Sturgill Simpson, a psychedelic country pioneer, joins Joe Rogan to critique Nashville’s stagnant, commercialized music scene post-2006, where labels prioritize quarterly profits over artistic vision. His five-album career plan—three more after his current work—reflects a deliberate shift from industry pressures, blending Navy experiences, addiction struggles, and DMT-inspired themes like Tibetan bardo teachings. Rogan contrasts modern country’s manufactured sound with its rebellious roots, citing Strassman’s DMT: The Spirit Molecule as a catalyst for Simpson’s work, while debating substance responsibility—like Jim’s roof fall—against alcohol’s widely acknowledged risks. European fans’ lifelong loyalty to live storytelling underscores the U.S.’s fleeting engagement with music’s deeper cultural role. [Automatically generated summary]
the Joe Rogan experience train by day Joe Rogan podcast by night all day fresh off the road Sturgill Simpson ladies and gentlemen Thanks for doing this, man.
You know, I had heard about your music from several people online.
I don't remember who made me take the plunge and download your shit.
Like, a bunch of people had recommended you.
I had Shooter Jennings on, and along those lines, people said, like, hey man, if you really dig Shooter Jennings, you gotta check out Sturgill Simpson.
You know, it's very unique in that it has a lot of country sound to it, but...
Like that Turtles All The Way Down song.
I mean, who the fuck is doing songs about mind-expanding, consciousness-expanding drugs in country music?
I mean, that's just not being done.
But it's still, like, really good country music.
Like, I like a lot of country music, you know?
Even songs that are...
Even like a song that's sort of a classic song with all those themes that you talked about before, like drinking, a heartache, if it's well done, I still really like it, you know?
For a long time, country got classified amongst a lot of young people as being, like, a dumb kind of music, you know?
And unfairly so.
And I think that as some young people started getting into some of the other country, like getting into some Johnny Cash songs, for instance, you know, you start going, oh, this is country, too.
Okay, well...
You can't say Johnny Cash songs are dumb.
You just can't.
I mean, they were just...
He had too much crazy shit going on in those songs.
It's like thinking that anybody who has a Southern accent's got to be a moron, thinking anybody who's singing country songs, they've got to suck.
That's what it is.
It's an urban form of classism.
Like, you look at that style of music, and they automatically, some people did for a while.
But I think guys like Shooter, guys like you, you guys are opening up, and Honey Honey Band does a lot of country-type sound.
I think a lot of people are opening up people's ideas of what that sound really is, and you hear a great song, it's like, God damn it, that's a great song.
It doesn't matter if they've got a banjo playing in the background, you can't tell me that song didn't fuck you up.
I think when you expand your horizon and sort of open up your ideas of musical appreciation, I've tried really hard with a lot of stuff and it just can't catch.
Like every few months or so, I try with jazz.
I'll throw some Coltrane on and I'll be like...
I'll be in my car and then five minutes in and I fucking snap.
I just can't take it anymore.
And I'll throw some Kid Rock on or something just to turn it the other way.
Yeah, my mom's brother, all his friends, they had this house, and it was these two twin brothers, and both of them never married, so they turned their house into a fucking practice space, and they just had this PA and lights and shit that stayed set up all the time.
Yeah, I mean, before I even really knew anything about music or songwriting, I think I was learning how to play in a band just from hanging out with those guys.
Played mandolin and just shoved that shit down my throat.
I mean, repeatedly until I accepted it.
Mom, my other grandfather, he was like a big Merle Haggard, Marty Robbins guy.
Had an old Gibson, a very beautiful voice.
He probably more than anybody.
We'd watch Hee Haw and shit when I was a kid and TNN and he'd kind of tell me which of the guys were actually playing and the ones that were just holding the guitar as a prop.
He was like six or seven years older than me, so...
You know, just older teenage neighbors with Chevy Novas and shit listening to Guns N' Roses, you know, when you're in fifth grade.
But Mike really, I remember very vividly one weekend, we'd go up to visit, they had a farm in Ohio, and I was probably in fourth or fifth grade, and I remember he knew I was really into music, and I was playing guitar already, and he's like, what are you listening to?
I don't know.
I mean, it probably was the Monkees or something.
He took me to his bedroom and he had one of those tower stereo systems with the glass door and the super headphones.
And he sent me...
And CDs had just come out.
You know, this was like 87, 88, I don't know.
And he just had this...
Already had this fucking mountain of CDs.
And he's like, here...
It was like Zeppelin box set and Cream and Hendrix and Humble Pie and Traffic and all these bands.
It was like a fucking bomb just went off in my head.
Everything just sounds really settled and cohesive.
Wow.
Whereas in digital, I hear the separation, especially in the stereo.
You can just hear, it's almost like you're sitting at the mixing board, and you just, like some asshole decided that guitar needed to be like a hard two o'clock right there.
But in a vinyl, it just kind of seems more three-dimensional, like it's coming from around you, I feel like.
So, the thing about the record stores that people loved was that it was sort of like, because we didn't have the internet, you would go there and you would see these, it was on a big piece of paper.
Like, holy shit, here's, you know, here's the new Bruce Springsteen album.
Like, it's right there, and you see, oh, wow, it's like, this is what he made.
This is what he's been doing for the past year.
Bruce has been, you know, writing all these songs, and bam, here we go, we got it, wow.
When you first decided that you were going to be a professional country music singer, did you decide slowly and gradually, or did you just fucking dive in?
I moved to Nashville once in 2006. You can play in local bands and if that's what you want out of it, that's great.
There's a lot of people that do that on a hobbyist level.
Like I said, it's what you do after work.
For me, that just never felt rewarding enough.
I never felt like I was giving everything I could to it.
It's a very frustrating place, and I ended up putting it down a lot of times because of that.
I felt like it was bringing me more heartache.
I took jobs and worked normal jobs, and I was out working a railroad job in Utah for almost four years.
My wife was out there with me.
