Jack Ingram: The Zen cowboy

18 April 2011

by Jeff Apter

For a guy who looks every inch the loner, with his stubbly broodiness and chiselled jawline, Texan Jack Ingram sure likes to talk. So much so, in fact, that in the lead up to the release of his latest album, 2009’s Big Dreams & High Hopes, Ingram talked, and talked, and then talked some more, knocking over 215 radio interviews in a single day.

“After the last 24 hours,” Ingram whispered, as he signed off from his final call, “I have officially nothing left to say.”

The next person on the line was the guy from the Guinness Book of Records. Chatty Jack Ingram was in.

42-year-old Ingram’s been doing more than talk — Big Dreams, his seventh studio album, is his third to chart high in the US Country chart, debuting in the Top 20. He’s also had 10 charting singles Stateside, with Wherever You Are reaching Number One in 2005. Not only was it Ingram’s first major hit, it was also the first numero uno for his label, Big Machine, preceding a certain labelmate named Taylor Swift by a couple of years.

And yet Ingram, the 2008 ACM Best New Male Vocalist winner, plays down his success. “To me it’s a job,” he insists. ‘” go to work and come home like any job.” That is, if your definition of “any job” is singing in front of thousands of screaming fans or filming videos — check out Barefoot & Crazy — with a cast of bikini-clad nymphs. As you do.

Pitched somewhere between the Nashvegas sheen of Keith Urban and the rootsy grit of John Mellencamp, Ingram has, over the course of a decade-and-a-bit-long career, managed to bridge the great divide that separates ‘true country’ from the middle of the road. On his latest record, such buddies and peers as Dierks Bentley and Patty Griffin help out, the latter chiming in beautifully during Seeing Stars.

“Big Dreams & High Hopes is an album that marries both his Texas-country rockin’ past with his mainstream country-rockin’ present,” said one scribe on its release, and that’s about right. But Ingram doesn’t consider himself a trailblazer.

“Coming from Texas and me trying to have my own identity may have come off as anti-establishment or Texas versus Nashville,” he says. “But that was a misconception. I wanted to be right where I am right now. Twenty in the game, on the big stage.”

Ingram’s a road dog by nature, having started out rocking bars and roadhouses between Dallas and Houston for years before seeing the inside of a studio. He’s cut five live albums and seems to exist on the road, warming up crowds for everyone from legend Merle Haggard to hunk in a hat Mark Chestnutt and dynamic duo Brooks & Dunn. And Ingram is heading this way for the second time in 12 months, as part of the CMC Rocks the Hunter Twangfest.

More than anything else, as the ever-humble Ingram insists, his slow rise to the top has been about persistence, with perhaps a little self-awareness thrown into the mix. He’s a Zen cowboy, without doubt. “I spent years trying to figure out what I was doing wrong,” says Ingram. “And finally you get with the right people, and you go, I don’t need to change anything. I just need to show up and do the job. All I had to do was be myself.”

Big Dreams & High Hopes is out now on Big Machine through Universal.