Blake Worthington was 13 years old when his older brother Mason gave him The Beatles’ Abbey Road for his 13th birthday. “It was game over from there,” he says to me as we sit on the front porch of my house on a recent beautiful fall Sunday afternoon in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Worthington’s originally from Owensboro, Kentucky, a small farm community two hours west of Louisville.
Worthington first started playing piano as a teenager, then transitioned to drums before settling on guitar. In high school, he began writing music. “My first song was called ‘Wasted Dreams,’ which is about a guy who never makes it in music and lives his life having those dreams,” he says. He tells me this imposter syndrome has always been in the back of his mind, even after majoring in music business at Middle Tennessee State University and moving to Nashville to become, in his words, a “successful musician.”
That’s the major theme that weaves throughout his debut album, Too Far Gone, which was released on October 11.
As many opportunities as Nashville promises, the competition to become a successful musician there is fierce. Worthington, like so many other aspiring musicians, got burned out. In the eight years he stepped away from music, he barely touched his guitar.
(Credit: Spencer Robens 2024)
But once Worthington and his wife moved two hours south from Nashville to Chattanooga, something changed. “I felt comfortable about the possibility of never pursuing it [music] again,” he says. “…When we moved to Chattanooga, something clicked. “It felt more approachable being in a smaller music scene and started meeting local musicians and it just felt right.”
Worthington began playing open mic nights around town and booking shows. But it was the birth of his daughter that got him back into songwriting again.
“My wife and I had a baby three years ago, and that was like a big part of it,” he says. “Just wanting to be able to kind of express what I was feeling in that moment…working through that and those feelings that I had and the excitement and how scary of a time that was, too.”
But it wasn’t just fatherhood that inspired him to write music again. Now, he was thinking about his legacy. “So, really the first time I played out in that period of time was for a songwriting competition and it was a song that I wrote during that period of getting ready to have a baby and what that’s like…and how are they going to view me and what I’ve done and just hearing about how I used to play music back in the day, I kind of wanted it to be real.”
With Too Far Gone, Worthington grapples with these insecurities head-on with songs like “Devil On My Shoulder,” “Light Again,” and the title track, “Too Far Gone.” Worthington says thoughts like “Am I able to still write” and “Am I able to still put out music that I think is worth listening to?” weave in and out of the album and that the goal is that perhaps, someone who listens to it might find meaning in it.
The album has a classic ’90s singer-songwriter, rock sound, which makes sense since Tom Petty, Wilco, the Old 97’s, and the Gin Blossoms highly influenced his music. “I enjoy songs that you can listen to and they tell you a story, but you can also put in your own details into that and flesh it out into what you think it’s about,” he says.
One of the last songs he wrote for the record, “Talk to Ghosts,” is his personal favorite; about the passing of his old college roommate, someone Worthington was very close to at the time.
“It’s just tough when somebody that is your age that you know personally isn’t with you anymore…” he says. “Even though you hadn’t really talked to them in a while, you start going back through years that you were super close and you talked every single day…there’s no resolution in that song. It doesn’t have a happy ending or anything like that because I mean, what can you say? There isn’t closure in those types of situations. But you can do what you can in your mind to make peace with it.”
Too Far Gone was recorded in Chattanooga, Nashville, and Los Angeles, with help from Alex Dezen of the Damnwells on bass and guitars and Ken Coomer of Uncle Tupelo and Wilco fame on drums and percussion. Worthington’s brother Mason—who first introduced him to music—played mandolin on the album as well, along with Kyle Snyder on guitars, Brian Chinino on drums, and on keyboard, Brady Beard.
Worthington has fully embraced himself as a musician again and feels encouraged by the success of his album. But these days, success means something different for him.
“I feel like I’m writing the best songs that I’ve ever been able to write,” he says. “Over the years ‘success’ in music has become a different vision for me. I keep playing and writing music because it’s my release, part of who I am…I can be my own fan. That’s fine.”