I guess, for whatever reason, from dealing with the stress of that, I didn't realize at the time I wasn't fulfilling my fucking purpose, Joe Rogan.
You know what I mean?
She kind of recognized that, and I started writing a lot as a result of dealing with the stress from my job and playing at home.
She just kind of told me, you know, you don't suck at this, and you're going to wake up at 40 and know you never fucking tried, and then I'm stuck with your miserable ass.
You know, depending on what, the industry, there's so many sides of the industry that people fall into.
And most, and I'd say the bulk majority of it is complete and total shameless opportunists.
Hmm.
But then the musicians come and everybody, you know, the thing about musicians, we're lazy as fuck and nobody really wants to work.
So you get all these guys, these side players, they're looking for songwriters to get gigs supporting or backing up and they want like half the door of what you get paid for their services because they don't want to wait tables.
And there's guys that are really good and earn that money.
And then there's this side of it.
But it just really feels like, to me, the first time I feel like everybody I've met, it's like literally, hey man, how's it going?
What can you do for me?
And while they're talking to you, they're looking over your shoulder to see who else they should probably be talking to.
Quite honestly, the negative aspects of anything, whether it's show business or entertainment, I don't think there's anything negative about talking about them.
I think the positive effect of talking about them is that young people recognize that they're not crazy, that they sense something goofy about this, and then it becomes more clearly defined what's goofy about it.
And it gives them a high standard to not set a trap for themselves.
I know in comedy, there's a thing that guys do when they first start out, which really fucks you up.
Because you're just terrified because you're on stage.
And I think...
Similarly in music, you could just start making stuff that you think like, you know, like one of those pros that writes those pop songs, you know, those guys, those weird dudes that just know how to like make something that clicks in, but there's like no feeling to it at all.
There's a big goddamn difference between that and someone who's writing shit like you're writing.
Someone who's writing shit that resonates.
I can tell, no matter what your influences are in this life, musically, or even while you're creating a song, it's all filtering through your unique individual vision.
And that's entirely missing from all these poppy things.
And that's something that people connect with.
I mean, look...
There's something personal about songs that you know the dude wrote it, you know the guy singing it, like my friends in Honey Honey Band.
They write all their shit.
So when they're singing it, and they're sitting here in the studio singing it, or you've seen them on stage, that's their creation.
It's 100%.
And there's a uniqueness to that, that your music has, that a lot of music, that it hits a different frequency, as opposed to a poppy frequency.
And these people that are coming in that are just trying to exploit it and monetize it, they probably, that doesn't register with them.
Or even if it does, they don't give a shit, because that's not where they're at.
Two or three decades ago, the label still offered up the other.
You had all these great bands that were making art, because they knew they were going to sell a fuckton of copies and make their money back, so they were willing to take the risk.
And now there's really no risk takers.
And I don't know if that's because of it, maybe there's a lack of visionaries.
I think they're all sitting in their corner offices looking out the window wishing it would go back to 1996 and twiddling their thumbs and praying to a dying business model.
because they're completely dependent on radio for sales and singles and cumulus and clear channels pretty much all but completely lock that out to a very politically selected group of songs which somebody paid probably at least a million dollars just to get it in rotation you know they'll pay a million or two million dollars to make a hit That's so crazy.
I mean, I would imagine that being stuck singing some songs that you don't believe in and that are not really good, but everybody is really responding to, and you have something inside you that you wish you could have got out.
You know, man, every time I come to California, it's always like in and out.
Yeah, quick.
We were here, we did Conan, and played at the Troubadour a month or two back, and we were here for about four days, and that's the most time I've ever spent consecutively in L.A., but I've never been able to really get the lay of the land.
There's 20 million people plus Mexicans in this city.
I say plus Mexicans.
With respect.
Because, I mean, people that have come over here from Mexico, which I think you should just be able to come over.
I don't believe in...
I think it's ridiculous that people who want to work, they should be forced to stay in this shitty patch of dirt because they just got a bad roll of the dice and they were born there.
I think we're just scared.
The good spots, like here, we're scared it's going to bounce out somehow and they're going to come over and fuck it up.
We just gotta figure out a way to not have it fuck it up.
Just gotta figure out a way to not have crime and poverty and all the different issues that we've just completely ignored in poor communities.
Not have that affect everybody's, like, level of happiness that's living in these big groups.
But just to imprison someone in a shit country, because they were fucked and they were born there, just seems kind of crazy and inhumane to me.
You know, that place is 20 times the size of New York City, and you could pass out in the darkest alley with a $100 bill sticking out of each year, and nobody's going to fuck with you.
You know, I hung out with a couple of Yakuza guys once.
One of them was a bookie and the other one, I guess he was just like a, you know, you're sitting in bars and you'd be drunk, you know, and they all, especially if they learn you're American or if you speak English, they all want to talk to you and just figure out what you're about.
And these guys, you know, they were drunk.
We just ended up kicking it for a couple hours.
Then I kind of put it together and realized what they did.
The government just kind of realized we can try to fight this or we can work with them.
They do a lot of things for the communities that they're in, strangely enough, you know, to kind of keep order.
But then at the same time you hear stories about some guy might owe a little too much money and they just literally go and beat him the fuck to death in a train station.
With baseball bats or whatever in front of people and they don't do shit about it.
Whoa.
There's a club owner in Roppongi that got murdered a couple years ago and I don't think anything came of that.
Well, that was really a strange part of samurai culture.
I shouldn't say strange, but unexpected.
When I started investigating it, or reading about it rather, was that they were required to be balanced, and it was encouraged to be a very balanced person.
Balanced like in your discipline, balanced in your artistic expression.
Balanced in your understanding of emotions and fears.
It was very different than what we think of as, like, a warrior.
We think of, like, Stone Cold Murderer, Conan the Barbarian motherfucker, just...
And then with any kind of society like that, Ido or Kendo, whatever, there's a lot of mutual respect, I would imagine.
