Dec. 6, 2017 - The Joe Rogan Experience
01:35:42
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
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Ready? | |
| Boom! | ||
| And we're live. | ||
| What's up, man? | ||
| How's it going? | ||
| Pleasure to meet you. | ||
| Finally. | ||
|
unidentified
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Pleasure to meet you. | |
| Yeah, man. | ||
| I'm a fucking huge fan of yours. | ||
| Well, thank you very much. | ||
| I listened to your last album. | ||
| I've listened to that fucking thing hundreds of times. | ||
| I listen to it all the time when I'm headed to the comics tour. | ||
| Puts me in a good mood. | ||
| Well, that's good. | ||
| That's what music's supposed to do. | ||
| I'm just stunned by the fact that for the longest time you were basically doing the songwriting thing. | ||
| You were doing a lot of that. | ||
| You were making your own music, but you were known more as a songwriter. | ||
| Yeah, well, you know, you walk through the doors that are open. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So you do the things that come up, and somewhere in the middle of that, you find out what your thing is. | ||
| But goddamn, your voice is so good, man. | ||
| I mean, I don't want to fanboy out on you, but it's just such a classic voice. | ||
| Male voice, singing those kind of songs, it's like, I'm glad someone's still doing it right. | ||
| Oh, well, I don't know. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I'll also say thank you. | ||
| I don't want to say I'm doing it right and somebody else is doing it wrong. | ||
| I'm doing what I do. | ||
| What you do, I like. | ||
| I'm just happy there's someone out there doing what you're doing. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| What is going on with you right now? | ||
| You've got a new album that's about to come out. | ||
| We've got a new album that came out December 1st. | ||
| Yeah, we're proud of it and hope people like it. | ||
| Is it on iTunes and all that jazz? | ||
| Yeah, you can get it everywhere that music is available as far as I know. | ||
| That's what they tell me. | ||
| How have the doors opened up for you now? | ||
| Does everything feel like... | ||
| Yeah, we're sitting here talking, aren't we? | ||
| Everything's good. | ||
| No, yeah. | ||
| I mean, beyond good. | ||
| Good would be the understatement of the century for, you know, just so many things that sound like fake life. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, things that happen, phone calls you get, people you meet, people you get to talk to. | ||
| Like what? | ||
| Shoot, man. | ||
| Just any of it. | ||
| Just getting to go play. | ||
| This past year, we played three shows with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| That must have been amazing. | ||
| It was amazing. | ||
| We played Wrigley Field with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. | ||
| Holy shit! | ||
| Wrigley Field! | ||
|
unidentified
|
God! | |
| What people is that? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It was a bunch, but it felt just as cool as it sounds like it should. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| Man, Wrigley Field with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. | ||
| It doesn't get any cooler than that. | ||
| Not to me it doesn't. | ||
| But maybe there's something else. | ||
| So how long has success been happening? | ||
| Like two years now? | ||
| To the degree that it's happening right now, you know, probably since, you know, 2015. A couple years of Good Strong, we're going on three of, you know, playing shows to more people than we knew ever came to live shows. | ||
| So, yeah, it's been, you know, a strange, life-altering thing. | ||
| When you hear it, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Chris Stapleton. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes! | |
| What is that like? | ||
| To freak you out? | ||
| Well, we don't usually do money announcements like that. | ||
| We just kind of walk out there and play. | ||
| That's the move! | ||
| Yeah, we don't hype them up too much. | ||
| We just kind of walk out there and fire up. | ||
| Ah, that might be the way to do it. | ||
| Well, I mean, everybody has their own thing, but I don't have like a hype guy doing that. | ||
| You need like the KISS guy. | ||
| The hottest band in the world! | ||
| KISS! I remember that when I was a kid. | ||
| I went to see KISS live a bunch of times. | ||
| He'd get so fucking pumped up at the beginning because he would go... | ||
| The hottest band in the world! | ||
| I've never seen Kiss Live, but Gene Simmons did show up to a show of ours one time. | ||
| Did he really? | ||
| It was the weirdest thing ever. | ||
| We were in New York somewhere, and he just happened to be in town. | ||
| He played the night before wherever we were playing. | ||
| And he showed up just to say hi. | ||
| And here's Gene Simmons on the side of the stage before we go play our gig. | ||
| And I'm just like... | ||
| You know, really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's one of those moments we're talking about. | ||
| You ask about people. | ||
| That was one of them. | ||
| It's like, hi, Gene Simmons. | ||
| Gene Simmons came to see me one time a few years back at New Year's Eve at the improv. | ||
