“My name is Mike Clifford, I’m a Texas singer-songwriter.
I’ve been playing guitar since I was 12. I took piano lessons starting at age 7 and I gave up piano as soon as I learned guitar, it was just a lot more interesting to me and a lot more portable!
I’m from Great Falls, Virginia. I’m definitely a long way from home in Texas. It’s interesting, West Virginia and Texas are not that much different. They are both good ‘ole red neck states when it comes right down to it.
I mostly liked rock and roll growing up. I moved out to Los Angeles to become a ‘rock star’ in ’89 and the scene out there at the time was really bad for rock and roll. It was the end of the hair band era. I interviewed with different bands and they said you’ve gotta get hair extensions. I was just disgusted with it; the music was shallow and superficial. Fortunately, in the early 90’s, Nirvana came along and the grunge movement kind of did away with all that hair band stuff.
A friend of mine in 1990, introduced me to country music and I realized that the songs that were coming out were really great. That got me excited about it. I quit my job in Los Angeles and moved to Texas. Since then I’ve really been into country. There’s a lot of great stuff happening in Texas, it has its own style and market. There are a lot of great bands putting out great music and nobody outside of Texas is even hearing it. That’s really unfortunate, but that’s what motivates me now, to put the word out, spread the gospel.
I worked in high tech up until 2003. I got laid off from that job; I’d been there for 9 years. I’d played in bands part-time back in college, and while I was working, but in 2003 I took the plunge and began doing music full time. Pretty late in life I decided to go and start doing music, seriously. It’s kinda nice, it takes the pressure off, you don’t feel like, “I’ve got to get signed by a major label,” because they won’t sign anybody my age. They’re looking for people pretty much under 30.
We have another album we’re working on for release soon. This’ll be my fourth album as an indie, so 4 albums in 6 years. On the first album, I put out I played every instrument on it, on the second one, I did all the guitar work and the organ and, then, on last album I let really good people come on and do all that, I just sang.
I’m fortunate that I have a really, really good band and we’ve been able to keep the same guys together for a while. It’s hard to do in central Texas; it’s very competitive. We’ve got a lot of people in Austin that are burned out in Nashville and LA, that moved down to Austin and want to put a band together. There’s a flood of musicians and it’s very challenging.
Up until now, most of my songs have been pretty sad, they tend to be honky-tonk type songs. I cover a lot of different themes. They tend to focus on men and women’s relationships and the challenges of those relationships. I try to write stuff that hasn’t been done before and go for a balance of serious and funny. The current single out now "West Texas Sun" I wrote for my wife. The song just broke onto the Texas chart a few weeks ago.
We’ve done some great shows with guys like Rick Trevino, John Connelly, Larry Gatlin, Chris Young, Johnny Lee, Dale Watson, and some others. I’ve also been nominated for two Texas music awards. In 2005, I was nominated as vocalist of the year and in 2007 the Mike Clifford Band was nominated for record of the year. Didn’t win either time, but that’s kind of a big deal down in Texas, just to be nominated... it’s sort of our CMAs.
The Larry Gatlin, show we did was a retirement community, everybody there was over the age of 65, and so that was an interesting crowd. I’ll probably sound really like an old fogie here, but we play a lot of senior-oriented events, because they usually appreciate good country music. We play every 3 months at a senior singles dance at one of the dance halls on a Sunday, and they come out in numbers. Three days before the Gatlin show we played two fraternity parties, so it was the total opposite end of the spectrum from crazy, loud, raucous, drunk kids, and, then, the next gig after that at a retirement community.
I have really strange shows, sometimes. I take almost any gig that pays decently, just because nothing really good ever happens by not playing. All the good breaks have come just from playing; you never know what a gig is going to bring you. Probably the greatest thing that happened is I met my wife Annie at what I considered to be kind of a lame gig, playing at a Bennigan’s on St. Patrick’s Day. We [now] have a 9-month old daughter named Melody."