Back in the day, if a peasant or somebody going to the fucking market, taking their fruit to sell, if they pass the samurai on the street and they didn't bow accordingly or just basically say good morning...
They cut their fucking head off, man.
Like, right there.
Like, no questions.
You know, imagine if, like, walking down the street on Santa Monica was like that today.
I mean, people's behavior would be very different towards one another.
saying I do think that when people are scared of other people in that way or when they respect that the other person has that ability to do that to them they're carrying a fucking sword like that well-armed society is a polite society argument I don't necessarily think that's the way to go but I do think there is an element of people that need to know they get punched in their
Like, there's a bunch of people that say rude shit to people, and they say it Only because they think they can, because they're protected by society, and because of that, they're oftentimes less respectful than someone who would be like a physically dominant person in the conversation.
Like, I've seen martial artists have conversations with people where, you know, they're way, way...
Way more kind or way more considerate in the way they've voiced their concerns or opinions about something versus people that have never been in a fight in their life that will get in people's face and scream and yell, and you motherfucker, and it's like, you're only doing that because this guy's not going to punch you.
You know, you're having this conversation because you're out in public and you know this guy's not just going to pick you up and drop you on your head.
I was at the Amtrak station in D.C. Something happened where there was a downed power line way up north that had taken out a lot of routes.
They basically canceled or delayed all the trains going out of the station.
When they put the announcement up, It just...
The place fucking erupted.
I mean...
I've never witnessed such a self-important display of human behavior in all my life as in Washington, D.C. that day at the Amtrak station.
There's this line of suited, briefcased...
You know, they all just got right in the Amtrak employees' faces one at a time, like, trying to explain to them how much more important their life was than everyone else's who had just been inconvenienced, you know, sitting in this place.
Is that just the uber-successful, hyper-focused, shithead thing that we have that other countries just don't have?
Like, they have the discipline, but they don't have this...
Marauding focus thing that a lot of like American businessmen sort of embody this ideas go get you know it's Wall Street fucking Gordon Gekko greed is good now that kind of shit I was I would say you know Wall Street and DC places like this yeah tend to cultivate a bit more intense version of that I was just there Saturday night I had a great fucking time yeah it's a great party town but uh yeah I don't know what I mean I don't know what happened I just couldn't believe what I was seeing It seems like a weird place.
I mean, all the world's wars are all, like, sort of organized in this weird geometrical building there.
You know?
This is a thing.
It's there.
There's the penthouse, which is just outside of there, and then there's the White House, which is this weird fucking building in a park where the commander-in-chief of the number one conquering army the world has ever known, that's where he sleeps.
And everybody passes by the castle, some sort of strange formation, a big circle you drive around, everybody points at it.
This may not be true, but I think I read somewhere that part of it, like why the streets are all one way and why it's so fucking confusing to drive around in D.C. is that in case it was ever invaded, they wanted to make it difficult...
For whoever was coming to get from the shore into the capital.
Yeah, the pine cone supposedly represents the pineal gland, which is the seed of the soul in ancient Egypt, which is where now they've actually proven that DMT is made.
Well, what's fucked up is that there's hundreds of thousands of different plants.
They found not just the right two, but they found out how to do it in this weird way where you have to mash up the vines and you add in the leaves and you boil it down.
It's a very involved process that takes hours to make true ayahuasca.
I'd say one of the more common side effects of high-dose psilocybin is inanimate objects tend to develop personalities or you kind of perceive them as much more characterized than normally.
It's all condensed matter, you know, so who fuck knows, man.
That's the kind of stuff I was tripping out on when the record got written.
I mean, just like, you know, I don't know.
I don't pretend to understand it.
I'm definitely a hobbyist, but I'm fascinated by, like, string theory and the concept of independent, freestanding, dimensional realms of energy that all kind of hold one another together.
I'm fascinated that someone's mind is not just so tuned in to how the nature of the universe works, but so tuned in that they've taken this theoretical particle and made it the subject of this gigantic science project that involves hundreds of different fucking countries.
I think it's like 100 different countries, over 10,000 different scientists, something like that.
The origin, like the first point of all complex consciousness, or the source of the universe that emanated everything that we know and that ever has been into existence.
And he...
He was basically trying to establish a symbiotic relationship between science and religion and evolution and spirituality, which wasn't a very popular opinion in the Vatican in the 1920s.
He had this theory that it all emanated from this one point, the omega point, and that eventually consciousness will reach a state of complexity that's so advanced that it will no longer require a physical vessel or a human body or anything to inhabit itself.
and then it will keep evolving until it returns back to the highest state of complexity which can only be the same place it came from because whatever started it had to be the source of this true divine whatever so once it goes back you know basically you know the reality as we perceive it and this is according to a lot of modern quantum physics
it's just this manifestation that we sort of project out to convince ourself that we're not actually consciousness experiencing itself I'm not sure.
If that makes sense.
Like, you know, we're not little special flowers and individuals.
If there was a Big Bang, why wouldn't we think that there could be an infinite number of Big Bangs?
An infinite number of expansions and contractions, and maybe what we are currently, and we like to think of as the highest state of life available, what we are is just this is what exists when you have this state of the universe.
And there's a type of consciousness that exists when the universe becomes no longer physical.
And that might be what you're experiencing when you smoke DMT. You might be experiencing these other forms of reality that are there.
You just don't tune into them while you're in this state.
and that you can access them through these chemical doorways while you're sleeping, while you're meditating, when you reach these different tunes of mind that people have been exercising and having these disciplined practices to try to reach these frequencies.
They've been doing it forever.
They're not doing it because they were, well, I know I'm starving to death, but I want to try to figure out a way to reach some shit that's not even real.
No, they were doing it because they had had success in it in some way or another.
Well, the first time, I didn't know what I was doing.
And the bubbling, it was just weird...
Everything was just some weird associations that kind of freaked me out.
And I was like, there's no way this is going to be healthy.