| Him and his family came to see me New Year's Eve. | ||
| I was fucking legitimately nervous. | ||
| So the whole time you're looking at Gene Simmons going, or not looking at him, you know, one way or the other. | ||
| It was so odd. | ||
| It was like, you know who I am? | ||
| How the fuck is that possible? | ||
| Strange stuff, man. | ||
| But I love talking to people that are like a year, two years into the situation you're in right now, where you're just kind of getting settled into it, where it still seems like Fantasyland. | ||
| I'm not sure that it would ever not seem like Fantasyland, because I spent enough years not in Fantasyland to... | ||
| Realize that it's in fantasy land. | ||
| You could be. | ||
| You could be like 71 day on cocaine, 15 ex-wives. | ||
| God, I hope not. | ||
| That sounds horrible. | ||
| But it seems like it happens to a lot of folks, right? | ||
| Well, maybe. | ||
| I'm going to hope not me. | ||
| Yeah, I hope not you, too. | ||
| I mean, you seem like you could avoid it. | ||
| Seems like a horrid existence. | ||
| Well, there's a balancing act, I think, with any great musician or any great artist, really. | ||
| It's like doing the art, and then now you're in the Fame Olympics. | ||
| Like, you're in this weird thing where, you know, you're going to win Grammys, and you're going to have... | ||
| Platinum albums if they still have those anymore and you're gonna be on these talk shows and people are gonna wreck. | ||
| It's it's a different animal now. | ||
| Well, yeah, yes and no no for me I mean I still Whatever we have is because we concentrated on the music and let the music lead. | ||
| And so trying to do anything other than that, you know, I'll have fun with some of the stuff. | ||
| You know, if somebody wants me to do a bit on a show or something, I'm fine with that. | ||
|
unidentified
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That's cool. | |
| But it still all just comes from music, you know. | ||
| And it's all, the focus is always going to be the music. | ||
| And anything other than that, you know, there's never, in my mind, any focus on trying to stay famous. | ||
| Does that make sense? | ||
| Yes, and I knew you were going to think like that. | ||
| I'm very happy you said it that way. | ||
| I don't make music for that reason or to win awards or anything like that. | ||
| I make it because I like it and hope that it's good. | ||
| Well, it's very clear in your music itself that does what you're doing. | ||
| Very clear. | ||
| It's very clear that that's pure. | ||
| That it's just this is what you do and you're concentrating on that. | ||
| There's nothing disingenuous about it. | ||
| There's nothing pumped up or fake or Well, yeah, I hope not. | ||
| I know, right? | ||
| But, I mean, it's got to be a weird world. | ||
| I mean, the world of the music business is a very, very strange world. | ||
| I've talked to a lot of musicians and, you know, navigating the world of commerce and music. | ||
| There again, if you just simplify it down to let the music lead and let that kind of be always the focus, for me, that makes it real easy to not make decisions you would regret or feel like weren't you. | ||
| So as long as that's the focus, that's okay. | ||
| All that other stuff just kind of becomes external noise that we'll all... | ||
| It doesn't matter. | ||
| It's not a hard thing to navigate in that realm to me. | ||
| To you? | ||
| To me, no. | ||
| But you must see it being a difficult thing for some folks that you know, right? | ||
| Sometimes. | ||
| But some people care very much about... | ||
| You're the first person to ever get me in dangerous waters like I'm talking about people. | ||
| We don't have to name names. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| And I don't want to sound judgmental in what I'm saying. | ||
| My wife calls this pulling back the curtain too much. | ||
| She's like, don't pull back that curtain too much. | ||
| But, you know, if you want to pull it back, I know that you're the guy that likes to pull back the curtain. | ||
| I think it's good to look back there sometimes. | ||
| Yeah, okay. | ||
| See what the fuck the monsters are up to. | ||
| Well, yeah, I mean, I think if you roll up into the music business, or, you know, this is my experience. | ||
| If you roll up into... | ||
| Wanting to make records and wanting to be in the music business and wanting to live and play music, having absolutely no opinion of what you want to do or who you are or how you do it, and you want everybody else to tell you how to do it and what to do and when and where and why, then yeah, it can be a confusing thing because there will be a lot of external opinions that aren't yours that will create someone that is not you that you will have to play for the rest of your life. | ||
| So, Was that a lot of information in that moment? | ||
| So, you know, but as long as you're doing things that that are you and and do come, you know, from you and and from who you are and what you like to do, that's never a wrong decision. | ||
| And sometimes that doesn't add up to most times it doesn't add up to some kind of commercial success. | ||
