Darius Rucker remembers Cracked Rear View the same way we all do—like a tornado that changed everything, whether you wanted it to or not. “That was an anomaly,” he says now. “Perfect record, perfect timing. And then 21, 22 million records later…”
The Hootie and the Blowfish frontman might be a country star these days, but in 2019 he was reuniting with the band that made him a household name, marking the 25th anniversary of the album that defined 1994—and probably soundtracked your cousin’s high school graduation party. “Everybody had a copy,” he says. “And if you didn’t, you knew ten people who did.”
The band was prepping a tour and new record at the time, one of those legacy plays that either lands beautifully or gets politely ignored. Rucker didn’t seem worried either way. “It’s been a long time, 12, 13 years since we made a record. But we sound like we sound. It’s about the songs.”
And those songs—like the socially-charged “Drowning”—still hold weight. “That one’s always gonna speak,” he says. “There’s always gonna be hate, always gonna be that faction that thinks it’s okay to hate people for religion or skin color.” Which, considering how many Hootie fans probably skew red-state, might seem like a needle to thread. “I get that reputation for being very conservative,” he says of country music’s audience. “But I think there’s a lot of people on both sides of the aisle. I’m not a preacher. I just see it, and I sing about it.”
Not that he minds making a few people uncomfortable. “You do something important, something big, it’s gonna affect people—even negatively,” he shrugs.
And then there’s “Time,” a song he wrote in his early 20s that now hits different at 52. “That line—‘I don’t believe in time’—that evolves every day. Becomes more and more real. You start saying to yourself, ‘How much more time do I really got?’” he says.
If you’re wondering whether fame warped him, you’re not wrong. “We sold five or six million of the next record and it was a flop,” he says of 1996’s Fairweather Johnson. “It’s crazy. The backlash that comes with being that big—that’s real.”
That massive fame also got them sued, sort of. “Only Wanna Be With You” quoted Bob Dylan lyrics, and while Dylan’s people were cool at first, a few million copies later they weren’t. “We handled it. They were cool. We were cool. But yeah… it became a big deal.”
Also a big deal? Having David Crosby on Cracked Rear View. “We’re in the studio, and a friend goes, ‘I can call David Crosby.’ I said, ‘Yeah right.’ But she calls him, and later that day, he walks in,” Rucker says, still in disbelief. “He sang backup on ‘Hold My Hand’ and just nailed it. Two takes.”
Rucker also has fondness for Musical Chairs, the 1998 album that pretty much everyone overlooked. “That’s the record where you really see where I was headed,” he says, pointing toward his future country career. “I wrote most of it, and yeah—you can hear the shift.”
That shift became real in 2008 with his solo country debut Learn to Live. “Who’s giving an African-American pop singer a record deal in country music?” he asks, still amazed. “But Capitol did. And not just a deal—they gave me a real shot.” That meant visiting over 100 radio stations in two months. “I had guys straight-up say, ‘My audience will never accept a Black country singer.’ And now those same guys play me twice in a row. Accidentally.”
In the meantime, the rest of Hootie’s doing just fine. Guitarist Mark Bryan is a college professor who helped start the music program at the College of Charleston. Bassist Dean Felber is deep in the wine biz. Drummer Jim “Soni” Sonefeld’s raising a big family and dabbling in records. “Everybody’s good. That’s why there was no rush to get back together,” Rucker says.
The band’s 2019 tour was aptly titled the Group Therapy Tour, a nod to their favorite college bar in Columbia, South Carolina. “It’s still there. Always stop by when we’re in town,” he says.
So is a new Hootie record going to blow the rafters off like it did in ‘94? Probably not. But that’s not the point. “We just want to play,” Rucker says. “That’s all we ever wanted to do.”
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