But then the second time, I got this extreme...
I don't know how to describe it other than say it was an intense downward shift in what felt like gravity.
You know that crest at the top of the first hill on a roller coaster where everything just kind of...
I felt like something was pushing me down.
And then I'd read so much and researched so much.
Most of my understanding came from reading and how that tied together with other experiences that I've had or how that related to things that I've always been fascinated with or...
Subscribe to, maybe, on a personal notion.
It felt like something putting you almost in a trance.
No, I had some visuals, but I wouldn't say that it was probably as intense as the strongest psilocybin trip I've ever had, but I was still very much...
I never lost cognitive thought.
I was aware.
I was in my body.
I could open my eyes.
I knew I was in the room.
Right, right, right.
Almost like these Easter Island head sort of things, sort of just kind of coming out of the void with chasers, and it felt like something, it was like the cusp of something, and it was kind of over.
The room definitely looked, there was a weird energy, like everything had this crystalline sort of melty effect, but it wasn't overwhelming.
Certainly not anything like what they've described, like some of the research volunteers talked about.
Yeah, my knowledge is from a purely amateur academia and incorporating that into certain other things.
How it may or may not resemble elements of Tibetan Buddhism and what people describe, like the bardos and independent realms of energy, where your soul is faced with these entities that test you in ways and how you react to those determine how you might transmigrate or reincarnate into another life.
I didn't even know about it until a year ago.
I was visiting a buddy of mine that was in town.
Which is really strange, because I've listened to your podcast off and on for a while, and I used to listen to a lot of Terrence lectures, and for whatever reason, I never heard about it.
Or maybe it passed in front of me when I was younger, and I didn't know what it was, and just said no, because it's related, it's like a PCP or something.
But yeah, I was sitting at a friend of mine's house, and his father, I can't remember if his father had already passed, or if he was just, he'd gotten very ill with terminal cancer, and...
He was pretty distraught about it, and we were just hanging out, and he was kind of telling me everything he'd been dealing with, and, you know, I didn't know what to really say, or to comfort him, you know, because he's obviously, you know, you find out your dad's dying.
And, you know, I just was like, well, you know, man, some people think that there's no such thing as death, and...
You know, you live to die and we die so we can really live and you know like the Buddhists think that there's this other realm you go to It's just the most pure bliss and like this ocean of love and you and you feel that joy and euphoria and either go on to Nirvana or you go back into another life depending how you live this one and he's like man that sounds a lot like DMT I was like what the fuck is DMT and uh He's like, really, man?
Come on.
I didn't have a clue.
He played an excerpt right there on the porch from one of your podcasts where you kind of got on this rant about it.
I'm like, alright, I need to dig in here because I'm seeing a lot of similarities and symbiotic Touchstones and I went home.
Man, I probably spent the next three months just reading everything I could find and scouring forums and then going back and reading metaphysical publications and a lot of theology and bouncing the shit around.
And then I found out my wife was going to have a child.
And it just was like my last great existentialistic dilemma, you know what I mean?
So I was like, I want to write a record about all this shit.
And record it like it was in outer space.
And then Dave and I just kind of wanted to tackle it from a standpoint in terms of the mix.
I wanted it to sound like a lot of my favorite records did that I used to listen to when I was high out of my fucking mind on Mushrooms or Dextromethorphan or anything else, you know.
And you can do all that with tape, I think.
Like we were talking about vinyl earlier, it's settled.
So when you put the headphones on, you want it to kind of just figure eight around your head, you know.
Isn't there like there's something really cool about hearing the pick moving across the guitar when you know that that's what you're hearing?
Yeah.
It gives you this certain strange connection and then instead if that was like cleaned up and this perfect sound, this perfect synthesized sound, it's still a cool thing, but it's missing out on whatever Whatever makes...
Whatever that unique feeling that you get from someone's art is.
You know?
When you see someone...
Like, David Cho was here the other day and he had some paintings.
Even though, I mean, I got a wife that I love and a four-month-old son that I've seen exactly like 12 days of his life, and I spend all the time in a van with three or four stinky other dudes going out and playing to a bunch of drunk strangers, and it's still the greatest fucking job on the planet.
You know?
And if it never went anywhere beyond where it is right now for me, I feel like I've just basically clawed my way to the beginning, as it were.
And if we're playing clubs to 300 or 500 people, I mean, I can make a living at some point doing that.
And it's...
I'm not compromising in any way.
I don't have to wake up and report to anybody.
I'm not sitting in fucking meetings for a week about what my haircut should look like.
I just feel like there's a lot of people you used to see back in club dates and you can tell the blatant, blinding narcissism that permeates this industry where people literally almost come to fucking fistfights over who's going to play what set spot at this rinky-dink club that nobody gives a shit about just because they think There's gonna be somebody there that's gonna recognize my genius and that's gonna change everything.
And I think you get a lot of entitlement because of that.
And that's, to me, probably the worst aspect of working in the music business is entitled musicians.
Yeah, well, everybody comes at it from a different place, and everybody, I'm talking about sort of all aspects of show business, and everybody handles their own needs in a different way.
Some people go in less needy, some people are just completely obsessed with the idea of success, and it just permeates every cell of their body.
In the beginning it was because you have to be playing in those clubs, which are some of the most thankless clubs in the entire nation.
You can't make money playing in Nashville.
It's where you go to find people that can help you.
Really?
And I've been very fortunate in that regard where I was found sort of by maybe the handful of actually trustworthy folks in town.
I mean, my manager never took a dollar from me for the first three years.
He was just kind of like a friend that gave me solid advice and told me what not to do because he'd watch guys like me get chewed up and spit out for 20 years, you know?
He was almost retired, basically, and he just said, I'll help you, and if it turns into a gig, I want the gig.
He was like, all right, man, you got a deal.
Just kind of like put this wall up between a lot of that shit that happens to a lot of people and they get taken advantage of and you end up bitter as a result and your creativity suffers.