| But, you know, at least you can look at yourself in the mirror on it and not hate whatever it is you have to go out and play. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So it can become like the artistic equivalent of like a soulless corporate job where you just kind of get sucked into something. | ||
| You wind up doing it for a living. | ||
| Maybe it makes you money, but you never really get to be yourself because you're sort of programmed into this thing that they've sort of manufactured. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah, well, or you ignore some other passion or talent that you have under the guise of it seeming risky or irresponsible and try to go do this thing that seems like, in your mind, is the normal thing to do. | ||
| Like when Garth Brooks put on that wig and pretended to be that other dude? | ||
| Remember that part? | ||
| Do you remember that thing? | ||
| I do remember that thing. | ||
| I love that. | ||
| I love when someone goes like, whoa, whoa, way off the reservation. | ||
| I think the story was that, and I don't know if this is true or not, that there was supposed to be like a movie. | ||
| Yeah, they did a documentary. | ||
| They did it behind the music. | ||
| Is that what it was? | ||
| About this fake guy. | ||
| But I think the idea was that there was supposed to be a movie. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| Chris Gaines. | ||
| And then this was supposed to be like the soundtrack. | ||
| But I think the mistake, if there was a mistake, and I'm not going to try to discuss. | ||
| You're such a nice guy, Chris. | ||
| Career in the realm of making mistakes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You're such a nice guy. | |
| Well, you know, who am I to judge anybody on what they do? | ||
| Particularly somebody who is as successful as he is. | ||
| I love I Got Friends in Low Places. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, me too. | |
| I love a lot of Garth's music. | ||
| I'm not a Garth Brooks hater. | ||
| I think that was just a colossal fuck-up that I think is hilarious. | ||
| And if Garth was here, I'd pull that up. | ||
| And I would tell him I loved him. | ||
| And I would say, come on, dude, what the fuck were you smoking back then? | ||
| Like, who talked you into this? | ||
| Well, you know, I will say, I think at the time... | ||
| That he did that, he had to be into what in the world else can I do? | ||
| The only way I can become more successful is if I become someone else and make them successful. | ||
| He was so successful and still is in that space that he can't be any bigger than he is. | ||
| Like Stephen King when he used to write as Richard Bachman. | ||
| Do you remember that? | ||
| No, I'm not aware of this. | ||
| Yeah, he wrote a bunch of books under a pseudonym because he was so gigantic that he decided to write some books under a different name so that people would sort of appreciate the work for what it was instead of as a Stephen King book, I think, or just maybe even as an exercise. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Well, I think very much that's what it is. | ||
| You know, I would look at it very much the same way. | ||
| Of course, it's kind of hard when it's your face up there. | ||
| He should have put a mask on. | ||
| Yeah, something. | ||
| Should have got, like, Rick Baker to do him up with a fake nose. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Completely, you know. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Make him like an ugly, weathered-looking, you know, saddle-worn dude. | ||
| Put a sea wig on. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Just go. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But they had a behind-the-music story on his life story, and the drugs, and all the problems, and the moodiness, and, you know. | ||
| But the music was always there. | ||
| It's hilarious behind the music. | ||
| You can watch it on YouTube. | ||
| I highly recommend it. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Well, I will watch it on YouTube. | ||
| I haven't seen that particular thing. | ||
| But he's pulled himself out of that. | ||
| He had a giant long hiatus. | ||
| And here's an interesting thing about Garth Brooks. | ||
| You can't get his shit on iTunes. | ||
| Oh no, you have to get it on whatever his... | ||
| CD or whatever. | ||
| And there's also his personally... | ||
| He had something called Ghost Tunes for a minute, I think. | ||
| Was that the name of it? | ||
| It was like his own curated streaming service where you stream only Garth Brooks tunes or something like that. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I remember something about that. | ||
| Well, I think his idea is that he wants his albums played from... | ||
| There it is, Ghost Tunes. | ||
| He wants his albums played from the first song to the last. | ||
| He doesn't want little bits and chunks. | ||
| He doesn't want to sell his songs individually. | ||
| This is what I believe I've read, that he thinks of his albums as one continuous work. | ||
| Well, I, as much as anybody, can understand that and want very much people to listen to things as bodies of work. | ||
| But in the world we're living in, sometimes you've got to let people skip over a song here and there. | ||
| Let people do whatever they want. | ||
| I don't want to control people's thing. | ||
