Clint Black's debut album, Killin' Time, launched him into instant superstardom when it was released, and he's taking over Taste of Country this week to share a host of exclusive content to mark the 25th anniversary of the landmark project.

The album was released on May 2, 1989, and it had an exceptionally long chart run, yielding five hit singles, including the No. 1 hits "Killin' Time," "A Better Man," "Nobody's Home" and "Walkin' Away," as well as "Nothing's News." Black and his longtime band have recorded some new acoustic versions of some of those tracks that they're sharing in exclusive videos with Taste of Country all this week, along with some of his recollections and observations about the career-making album.

In an extremely rare scenario for country music, Black wrote or co-wrote every song on the album, and he used his band to track the recordings, instead of relying on Nashville session musicians.

"I told those guys then, 'I wanna look around in 30 years and see the same faces.' And that doesn't always work out, but I did everything I could to keep doing what I was doing with the people I was doing it with," Black recalls to Taste of Country. "Some of them didn't last, and some of them did. But my attitude was, I want to be artist. I don't want to be a product."

Though there would be the usual struggles in art vs. commerce as Black's career progressed, he stuck to his guns. "Basically, I made the albums I wanted to make and delivered them to RCA, and they released them," he says.

That approach paid off in spades for Killin' Time, which had such a long shelf life commercially that Billboard declared "A Better Man" the top song of 1989, and "Nobody's Home" earned the same distinction the following year. Songs from that album will appear in Black's set as he tours this year, along with fresh material from his latest album, On Purpose, for which he partnered with Thirty Tigers for an independent release, once again writing all of the songs and recording in his own studio.

In the exclusive video above, Black and some of his collaborators talk about the recording of Killin' Time, and how both the songs and the relationships in the band have stood the test of time. Visit Taste of Country every day this week for more exclusive video content from Clint Black in celebration of 25 Years of Killin' Time.

Backstage at the 2015 ACM Awards With Clint Black

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