Right.
So I just decided, well, if I just don't have anything to do with any of that, then that can't ever happen.
So now, four years later, you know, I have a great booking agent, I have a manager, and these people that kind of help facilitate us getting out and playing shows on the road.
I mean, I could start a tour from anywhere.
So my wife and I talked about that, and I was like, why do we even still live here?
Typically I don't like to play songs I haven't recorded.
So I get in the studio, formulate it, and then get it down and committed, and then they kind of tend to come to life all on their own over the course of a year and a half.
You know, you end up at the end of a tour, that song sounds nothing like the one you put down on tape.
You get bored, so you push things and go to different places and try to just keep it exciting and take risks.
And it makes you a better musician.
Obviously, eight months later, from the time you recorded that song, If you've been playing every night for two hours, if you haven't become a better musician by that time, then you're doing this for the wrong reasons.
So now when you go in to make your next record, ideally, you've trained harder.
I know, but I always wondered, like, man, we were talking when you got here, and you were beat because of traveling.
And I'm beat because of traveling.
And I was only traveling for two days.
You know, just the flying back and forth from Philly to D.C., L.A. to Philly, Philly to D.C., D.C. to L.A. Do that in two days, and you're just like, ugh.
If you could just stay put, if they could all come to you.
Truthfully for me, man, it's really bittersweet, everything that's happening right now, because I've been, like I said, off and on for a lot of different reasons that I've put it down over the years, but I've been doing this a long time at a very thankless capacity, so it's all just been very passion-driven.
And then now...
I've got a newborn son and everything's happening and I'm just slammed so much that I'm exhausted a lot of times.
It's really weird because I'm out here and all this stuff we've worked so hard for has finally happened, but a lot of days I just really want to be at home.
It's so funny, because people back home that I haven't talked to since I was in high school, and all of a sudden you start getting texts from unknown numbers and shit, and people you haven't talked to, and they're like, man, you fucking made it, man.
It's like, I'm just blowing it up.
It's like, they think because you get some press...
In 10 or 12 media outlets that you're just raking in the dough, and that's just not the reality.
So spent that year on the road playing and then trying to pay that debt off.
And then about a year later, once we're coming back off tour, we're about five grand in the black.
And I just spent all this time on the road with this young band I'd put together working out all these songs and just decided, all right, well, let's just go make a record.
And then the other $1,000 went towards paying the engineers.
And my buddy Dave, the producer, just kind of did it for free on spec to help out.
Wow.
And so I think the whole thing cost about $4,500.
And it was just very, very inexpensive to make an album.
And now this record that sort of started, I guess, what we'll call the beginning of a career...
If I'd have taken that in and tried to shop it to anybody, you know, any major label or music row entity or even a lot of indie labels and had laid that down, one, it's a country record.
Two, I'm talking about reptile aliens and fucking turtles and shit, man.
You know exactly as well as I do how that would have gone.
It's like an old comedic reference to the infinite regress problem in cosmology, which, you know...
Basically all the shit we were talking about earlier and there's a story I guess there was some professor at Oxford or somewhere giving a speech and explaining how the universe works and everything else and some little lady stood up and said you know that's really clever I know you think you're smart but you're wrong and he's like oh yeah well what's the truth and she's like well the earth sits on the back of this giant cosmic turtle and he carries it through space and he said well what's carrying the turtle and she's like oh that's very clever but it's another turtle And
he's like, well, what's under that?
She's like, you might as well, you're wasting your time.
It's turtles all the way down.
And so Hawking referenced this in Brief History of Time.
And it's weird because you can look back, um, Hindu cosmology and a lot of, uh, Some Native American tribes, they all held these, like, earthly turtles in high reverence and the symbology of it all.
And you find that story in different cultures throughout, you know, space, but thousands of years with this weird reference to this cosmic turtle.
And I know the Indians or the Hindus thought there were these four elephants standing on the back of the turtle and the earth was a flat disc resting on its back.
There's a lot of artwork you can find associated with this.
And I just thought...
That it was really, the record at its core is about love, you know, being like this one universal truth.
A lot of people look to religion, a lot of people look to drugs, and I'm not saying you can't get really spiritual experiences from all those things, but I think love at the end of the day is the one thing that really I've ever found forced me to want to wake up and really try to be a better human being every day, you know.
So that was the main point of the album.
The Turtles thing was just kind of, it's a way of saying, if you get into an argument with somebody and you realize it's just pointless and you're going back and forth, it's Turtles all the way down.
Alligators are, I mean, at one point in time they were really extinct or on the verge of extinction.
They were really endangered.
That's when I lived in Florida.
We used to feed them.
We used to throw marshmallows into this place called Lake Alice and they would come up and snatch up the marshmallows and And I never would have thought that they would get so plentiful that they would start hunting them.
But now, they're trying to kill as many alligators as they can.
Yeah, this guy, he jumps out on this little grass pond and you just see like eight of them in succession come out of nowhere and start swimming towards him.
They all jump up.
You know, he understands the behaviorism and the sight line, but I'm just, and this guy had this massive scar on his bald head and literally three teeth in his head.
He's like, you know, and then I'm like, I'm going to watch this guy die.
I worked with a guy in the yard, Corey was a big hunter, and he would bow hunt, and he moved up to Wyoming because he could get like four or six more tags a year than he could in Utah, and he'd drive that hour and a half every day.
Wow!
Blizzards to come to this job just so the kid would just eat up with it, man.
But apparently he set, I think, the longest distance shot in Wyoming at 23, and then he'd hunt moose and elk and everything else with a bow.
But he would cut in, he'd bring in these venison, like, filet cutlet medallions of elk meat, and we had a grill down at the Swiss Shack, and he'd cook that shit.
It was the best fucking thing I've ever tasted in my life.
Actually, with the guy, the producer of the show, Meat Eater.
I don't know.
Somewhere in Mexico, there's a giant wild herd of buffalo they brought there in the 1950s.