| Yeah, and sometimes it's just a song that gets them, and if you sell that song individually, that'll get them, and then maybe they'll check, all right, I'm listening to this a hundred times. | ||
| What else has Chris got to say? | ||
| Yeah, maybe. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| So how did you get, quote-unquote, discovered as a singer? | ||
| You started off as a songwriter, but you were always singing. | ||
| I was always singing. | ||
| I was in bluegrass bands. | ||
| I was in rock bands. | ||
| Always kind of touring in a pickup truck or something like that. | ||
| How old are you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm 39. And how many years did you do that for? | |
| Well, I moved to Nashville when I was 23. And probably the first three years I was in town, I only wrote three times a day, living, eating, sleeping, breathing, songwriting. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Trying to learn how to do that in a way that kept me a job at a publishing company. | ||
| So how does that work when you get signed by a publishing company or you get a job at a publishing company writing? | ||
| Well, you're a contract labor deal, basically. | ||
| It's like you have... | ||
| You sign a deal with, you know, like, you get a year and they get an option or two to pick you back up for another couple years, you know. | ||
| And what if one of those songs hits? | ||
| You know, those terms are worked out, whether you have what percentage of publishing they have and what percentage you have, and they pay you a salary in exchange for, you know. | ||
| Is it lucrative? | ||
| It can be, yeah. | ||
| It can be, you know, if you have a bunch of songs on the radio. | ||
| And so for you, you were getting by doing this? | ||
| Well, no, I made a very comfortable living up to the point. | ||
| And that allowed me to go out and play bluegrass for next to no money or play rock and roll and have fun doing it and not worry about that being how I'm making a living. | ||
| But I got to do it for the right reasons. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so, in a lot of ways, you know, the songwriting thing, the commerce paid for the art, I guess, in that. | ||
| Which I'm a firm believer in, and some people will argue, this is a conversation that Sergio and I will have, the commerce paid for the art. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But, yeah, so, yeah, it's... | ||
| It's a great thing. | ||
| It still is. | ||
| I still write songs for people. | ||
| I still write with people when they ask me to do that because it's cool to get in somebody else's head or kind of sit down with them and try to help them realize some vision of what it is they want to do. | ||
| That's still one of my favorite things to do. | ||
| Just as interested in that as I am in doing my own thing a lot. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| So when you learned how to write music, when you would write, do you sit down with an idea in mind with a guitar? | ||
| Do you sit down with a pen and pad? | ||
| How do you write songs? | ||
| Well, if I'm writing by myself or with somebody. | ||
| By yourself. | ||
| Because there's a lot of different processes. | ||
| It can be... | ||
| You know, whatever comes up that day. | ||
| For me, generally, if I was just going to say, hey, I'm going to sit down and go over in that corner and write a song, I'd have a guitar. | ||
| I'd probably have a legal pad and a pen, much like we have sitting right here. | ||
| And I'd start strumming until that felt like something. | ||
| And how does that make me feel? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I'd start humming a melody, maybe. | ||
| And hopefully somewhere in humming the melody, a word would pop out that... | ||
| Or a noise I would make would turn into a word. | ||
| word and from there you can kind of grow this thing into whatever it is supposed to be. | ||
| Now that's how I would do it if I was sitting around by myself. | ||
| Now there's other times you and I could be having a conversation and you could say a phrase or a line or I could read a sign going down the road. | ||
| If you're a songwriter, you're always writing songs. | ||
| It's not like a choice that you have. | ||
| It's like an affliction that you have. | ||
| In some way, so you're just kind of walking around unconsciously, things will hit you, you know, or moments will hit you, or a visual will hit you, and that will spark something. | ||
| So that's really, it can come from anywhere, and that's the truth. | ||
| It sounds a lot like writing comedy. | ||
| I'm sure. | ||
| I personally cannot write comedy, but I would think the creative process is very much the same. | ||
| You're trying to kind of take life and distill it into something that evokes an emotional response. | ||
| Do you sometimes sit down with a blank slate like you have no idea what you want to talk about or write about? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And that's back to the publishing deal thing. | ||
| That was my job. | ||
| We would set appointments. | ||
| We'd come in at noon, and I'd have an appointment with writer ABC, you know? | ||
| And we'd sit down and try to come up with something. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| That's got to be weird when you first work with someone for the first time. | ||
