On This Day in 1990, Clint Black Was at the Top of the Country Chart With a Song He Almost Sold To Make His Car Payment

On this day (January 22) in 1990, Clint Black was at the top of the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart with “Nobody’s Home.” It spent three consecutive weeks in the peak position. Later, Billboard named it the No. 1 country song of the year.

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Black made his debut with “A Better Man” in 1989. Later that year, he followed it with “Killin’ Time”, the title track from his debut album. Both songs were toe-tapping honky tonk-infused numbers that topped the chart and put Black on the map. “Nobody’s Home” introduced listeners to a new side of the singer/songwriter. While it carries the same sonic spirit of his first two singles, its mood is much different.

[RELATED: On This Day in 1989, Clint Black Was at the Top of the Country Chart with a Song That Took a Month to Write]

“Nobody’s Home” is a ballad about a man who is a shell of himself after his lover leaves him. Throughout the song, the narrator talks about going through the motions and feeling empty–“The lights are on, but nobody’s home.”

Clint Black Almost Sold “Nobody’s Home” for $250

The story behind “Nobody’s Home” is an interesting one, to say the least. First, Clint Black wrote the song over the course of a few days while he was battling a fever.

At the time, he was living with roommates who had day jobs. So, he was alone and battling the flu and a high fever. “I would just get out of bed to get some water or use the bathroom or whatever, and that was about all I could manage. It was really, really bad,” Black recalled. “On my way back and forth to bed, I would stop and write these lines down. When the fever finally broke, and I was able to stay out of bed for more than a couple of minutes, I sat down at the desk and looked at what I’d written. It was really the entire song,” he added.

Eventually, he sat down with a guitar and put music to the lyrics. At the time, he was a long way from being a country star. He was a struggling musician who was on the verge of losing his car. Black believed in “Nobody’s Home” and took it to a publisher he knew. “He wanted to buy the song for $250, which was the exact amount of money I needed to keep my car from being repossessed. It was killing me, because I kept feeling like that was a song that could get me into the business,” he said.

Fortunately, another friend of Black’s loaned him the money to make his car payment and told him to keep the song in his pocket.

The Song Got to Nashville First

Interestingly, the song made it to Nashville before Clint Black. Several months later, he was in Nashville working with producer James Stroud to build the tracklist for his debut album. He had played Stroud demos for a few songs. “When I get to ‘Nobody’s Home,’ he asks his assistant, ‘Hey, go get me that tape out of my drawer.’ He comes back, and he’s got that tape of ‘Nobody’s Home’! It turned out that the publisher had gone ahead and started pitching that song to producers in Nashville, and James had it,” Clint Black recalled.

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