Claire Hinkle is Ready to ‘Get on the Bus’
Photo by: Brian Harrington | Western AF
Written by: Meredith Lawrence
When life gets going, sometimes it goes fast. For Fort Worth-based singer/songwriter Claire Hinkle, that’s exactly what happened. In September last year she called an acquaintance in the music community (now manager Blue Barnett) to ask for help because she felt stuck. By December 2024, she was at Sunset Sound Recorders cutting four singles with Shooter Jennings. A few months later, she performed at Willie Nelson’s 2025 Luck Reunion (on the Fort Worth Stage), and this fall, she played Americanafest.
“You might just burn so bright you burn yourself alive,” Hinkle sings on “In the Movies,” her wry, sardonic take on the music industry she’s suddenly seeing up close and unvarnished.
“None of this shit feels real to me.”
“None of this shit feels real to me,” Hinkle says, in awe of how much has happened for her in the last year. “[It’s] really weird to be in these rooms and meeting people, but it's been so much fun. I'm having a blast.”
Photo by: Brian Harrington | Western AF
Though her own career hit overdrive in the last year, music has always been a part of Hinkle’s life. Even in the womb, her blues musician father sang to her lawyer mother’s belly, selecting most often spy-thriller theme song “Secret Agent Man,” popularized by Johnny Rivers and the T.V. show Danger Man. Fitting then, that as a child Hinkle had her own theme songs, too, which she made up with her parents. Most memorably:
My name is Claire Hinkle
I like to jump up and down
My name is Claire Hinkle
I like to spin all around
“I have no shame,” she says, singing it now as an adult. “I’ve always been kind of a weird kid.”
Indeed, Hinkle spent so much time walking around the house singing to herself and making up songs as a kid that she inadvertently wrote a chorus for one of her dad’s songs at age 6 or 7, after riffing on an image she’d seen in cartoons.
“I would just make up songs all the time, and I was singing, ‘she's just a ball and chain around my ankle,’ Hinkle says. The song became “Ball and Chain,” which her father, musician James Hinkle, recorded on his 2008 album, Some Day. As a child, Hinkle would hop up on stage to sing the song with her dad.
Photo by: Brian Harrington | Western AF
Growing up, Hinkle was surrounded by music, she listened to it, sang it, and composed it. But when she was 15, her dad made her an offer: ‘write one song a month for the rest of the year, and I’ll take you to record them.’ Hinkle recorded the resulting eight-song album, Let it Out at Fort Worth Sound studios and released it in 2017. Spacy and folky, the album is a time capsule of a 16-year-old songwriter learning to create.
“I have mixed feelings about that, because it's the first thing I ever made. So there's a part of me that is like, ‘wow, that's awful,’” Hinkle says. “And then the other part of me is proud of it, because it was the first thing, it's my baby. It was a baby making baby art.”
These days, Hinkle writes rock and blues-tinged Americana music with a witty, clear-eyed take on life. In “Hot Shit,” her current single, she takes down an egotistical ex; and in “Don’t Ask Questions” (which was inspired by a family inside joke about something Hinkle’s dad said to her mom when they were dating), Hinkle cautions, “there’s a difference between love and use.”
Hinkle’s path to Americana music wasn’t direct. She attended the New School in New York City for college, and gigged around town. After moving back to Fort Worth, a couple of years working as a behavioral therapist for autistic children and in her rock band Tiny Giants didn’t feel like the right fit for Hinkle. The turning point came when she attended the 2024 Luck Reunion, where at an after party she got up and sang Linda Ronstadt’s “Blue Bayou” (written by Roy Orbison and Joe Melson). Though she was so nervous she hardly remembers the moment, it sparked something in her, and a few months later she reached out to Barnett, setting off the chain of events that kickstarted her career.
Since she’s been around the industry her whole life, Hinkle isn’t under any illusions about making money or having an easy life, which she makes clear in “Get on the Bus.” Making it work is hard, still, she’s ready to, as she sings: “Get on the bus and shut the fuck up / This is what those dreams are made of / Smiling through the pain’s getting kind of fun.”
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