| It's a lot of first dates. | ||
| It's a lot of first dates. | ||
| But, you know, you find out pretty quickly how you can just kind of... | ||
| Particularly when you're writing with writers who do that a lot, you can very much walk into a room and kind of throw all the... | ||
| You know, how's you doing? | ||
| You just get down to it. | ||
| You just be like, dive into it and start working on something. | ||
| Hey, this is on my mind. | ||
| What do you think of this? | ||
| No, that sucks. | ||
| And you have to be not nice a little bit to each other. | ||
| And even if you don't know each other well, you have to act like you do in order to get to a spot where a song can be something. | ||
| And do you ever write with no guitar or no music? | ||
| I have, absolutely. | ||
| There's a song that I wrote. | ||
| On the Traveler record that we had a couple records back, Traveler, I wrote driving down the road, you know, driving down through the desert on Interstate 40, you know, wrote the whole thing driving, and then I had to go figure out how to play it. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So as you were driving, did you record it? | ||
| Yeah, I had a phone. | ||
| I just turned the voice recorder on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| You know, I'm on the phone. | ||
| My wife was asleep in the seat next to me, so I'm trying not to wake my wife up. | ||
| I'm being real quiet. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, wow. | |
| But yeah, and then you get it done, and you put it away, and you go listen to it later and see what happens. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| So in all these years, how many songs do you think you've written? | ||
| In excess of a thousand probably. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow! | |
| Somewhere like that. | ||
| Do you have stacks of them like laying around somewhere? | ||
| I mean, they're all cataloged, you know, at the publishing company I write for, you know, and they're all, you know, accounted for for the most part, and I can kind of go back through them and dig in them if I need to. | ||
| Would you do that, like, for an album? | ||
| That's what I've been doing. | ||
| Yeah, all the, you know, this record we're putting out and the last record that we have out, save for a few covers, they're all songs that are, you know, a decade old or something. | ||
| Wow, no kidding. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So Might As Well Get Stoned? | ||
| How long is that one? | ||
| Oh, God, that song is... | ||
| It's probably one of the first songs I wrote when I moved to town, so I was probably 25 when I wrote that. | ||
| So yeah, it's 13 years old, something like that. | ||
| Dude, love that song. | ||
| I love all your songs, man. | ||
| I'm a big fan. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| So when you are touring now, are you bringing your own opening acts with you? | ||
| Are you deciding who comes out with you? | ||
| Yeah, and we try to pick people that we know and love and we think fit musically or we just want to support. | ||
| We have a lot of great people out on the road with us. | ||
| We have Brent Cobb and Margot Price and Anderson East and Marty Stewart. | ||
| There's a lot of people that we love. | ||
| Have you listened to Ben and Brent Cobb or Anderson East? | ||
| No. | ||
| No, I'm going to write this down afterwards. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Give me some suggestions. | ||
| Yeah, you'll dig it. | ||
| It's good stuff. | ||
| Well, birds of a feather flock together. | ||
| And I know you type of dudes probably only like other legit type of people. | ||
| So I'd probably get some good data. | ||
| Well, I guess, yeah. | ||
| No, we love music, and we like to support that. | ||
| There's something about the art form of music that has always been very inspirational to me, and I've always drawn upon it. | ||
| Do you know that Hunter S. Thompson quote about music being fuel? | ||
| Have you ever seen that quote? | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| It's on my Instagram page from pretty recently when I was listening to Gary Clark Jr. just a couple of days ago. | ||
| Dude, that guy can play. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fuck! | |
| That guy's a freak. | ||
| He was with Honey Honey. | ||
| In the best way. | ||
| Yeah, and they did a version of Midnight Rider. | ||
| Yeah, here, music has always been a matter of energy to me, a question of fuel. | ||
| Sentimental people call it inspiration, but what they really mean is fuel. | ||
| I've always needed fuel. | ||
| I'm a serious consumer. | ||
| On some nights, I still believe that a car with the gas needle on empty can run about 50 more miles if you have the right music very loud on the radio. | ||
| I like it. | ||
| I like music in the car myself. | ||
| Yeah, it's uniquely inspirational, like very few things. | ||
| And the art of music and music creation is such a... | ||
| I think when it's done correctly I should say is it's a very pure art form in the sense that the people that are doing it are really like digging into their creative engines and You know just getting the gears turning and pulling these things out and It represents, like, however much burden you have in your personality, in your life, that can either help you or hurt you in this process. | ||
