Guitar phenom Melton offers new blues and an old classic
Clay Melton remembers the exact moment he wanted to play the guitar. He was 10, sitting in his father’s truck driving around the northwest side of Houston. His father played Jimi Hendrix’s take on “All Along the Watchtower.” The kid was pulled in immediately, but midway through the song, something else happened.
“The solo blew my mind,” Melton says. “That slide guitar part that didn’t sound like a guitar. ‘What is that?’ I just wanted to make that sound.”
Early efforts to make that sound were primitive, due in part to Melton’s three-string Toys R Us guitar. But he kept playing the song and working on the sound, and eventually, he came into possession of a proper instrument. By 13, Melton was playing crawfish boils in nearby neighborhoods. By 15, he’d found his way into blues jams at the Dosey Doe in The Woodlands. (He returns to Dosey Doe for a performance on Jan. 6.)
“I learned to play, but more importantly, I learned when not to play,” he says. “When to shut up and listen to the people you’re playing with.”
Now 26, Melton has more than a decade of professional experience to his credit. His new EP, “Back to Blue,” also suggests he’s found his own space triangulated by rock, blues and soul. Melton managed to tour the recording some last year. And he’ll play those new songs and others this week at the Dosey Doe, a performance he plans to record.
Melton points to “Say That You Love Me” — which he recorded during the pandemic at an empty White Oak Music Hall — as a crucial cut on the EP. “I really wanted to get back into a more guitar-driven style,” he says. “I wanted to write songs that sounded like what happens
when I just pick up a guitar at home and start playing. The stuff that’s close to my heart.”
The songs move around fluidly: some emphasize his blues licks, others a soulful restraint. “I never wanted to gravitate to one sound or one style,” he says. The title track speaks to that. Melton sets a moody tone at the outset of “Back to Blue,” but the song manages, in under five minutes, to take a darker and grittier detour.
That Melton closes the EP with ZZ Top’s “Jesus Just Left Chicago” speaks clearly about where his compass points.
“You can’t grow up in Texas without hearing ZZ Top,” he says. “Hearing Billy Gibbons play guitar, that was a huge influence. So I hope people recognize it as a tribute, and that they hear the joy in it.”
Befitting a tribute to Gibbons, Melton encountered a labored process finding the right guitar tone for the cover. His decade of guitar study and a bit of serendipity collaborated.
“We searched a long time for the tones,” he says. “So I looked into what Fender was doing with guitars when I was born, which was 1994. There was this Japanese Foto Flame Stratocaster, it was kind of gaudy, with a different pickup configuration. The last thing I needed was an excuse to buy a new guitar. But the next day, I went to get strings, and hanging up on the wall of used guitars was a Japanese Foto Flame Stratocaster. It was cheap and a little beat up, but it played well. It screamed. And it was good for that overdriven, crunchy sound I needed. I figured I could always return it. But we plugged it in and it worked great.
“And I didn’t have the heart to take it back.”