Most bison today, when you buy bison steaks, most of it's farm-raised.
There's very little wild buffalo left in this country.
A big percentage of it is owned.
It's property.
People have these big giant game preserves and they have buffalo on them that you can hunt and they have buffalo in these livestock places where you buy like farm-raised buffalo.
Apparently, there's a guy that I'm going to have on the podcast that Steve Rinella recommended to me that can explain in great detail what actually happened to the Buffalo, but that there's a lot of misconceptions about why the Buffalo population was so high.
And he says there's a direct correlation between smallpox that when the French and the Spaniards, when they brought over smallpox or whoever brought it, I guess it was the French, it wiped out like 90% of the Native American population.
And during that time, the buffalo population just exploded.
So when we came along and started slaughtering These buffalo in mass, when I say we, white people, obviously it wasn't you and me, it was a long time ago.
The reason why those guys were able to find these animals in such giant numbers was because the Native Americans had experienced this massive loss of casualty.
I mean, massive 90% casualty rate because of smallpox.
Because they were apparently, at least in this guy's book, he's going to come on the podcast soon, we're working out the dates, they were on the verge of, I guess extirpation is what they call it, when it's local extinction, because the Native Americans had figured out horseback riding.
And once they figured out horseback riding, over the course of a couple hundred years, whatever it was, they had almost completely abandoned agriculture, and they were just chasing down the bison and killing them like fucking crazy.
Yeah, so the idea was that they were on the verge of killing off the buffalo even before those crazy assholes came in and did it later on, hundreds of years later.
If somewhere in the future, because of the transparency that we're experiencing now with social media, with the internet, with the access to information that we have today, I wonder if eventually the bullshit artists will all be exposed to the point where they won't be viable anymore.
It's not a viable business model.
The accountability of the corporations that are financing these politicians will all be exposed.
I mean, when you see this new door opening up for you, you know, when you see, like, all of a sudden your career, like you said, you've clawed your way to the beginning, you're obviously, there's some shit going on, man.
I mean, I told you my friend Justin told me about you right when I, like, he goes, man, he goes, there's this dude, Sturgill Simpson.
And as soon as he said that, I go, dude, I've been listening to nothing but him for two fucking weeks.
And we were laughing and joking around.
There's something going on, man.
When my friend Justin finds out about shit, I always pay attention because he's got fantastic taste in music, but I had already found out.
Like, there's something going on.
You've hit this sort of frequency where people are checking out your shit.
I mean, by not doing this when I was younger, I was out doing a lot of other things that kind of culminated into whoever the hell I think I'm trying to be today.
So incorporating those experiences and a lot of those stories and people I've known and characters I've met, and then maybe even embellishing upon that in a somewhat autobiographical sense, but still telling these stories in a way that other people say, yeah, I feel that way too.
You know, you don't want to just say, hey, this is what the world looks like.
It's just, this is what it looks like to me, and hopefully other people can resonate with that.
But it's an interesting...
There's a line you have to really kind of straddle between commercial viability and...
Is this a rigid idea that you have, or do you think that it's possible that you can get to that three albums from now and then go, you know what, I'm enjoying the fucking shit out of this.
Well, I say that just because I have those albums pretty clearly in my head, and I do what they'll sound like and what they'll be about.
And, you know, someday you're dead, and everybody that ever knew you is dead, and it's like you were never here.
But that little thing, I don't know what else I would really have to say about...
My version of the human experience past a certain point unless I go turn it off and do another 30 or 40 years of living and then make five more albums.
Any real artist, their best work is always in their pinnacle peak and then right before they die.
And then you get this ocean of mediocrity of just kind of fumbling through existence there.
That's an interesting perspective, because you really think that when a guy puts out an album, or these parallels to authors, to a lot of different art forms, you spend your entire life thinking, and then you express yourself like the culmination of this life.
Well, there's a really interesting thing of somebody, I think my buddy Jason Isbell put up there and retweeted, talks about it takes 20 years to write your first record, you get a year to write your second record.
And it really doesn't matter what you do, because music's the devil's work, and you're fucked anyway.
But yeah, it's like, you know, you squeeze all this...
I had a good 30 years of fucking up and mistakes and lessons and, you know, a lot of personal...
You know, development and certain experiences that I had that led me to kind of recognize and look at things that caused me to live that way.
And then to come out of the other side of that, like, really supported and understood by someone that met me at my absolute worst and then helped me to get right here.
It's just like I have all this clarity now.
And, you know, I think the only way...
To ever really grab that...
I mean, I probably could have made some great records in my 20s because I was so fucked up.
I'll never know.
So I'm just trying to reference those feelings as I remember them the best I can.
And people think, oh, I made this record.
This guy's just sitting around fucking smoking DMT and he's on drugs.
There were no drugs involved making this record.
It's been, you know, I really don't even smoke dope that much anymore, especially with the sun.
Certainly not when I'm at home, usually on the road, and it's only then anymore to cure boredom.
So it's just really weird to find myself, but I still had to tell that part of my life through story.
You know, I was excited, this young relationship, and I was going to all these parties and meeting people and exposed to things I probably never would have been otherwise, and just kind of, you know, took it at face value for experience and jumped in, and then there was a lot of, you know, there was a lot of hard narcotics in that area, and I realized that those weren't very well for me, and Like heroin?
Well, like I said, my buddy played when we were talking on the porch last year and then he played your little excerpt.
I went home that night and just kind of started scouring the internet on the subject and a lot of things related to it and I found Dr. Strassman's book.
Downloaded it and read it probably three times and it just absolutely blew my mind.
All the correlating aspects of that conversation.
And I think what might have ultimately led him to it or what he was looking for in terms of its relation to...
So yeah, once I finished the record and had it mixed and mastered, I'm sort of like looking back through everything that sort of led to this happening.
And I knew...
I went into it before we put the album on.
I really did think, okay, well this is going to be the end of my career.