| And some people's music sort of represents the torment of their life. | ||
| And some people's music represents the purity of their vision. | ||
| But it all has different effects on people in some sort of strange and bizarre way. | ||
| Yeah, I like to say that, you know, the songs, I was talking about, I forget what I was talking about this, but I like songs that allow you to take ownership of them and make them personal to you. | ||
| Does that make sense? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I like listening, and I think that's... | ||
| Probably what we all like about songs eventually is our ability to relate to them. | ||
| I can write a song and I can play a song on a stage, but it doesn't really mean anything until somebody listens to it. | ||
| My perception of what that song is about in relation to them comes back at us on a stage or it lives in the world that way. | ||
| And that's so cool to me. | ||
| That's the thing that makes a song complete. | ||
| I don't feel like they're even done until somebody listens to it and attaches to it. | ||
| That's the thing that I love so much about songs. | ||
| Yeah, and everybody's thing is different too, right? | ||
| It's like you can have two songs that are the exact same song, but they're sung by different people and they have a completely different feeling. | ||
| Certain covers, you listen to certain covers, you're just like, whoa! | ||
| It just hits you in a totally different way. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| And then the other side of that is two different people can listen to the same version of a song and it means totally different things to them. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because they attach the pieces of their life to it in a way that is unique to them. | ||
| And that's the coolest thing in the world. | ||
| Yeah, it's interactive in some sort of a weird way, right? | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| And if it's not, nothing exists. | ||
| What I mean by, like, sometimes people's music represents sort of the torment that's going on in their own personal... | ||
| What I was thinking specifically of was Amy Winehouse. | ||
| Like, I was a big Amy Winehouse fan, and there's something about that. | ||
| She was great. | ||
| Fucking phenomenal. | ||
| There's something about that rehab song, because she put that rehab song out when everyone knew she was a mess. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then she still, you know, they tried them, She made it sound happy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| She's like, fuck it, I'm riding this thing right into the beach. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I'm not stopping for the rocks. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I'm hitting the throttle. | ||
| We're going to see where this goes. | ||
| It was tragic, but it produced some phenomenal music, no doubt. | ||
| Yeah, there was something to it. | ||
| There was almost a fatalistic acceptance of our own fate or something. | ||
| Well, and we can listen to it in that perspective now that she's not with us anymore. | ||
| But, you know, at the time, it was a lot of teenage angst. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Almost celebratory. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It felt celebratory at the time. | ||
| On the other side of the tragedy of it, it has a little more weight, I think. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| But, I mean, man, if you stop and think about how many tortured souls put out unbelievable music... | ||
| I think it's, you know, to some degree, some of the greats, you know, it's almost like a requirement that they are a little bit out there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, and so, which is, it's a horrible thing for them, but it's a beautiful thing for the rest of us who get to listen to it. | ||
| Yeah, right. | ||
| Man, it's just the, just to be an artist in any form, right, requires all this vulnerability and just trying to Trying to find whatever it is when you're trying to create something. | ||
| Where is that coming from? | ||
| The ether, the muse. | ||
| It's trying to just find that thing. | ||
| And then when you're dealing with your own personal demons, especially the deep drug demons, seem to produce some of the most insane music ever. | ||
| You know, you think of Hendrix and Kurt Cobain. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And you keep going down that list forever, really. | ||
| Yeah, and I have a songwriter friend who is convinced that you can't really produce something that is, you know, really noteworthy unless you have some kind of an addiction issue. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| I don't know if that's true, but you're saying that very thing. | ||
| You look back at history of rock and roll and music in general, there's a lot of heavy drugs and a lot of getting out there on the edge that has in fact produced some of the greatest music that we've ever heard. | ||
| You also can hear it in the music. | ||
| Stevie Ray Vaughan's a great example. | ||
| You hear the getting out there on the edge in the music. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| You hear it with every ounce of everything in it. | ||
