right here near the Ohio River. My dad spent thirty years here. The cowboy thing, that’s California. But the roots? They’re the same. Ralph Stanley, the Carter Family—that’s where it all connects.”
He was twenty when he dropped out of Ohio State, bolted west, and never looked back. “I’d been to Nashville,” he says. “It wasn’t what was gonna deliver me. At that time, if you wanted to make a living doing this kind of music, you had to get to L.A. The beacon was Emmylou Harris out there, and Buck and Merle were on the periphery. Once I landed on the coast in ’77, I knew pretty quick I was home.”
The homecoming didn’t exactly come with a manual. Yoakam broke out of the so-called “cowpunk” scene—long before “alt-country” was a marketing term—and immediately found himself balancing the old guard’s side-eye with the indie crowd’s sudden embrace. “It’s funny,” he says, “because 3 Pears came out and suddenly the indie community was saying, ‘Dwight’s cool now.’ Like I’d just shown up. I’d been doing this since before they were writing about it.”
When he talks about country music’s current identity crisis, Yoakam sounds like a man who long ago decided to stop caring about the argument. “I quit trying to have a problem with it,” he says. “It’s too distracting. I don’t like everything that’s guitar rock, or all jazz, or all country. Why should I? You can’t make music by keeping score.”
He grins when the subject turns to image—something he’s quietly mastered since the ’80s. “Rock and roll always had a sense of identity,” he says. “You take Bowie, put him up there as Ziggy Stardust—that’s commitment. It was showmanship, but it was earnest. That was really who he was at that time. I got to ask him once about Marc Bolan and T. Rex. You could see that lineage—Bolan’s glam mixed with blues riffs. Bang a gong, get it on, you know?”
Yoakam’s always understood that lineage too: honky-tonk heart, rock and roll soul. “When I had the means to do it, I wanted to pay tribute to the culture I was born into,” he says. “The Stones did that too. They had bolero jackets cut at Nudie’s. Keith wore satin cowboy shirts. Everyone borrows from everyone else—it’s just a matter of doing it with respect.”
Before heading onstage, he drops one more breadcrumb about what’s next. “Yeah, I’m back on Warner Bros.,” he says casually. “Working on a new record. Probably somewhere between where 3 Pears left off and where the songs take me. I just let the songs write the map.”
Watch the full interview above and then check out the video below.
