Guitar Man is the twelfth studio album by American musician J. J. Cale, released on June 25, 1996 by Virgin Records.

They didn’t call it unplugged in those days but that is what it was…There is a fascination about electronics…It is an art form in itself.”[3] After Guitar Man, Cale would not release another album for eight years.[relevant?]

Produced by Cale, Guitar Man differs from the albums he made in the seventies and early eighties in that while those records featured numerous top-shelf session players, Cale provided the instrumentation on Guitar Man himself, augmented by wife Christine Lakeland on guitar and background vocals and drummer James Cruce on the opener “Death in the Wilderness.” In his AllMusic review of the LP, Thom Owens writes, “Although he has recorded Guitar Man as a one-man band effort, it sounds remarkably relaxed and laid-back, like it was made with a seasoned bar band.” In assessing the album, rock writer Brian Wise of Rhythm Magazine commented, “‘Lowdown’ is typical Cale shuffle, ‘Days Go By’ gives a jazzy feel to a song about smoking a certain substance while the traditional ‘Old Blue’ reprises a song that many might first have heard with The Byrds version during the Gram Parsons era.”[4] The traditional song “Old Blue” long fascinated Cale, who reflected, “I have heard that song all my life, it’s an old folk song.

I have heard the song off and on in my subconscious for years.”[5] On the ecologically minded “Wilderness,” Cale deems the planet “a hopeless case, I guess,” and surmises “We'll mow it down, we'll rape the ground 'til there's nothing left to abuse.”[relevant?]

Thom Owens of AllMusic gave the album an average review and said “there's a handful of very good songs, but there's nothing on the level of his previous classics.