| It's like there's no safety net in that kind of music. | ||
| It's just all raw. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| You've got a crazy life, man. | ||
| It's a crazy way to make a living. | ||
| It is a crazy way to make a living. | ||
| You must be super happy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| I don't have any of those issues. | ||
| I don't know what you're talking about. | ||
| But you don't have to have any of those issues. | ||
| I don't think you have to have an addiction issue to be great. | ||
| I just think you just have to pursue it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Well, maybe the addiction. | ||
| I mean, there can be healthy addictions. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| That's a good way to look at it. | ||
| Most people that I meet that are successful in one way or another, they have at the very least kind of obsessive tendencies about something. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And generally it's some part of the work. | ||
| And focus. | ||
| I see a lot of focus. | ||
| Like, this kind of super focused thing that when you see certain people, you're like, oh, that's why he can do that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Or she can do that. | ||
| They have this ability to focus. | ||
| Yeah, there's a... | ||
| I've always been amazed, too, when someone can take an instrument and make that instrument sound very specific to them. | ||
| Like, Gary Clark Jr. is another good example of that. | ||
| Like... | ||
| See if you can find that video that I put up on my Instagram way back when with Honey Honey. | ||
| Honey Honey and Gary Clark Jr. performed this really tiny place in downtown LA about maybe a year ago. | ||
| And they did a midnight set on like a Wednesday night or some shit. | ||
| And Gary Clark is up there doing the Allman Brothers Midnight Rider. | ||
| Like, listen to this. | ||
| And it's That's him You know what I'm saying? | ||
|
unidentified
|
in like that sound that's him so so so so so | |
| i mean come on He's mean, man. | ||
| That's a perfect example of what I'm talking about. | ||
| Like, that is him. | ||
| Well, that is him, but it's also everybody that's before him. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| And he's probably the one guy that we have in modern times that really can carry that torch for the blues and all those great guitar players that we don't have a lot of them left. | ||
| I mean, he can do that, and that's real kind of, you know, B.B. King approach, you know, just playing some real straight-in-line stuff. | ||
| But then he can do Hendrix and be crazy and psychedelic, too. | ||
| He can do any of that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's, you know, that guy shines when you step on a stage with him. | ||
| You know, it's... | ||
| We played... | ||
| He and I and Bonnie Raitt played a B.B. King tribute on the Grammys a few years back, and... | ||
| That was intimidating. | ||
| Bonnie Raitt's excellent in her own way. | ||
| She has that thing, just like he has, where it's just like those people are special people. | ||
| Yeah, I agree. | ||
| And there's something about them, like what Hunter was saying, that they're fuel. | ||
| Like I saw that and I ran home and I wrote. | ||
| I wrote for like three hours. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I just was pumped up. | ||
| I just felt like I'd seen something. | ||
| You know, like I just touched some new dimension. | ||
| You listen to a lot of Freddie King? | ||
| You ever listen to a lot of Freddie King? | ||
| No. | ||
| Oh, no, man. | ||
| I'm going to write this down, too. | ||
| I'm going to start writing down. | ||
| You've got to get on Freddie King. | ||
| Freddie King. | ||
| What kind of shit is he? | ||
| He's blues. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's not with us anymore, but... | ||
| Oh. | ||
| You know, there's B.B. King, Albert King, and Freddie King. | ||
| I've never heard of Freddie. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| Well, you've probably seen that show, Eastbound and Down. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, the theme song at the front of that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's Freddie King. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| Okay, but I love Freddie King. | ||
| Yeah, there's a wealth of fuel if you want some in Freddie King. | ||
| That's a pretty standard staple of listening for me. | ||
| If I want to turn something on and let it make me feel right, Freddie King. | ||
| Freddie King. | ||
| I got a John Lee Hooker problem. | ||
| When I start thinking about blues, I just listen to John Lee Hooker. | ||
| I have so much John Lee Hooker on my phone, I have no room for other people. | ||
| You've got to get some Freddie King in there. | ||
| All right, I'll get some Freddie King in there, but when I'm tired and I don't feel like working out, I put Boom Boom Boom on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| And woo! | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| We're off to the races. | ||
| It's just something about those types of songs, that deep blues. | ||
| It's just got this extra special soul to it. | ||
