In 1992, right after Sharon Stone publicly compared kissing him to eating a dirt sandwich, country singer Dwight Yoakam refused to say a single negative word in return and walked back into a Los Angeles recording studio. Their brief romance had started earlier that year just as the film Basic Instinct made Stone a global star. The pair drew relentless attention from Hollywood photographers until the relationship ended abruptly after only a few months. According to entertainment reports at the time, Yoakam broke off the romance at the Four Seasons Hotel shortly before the 1992 Academy Awards. Stone soon took her frustration to the press, delivering the dirt sandwich insult that tabloid writers repeated throughout the decade. Raised with the private habits of his Kentucky coal-country family, Yoakam declined every interview invitation to fire back or defend his pride in print. Instead of trading insults in the newspapers, Yoakam locked himself in the studio with his longtime producer and guitarist Pete Anderson. They poured the fallout of that year into the sessions for his March 1993 album, This Time, which sold three million copies to become the biggest commercial release of his career. That quiet discipline also earned him lasting respect in the film industry, where he soon built a serious acting career of his own in movies like Sling Blade and Panic Room. After decades in the public eye, Yoakam married Emily Joyce in 2020 with fewer than ten people in attendance and welcomed his first child, keeping his home life just as guarded as his silence outside the Four Seasons nearly thirty years earlier.

Introduction

After Sharon Stone told the press in 1992 that kissing Dwight Yoakam was like eating a dirt sandwich, the Kentucky-born singer declined every interview request to answer her and walked into Hollywood’s Capitol Studios instead.

Working alongside his longtime producer and lead guitarist Pete Anderson, Yoakam spent those 1992 sessions recording the eleven tracks that became his March 23, 1993 release, *This Time*.

The two men had partnered since Yoakam’s early days playing Los Angeles roots-rock clubs, building a career on stripped-down Bakersfield honky-tonk. For *This Time*, Anderson and Yoakam expanded their studio blueprint inside the historic Capitol tower on Vine Street, bringing in arranger Paul Buckmaster to conduct strings alongside upright bass player Chuck Domanico, drummer Jeff Donavan, keyboardist Skip Edwards, and pedal steel veteran Al Perkins.

Earlier in 1992, Yoakam’s brief relationship with Stone had drawn constant attention from celebrity photographers just as her thriller *Basic Instinct* arrived in theaters. Entertainment outlets reported that Yoakam ended the romance at the Four Seasons Hotel in Los Angeles shortly before the 64th Academy Awards in late March, though he still accompanied her to the ceremony in his cowboy hat.

When Stone’s dirt sandwich remark hit the newspapers and late-night monologues, entertainment reporters waited for a counterpunch. Born in Pikeville, Kentucky, to parents from coal-mining families, Yoakam kept the private habits of his upbringing and gave the tabloids nothing to print.

Inside Capitol Studios, he directed that energy into his songwriting notebook. Yoakam wrote or co-wrote ten of the eleven songs on *This Time*, teaming up for the first time with Montana-based songwriter Kostas on five tracks: “This Time,” “Two Doors Down,” “King of Fools,” “Try Not to Look So Pretty,” and the lone outside cut he didn’t write, “Ain’t That Lonely Yet,” which Kostas penned with James House.

On his own, Yoakam wrote six songs for the project, including the string-backed opener “Pocket of a Clown,” the lonely highway ballad “A Thousand Miles from Nowhere,” “Home for Sale,” and the driving rocker “Fast as You”.

Anderson later explained the musical shift behind the board during those 1992 dates, noting that after establishing themselves within the boundaries of traditional country records, they wanted to reach a point where they simply made “Dwight Yoakam music” the same way Johnny Cash made his own distinct style.

Tracked by engineers Dusty Wakeman and Peter Doell and mixed across three Los Angeles facilities, the album paired Perkins’ lap steel and Scott Joss’s fiddle with electric guitar riffs, pop-Polynesian string charts, and rockabilly percussion.

When Reprise Records issued *This Time* in March 1993, “Ain’t That Lonely Yet,” “A Thousand Miles from Nowhere,” and “Fast as You” each climbed to Number 2 on the Billboard country singles chart. “Ain’t That Lonely Yet” also earned Yoakam a Grammy Award for Best Male Country Vocal Performance.

Although the album peaked at Number 4 on the Top Country Albums chart without producing a Number 1 country single, it crossed into the Top 25 of the all-genre Billboard 200 and was certified triple platinum for three million copies sold, outperforming every other album in his catalog.Stream Albums

His refusal to trade gossip during the 1992 media blitz also preserved his standing among Hollywood directors and actors. Three years after *This Time* hit record stores, Billy Bob Thornton cast him as the abusive boyfriend Doyle Hargraves in the 1996 drama *Sling Blade*, launching a screen career that later included David Fincher’s 2002 thriller *Panic Room*.

Yoakam maintained that same guarded boundary around his personal life for the next three decades. After dating photographer Emily Joyce quietly for ten years, he married her in March 2020 at St. Monica Catholic Church in Santa Monica with fewer than ten people in the pews, waiting two months to announce the wedding out of respect for frontline workers during the pandemic lockdown before welcoming their son, Dalton Loren, that August.

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