People are going to think this guy's nuts or what the hell.
But the work that...
That Dr. Strassman did, and I guess the bravery it took on his part to open that conversation back up in a field, especially in the professional medical world, was so stigmatized.
I can't imagine the balls that must have taken after spending years of your life following this profession and all the school you underwent.
So I wrote him an email.
I got his contact off Cottonwood.
I just wrote him basically saying, hey, thank you.
I wrote, you know, I shared the record with him through a file.
I was just like, I just want to thanks for your work and the inspiration that I got from the book and along with some other things.
And he wrote back and it sort of, you know, email buddies sort of thing.
And then I was going out to Phoenix and so I just stopped by and have a cup of coffee.
But he's got some really fascinating stories of his explorations in this realm, not just physically, but just dealing with the red tape that was required to do a real FDA study.
Yeah, to do one of the first psychedelic studies that, you know, have a real scholar involved in testing people on some serious Schedule I hallucinogens.
The Army Research Lab, they were aware of that shit in the 60s.
Absolutely.
That's how McKenna found out about it.
Terrence McKenna got a hold of DMT through a friend who was a chemist at the Army Research Lab, and apparently this guy had a barrel of it.
Oh, yeah.
Which, if you know about the effective dose of DMT, a pinky nail is a lot.
Like if you had a pinky nail sized piece of DMT or pile.
I mean, you're going to the center of the fucking universe with a pinky size.
So imagine these guys had barrels or stuff.
And McKenna's story.
I found out about McKenna because of Hicks.
Hicks mentioned McKenna in one of his bits.
He would talk about taping mushrooms under the chair of everybody in the room.
He would say something and then he would drag them into this.
I've taped mushrooms under all your chairs.
Reach down.
It's what Terrence McKenna would call a heroic dose.
Five dried grams.
And I was like, who's this McKenna guy?
And so I started looking into McKenna and reading some of the things that I could find about him online and then listening to some audio recordings.
But he was already dead by the time I had found out about him, unfortunately.
But his, you know, his discovery of DMT and the way he described it in one of his audio recordings was just one of the most amazing things I've ever heard.
Because this is a guy who had already done like LSD and Morning Glory Seeds and he had experienced psilocybin and he thought he had really traveled.
I mean, in dentists they did a lot of traveling, I guess, but Man, like the iboga and, like I said, DMT, I don't really have any experience to speak of firsthand, so I try not to talk about it.
Well, you know, Dr. Strassman said that, and I'm inclined to agree, although at this point, like, I should have a fucking PhD in this shit.
I've read about it, and I don't even know what the firsthand aspect is, but...
He said at this point in my life now that all these things are formulating and my career is budding and I have a newborn son that there's a high potential it could make for a pretty unsettling experience because it's all this stuff that's finally happening in my life that's so positive.
Like the idea of thinking you're dying and having to let go of that could make for an unsettling experience.
LSD, the few times I tried LSD, though, I didn't really enjoy it because every time it seemed like on the tail end of the trip, it takes this turn and there's almost a sinister underlying energy about it.
I don't know that I've never experienced with psilocybin.
It's the starting gate for psychedelics and to that I say go eat 12 or 15 grams and tell me that you're Yeah, the starting gate is only if you have a small...
As they were announcing on television the war was starting, and I'll never forget, Stan was like, oh my god, they've got a kickoff.
They're like, war coverage begins at 5. He's like, the war has a kickoff.
And we just fell to the ground.
We're howling, laughing.
And the walls around us were all made of these honeycomb geometric patterns.
Everything was basically gone.
I was trying to still have conversations with him, but he was just this...
Sea of patterns, you know, that like blurrily represented what his physical form was, but it was all just like really tiny flower of loves, you know, that little flower of life thing.
I mean, his entire body was made out of those, as was all the walls around us.
Well, yeah, I mean, demethyltryptamine, for sure, we know that.
We know that it's created in the liver, it's created in the lungs, it's not just created in the pineal gland, it's created in other parts of your body.
They also know that it's in like, you know, who knows how many fucking plants, like a shitload of plants.
I mean, it really forces you to look at a lot of things maybe you don't want to or you're unable to and just kind of pulls apart the defense mechanism, you know.
Well, I mean, they're trying to crack down now on the prescriptions, on pain medication prescriptions, because there are so many people that are addicted to them, and they've realized, look, we've made a nation of junkies.
I mean, I'll tell you, the part of the country you're from, man, I mean, that is fucking, that is prescription drug central, right?
I mean, the town that I'm originally from is called Jackson.
It's like right in the middle of southeast Kentucky, like hard Appalachia.
And I remember as a small child, it was very much a wonderful community.
There was small business.
Main Street was thriving.
Everybody knew everybody.
And then, but all the major industry was based on coal, which slowly evolved from strip mining, or from deep mining, I'm sorry, into strip mining once they figured out they could get the coal with less bodies.
And so that just kind of leveled the topography.
But then even when that industry sort of dried up and they moved on, well, the coal pulled out and then Walmart and Oxycontin moved in.
And it, I mean, within a matter of years, it just completely changed the entire face of the region.
There's not even the idea of the possibility of opportunity coming to that region.
No industry is going to come in there and start building car manufacturing plants because then they have to train the shit out of there.
it's just not logistically very sound for any type of industry other than growing dope and making meth you know like unless they really push the hemp legislation through and they can put a lot of money and food on people's tables down there but that would be incredible and we're doing that would suck either they're really finally pushing toward I never thought I'd say this but there's a guy named Mitch McConnell who for once did something I agree with and He's really trying to get that.
Kentucky was at one time the nation's leading hemp manufacturing point.
The Hemp Museum is in a little town called Versailles.
You know, like everything else, at some point it is going to go mainstream, and then they're going to commodify the hell out of it and commercialize it, and everywhere you go is going to look like a 14-year-old's bedroom.
And then you're showing these drops in crime, drops in DUIs, drops in murder.
