Clint Black barely stopped to catch his breath throughout the first decade of his career. The New Jersey native released his freshman Killin’ Time record halfway through 1989, kicking off his career as one of the leading men in country music, with seven more albums and 30 singles released before the new millennium. The struggle for Clint was less with making and performing music, and more with the work it took to promote it.

“It was a whirlwind,” Clint told WBUR. “It was a time when I was working so hard that my chief concern was, ‘Am I going to be able to sing tonight?’ I remember telling my manager, ‘I’m not Joe Cocker and I don’t want to sound like Joe Cocker. We have to remember the kinds of songs I sing, and the sounds and the high notes I have to hit, and we’ve got to safeguard [it].’ It didn’t happen, so eventually I kind of fought back against that.

“I used to tell people, what drives all of my decisions now is, am I going to be able to hit the high note on ‘Put Yourself In My Shoes’?” he added. “And it became a fight, almost a desperate fight at times to push back against the pressure to just keep talking.”

One of Clint’s signature songs is “Where Are You now,” which he wrote with Hayden Nicholas — never imagining how iconic the song would become for him.

“That’s one of the rare songs that I wrote on the road,” Clint reflected. “My lead guitar player and I wrote it in the back of the bus. His mom was in trouble, health troubles, and she was the person he had relied on his whole life, and now that person wasn’t there to help him get through this, sort through it. And that was his burning question: Where is that person? Who’s going to help me figure this out?”

Clint might have slowed down his pace some since then, but he has no plans of walking away from music anytime soon. The 58-year-old, who just released his latest album, Out of Sane, says he will keep making music as long as he is able.

“It’s all about health,” Clint noted. “And I still have the desire. I look to people like Willie Nelson, like Eric Clapton, Paul McCartney, and they give me hope. If James Taylor can still be making some of his best music at his age, maybe I can, too.”