Not Enough Whiskey

Album: Down In A Hole (2016)
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Songfacts®:

  • Playing Jack Bauer for nearly a decade would give anyone a bleak outlook on life, but Kiefer Sutherland knows a thing or two about about sorrows, and how to drown them, from personal experience. "I've certainly been there, where something will happen in life, and one, two, three bottles of whiskey are not going to fix it," the former 24 star tells Rolling Stone of his debut single. "In the context of the song, those moments are important to realize so you have to find another way to deal with them. I'm sure a lot of people have felt that way."

    In this country track, Sutherland is trying to cope with the reality that his girlfriend has left him for someone else.
  • Sutherland, who founded the Ironworks record label with songwriting partner Jude Cole, started writing songs near the end of his tenure on 24, but he never expected to sing them. Because the lyrics were so personal, Cole suggested Sutherland's voice would be the perfect fit. "The thing I like about my voice is there's a lot of texture to it, and it's a voice that sounds like it's got a lot of miles on it," Sutherland explains. "Somehow it fit my lyrics and my songs, and I started to feel comfortable about it."
  • Sutherland financed the music video, which captures him walking across a parking lot and into a bar in one long shot. When it came time to film the clip, the experienced actor expected that it would be an easy task. "I was like, 'No, this I got in the bag. I'll do the video; that's no problem. At least that, I know what to do with, and we'll be done by lunch,'" Sutherland recalled to reporters.

    "It was one of the hardest things I've ever shot in my life," he continued. "There are no cuts, so it was all one go, or one take, one long take, at least to the bar … and it actually took two days. I was so embarrassed. That's when I started to realize that this was actually very different in my head, because of the personal nature of what I was trying to do. It was just inherently different than anything else I had done before as an actor."
  • So another actor thinks he can be a singer? Sutherland totally gets it. "If I hear about an actor doing a music project, my eyes are the first to roll," he tells Rolling Stone. "It's been done before and, on some levels, not very well. A lot of actors make records but won't tour to support them or make videos, and it ends up not being serious. I felt strongly that this was something I wanted to do."
  • Country music is rooted in storytelling and that's exactly what appeals to Sutherland - that, and he already knows he looks good in a cowboy hat. The actor starred as an Old West gunslinger in Young Guns (1988), Young Guns II (1990), and Forsaken (2016).

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