Like, there's nothing you can say other than, let's try this somewhere else.
Any state that's struggling, any state that doesn't have some sort of a massive resource pool, like natural oil or gas or something like that that it's relying on, if they are in need of an industry, boy, that's a fucking pretty easy one.
We were out here months ago for this, played with Greg Allman down at the Annenberg Center, and some guy came, or somebody gave us these little, man, they were tiny.
They were like these little, tiny little cupcakes with like a peace sign on the top of it.
Yeah, they're saying that Bruce Lee's brain had been swollen when they checked his autopsy.
They said there was no visible external injury.
However, according to autopsy reports, his brain had swollen considerably from 1,400 to 1,575 grams, which is a 13% increase, which is pretty big.
He was only 32. The only substance found during his autopsy was equagesic.
I don't know what that is.
I'll Google it.
Okay, the only substance...
Okay.
The doctor said in an interview that he died from an allergic reaction to the muscle relaxant in equagesic, whatever it is, which is described as a common ingredient in painkillers.
You know, if you're doing the kind of shit that he was doing, he was experimenting a lot with various martial arts and had a, most likely, he got hit.
I mean, that's just a part of the game.
And if he was doing really experimental, wild stuff like I know he was, I mean, he's involved in a lot of different, sort of assimilating a lot of different martial arts styles.
The only time I've ever experienced that, even on...
I never had any type of complete disassociation experiences, even on really high doses of psilocybin.
The one time I ever...
I think what I would classify as the most psychedelic experience I've ever had was from a drug that's not even normally associated with the psychedelic family, which is dextromethorphan.
My buddy Brian, he's like, you know, Sturgill, you need to hear music on this.
He's like, it's as good as it fucking gets.
So, first off, the weirdest part of the whole experience is we're out in this KOA campground in North Carolina, and we're just surrounded by hippies, and there's tanks going off and shit, and that ain't my thing.
We had to make it back down to the parking lot where his truck was parked through this trail.
You couldn't see shit, man.
It was like the most complete flutter vision ever.
And I'm just stumbling, not walking into trees.
And Brian was like, oh man, just close your eyes.
I'm like, what are you talking about?
What?
He's like, just close your eyes, trust me.
And I closed my eyes, and I swear as I'm sitting here, it was all of a sudden, like, I could see the trail, plainest day, directly in front of me, and almost like the entire canopy had this moon lamp just turned on and flooded it with light, and everything was so clear.
I've never even met anybody that's even heard of it or knew where to find it since, but Brian used to get tons of this shit, and he'd just lay with his headphones on for like eight hours in his living room and listen to music, and you're completely...
I didn't know anything about it until then, and I've never seen it since, but I do remember the guy saying that the difference in three or four or two hundred milligrams is, you know, a thousand times stronger trip.
So, you know, nobody's ever really documented the ladder, so to speak.
The only thing I remember is I might have had a slight allergic reaction, because I remember feeling like I had sun poisoning, and I was really scratching my back, kind of tripping out on this for a second.
This was on the early onset, and the guys were like, what are you doing?
I was like, man, I think I got...
Too much sun today, my back's really itching, and Chad was like, no, it's not.
You're fine.
And as soon as he said that, the whole sensation went away.
But there was nothing negative about the experience.
You always wonder if it was easy for people to do research on psychedelics and it was respected and it was something that people pursued as opposed to being like, you know, if you do research on certain things, you could be thought of as a pariah.
It could fuck with you.
You know, you could be ostracized.
People could say, oh, this guy just wants to get high.
There's a massive hospital in Lexington, Kentucky that was called the Narcotics Farm.
And it was a criminal...
uh you know william burroughs was there for a while and they did a lot of like highly barbaric experimental addiction treatments there back in like the 40s and 50s and just unspeakable things like you know like dropping people's genitals and ice water or something like that's not unspeakable right i can speak of this
Well, like, kind of ridiculous approaches to dealing with heroin and methadone addiction, and I know they did some psychedelic studies, I'm sure, back there, but, you know, the hospital still stands there, and it's just the most ominous, creepy building.
People did heroin and made some fucking incredible music.
Nobody did methadone and made some awesome shit.
There was these guys that used to come to the pool hall that used to hang out in white plains, and they were called the methadoneans.
That's what we would call them.
They were these dudes that came over from the methadone clinic, and they'd come over and play pool, and they were just zombified, just dead in the eyes.
Yeah, what's his deal?
He's one of those methadoneans.
These poor guys come over from the methadone clinic.
I saw a really sensationalist piece about this on some national news program the other night because children were getting a hold of them and having overdoses.
Well, when I say overdose, all it means is I'm going to go lay in bed and have a really good time instead of walking around and having a really good time.
You know, it's sad that the shows, they're the only ones that ever want to talk to me.
Like, the other guys in the band are young, and they get hit on by the girls.
The girls never want to talk to Sturgill, man.
It's always, like, the really big, like, large, drunk guy.
And they all, like, give me the bear hug, and I get the whaling thing.
And then they're just, like, hugging me, and I'm levitating off the ground, and they're giving me, like, this thing, like, fucking man, you're the shit, dude.
Yeah, like, one song, man, damn, dude.
Yeah.
Those are the only people that want to talk to me.
The really huge, wildebeest, drunk, really redneck guys.
But yeah, traditional Irish music and a lot of Scottish fiddle tunes, like the mandolins tune in D, just like a bagpipe, because when the pipes got outlawed, they started playing a lot of those songs on stringed instruments.
And plus, you get to fucking play music every night and see Europe.
Right.
I think...
Honestly, well here, careers can be such...
It has the potential to be a little bit more flash in the pan base over here.
People get bored quicker.
But I've just had a lot of friends that are musicians that said if you make the effort and you go over and they see you taking the trouble and the time to come over, they're loyal, they're just fans for life.
I'll probably still be touring over there long after any career I have here has dried up.