| You're sort of immersed in the feeling of those people. | ||
| Yeah, it's heavy-duty stuff, man. | ||
| Music is heavy-duty stuff, man. | ||
| How fortunate do you feel? | ||
| Oh, I'm the luckiest man in the world. | ||
| I say that all the time. | ||
| And it's true. | ||
| I am absolutely the luckiest dude in the world. | ||
| I would imagine you feel that way. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, you found your thing. | ||
| No, it's actually true. | ||
| I think I'm the luckiest guy in the world, but I'll let you slide. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Because you're here. | ||
| Well, I'm top five. | ||
| I'm top five. | ||
| I think we're all the luckiest person in the world if you actually found your thing that you like to do. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you work, but you don't really work work. | ||
| Well, yeah. | ||
| I mean, listen, I do a lot. | ||
| We do a lot. | ||
| It's work. | ||
| It's work in the sense of it's time-consuming. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It requires effort and focus. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But listen, there's nothing else I would rather do for a living, and I'm grateful and thankful every day for it because I love it. | ||
| Well, you could tell. | ||
| I mean, it really comes out in your music. | ||
| You really could tell. | ||
| It's pure. | ||
| Do you listen to any classical? | ||
| Any classical music? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, when I was a kid, I used to listen to more classical music than I do now. | ||
| But, you know, I enjoy occasionally going to the symphony, you know, but I haven't gone in years. | ||
| But I do like that music. | ||
| It moves me in a different kind of way than listening to Freddie King would. | ||
| All right, here's the big question. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Jazz. | |
| Jazz. | ||
| I do like jazz music. | ||
| Not necessarily like super experimental jazz music that gets way, way out there, like acid jazz. | ||
| So like the Coltrane, like classic stuff? | ||
| Well, I just, yeah. | ||
| And once again, I am not a... | ||
| In no way am I an authority on jazz, but if it's on, I will enjoy it. | ||
| Because I enjoy, as a musician, I enjoy, just like I enjoy great blues players, there's so many great musicians in jazz. | ||
| Like I had an opportunity... | ||
| To write some songs. | ||
| Dan Wilson called me up one time to go write some songs with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. | ||
| And so we wrote some songs. | ||
| I knew nothing about New Orleans jazz whatsoever, but I went down to New Orleans and I participated in this and wrote these songs that now live in the jazz world. | ||
| So that really is thrilling to me to get to that thing I was telling you about where I get to go hop into somebody else's space and see if I'm helpful. | ||
| That's cool to me, you know. | ||
| So now I have, you know, I have that. | ||
| It feels like, to me, like that's a feather in my cap. | ||
| I got to go participate with those guys, and they're so great, every one of them. | ||
| I have some friends that love that sort of collaboration thing, too, whether it's in music. | ||
| I have a good buddy of mine who writes a lot, my friend Tony Hinchcliffe, writes a lot for people for roasts, and he does punch-up on shows and things along those lines, but he relishes that opportunity. | ||
| He likes collaborating, likes helping people out on stuff. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, it just gives you the opportunity to flex your mind in a way that maybe you wouldn't in your own space, you know? | ||
| Right. | ||
| What do you do when you're not doing music? | ||
| That's all I do, pretty much. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| I play music and I, you know, I like to, I have things I like to do. | ||
| You know, I like to fish. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Me too. | |
| But I don't get to do that a whole lot. | ||
| Bass fish? | ||
| What do you do? | ||
| I grew up on a trout stream. | ||
| Oh, yeah? | ||
| Where? | ||
| I'm not a fly fisherman in Kentucky, but I'm not a fly fisherman. | ||
| Spinning tackle? | ||
| Yeah, just spinning tackle. | ||
| I used to use a little ultralight spinning rig. | ||
| My summers were spent as a kid. | ||
| I'd be in the creek at 530, you know? | ||
| My friend Steve Rinell was just talking to a famous writer recently in his last podcast. | ||
| I don't remember the man's name, but he's famous in the fishing writing world. | ||
| And he's a fly fisherman. | ||
| And he's like, he had a really interesting question. | ||
| He said, why is so much great literature attached to fly fishing, but not to spin tackle? | ||
| It's true. | ||
| That's a good question. | ||
| And I think that's the... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It's kind of like using spin tackles like this workman. | ||
| It's like a blue-collar way of doing it. | ||
| That's my perception of it. | ||
| And then people who are fly fishermen. | ||
| And I've seen these guys in action use a fly rod. | ||
| There's an art to it. | ||
| But there's an art to... | ||
| I'm using all of it, but the guys who are fly fishermen take a lot more pride in the art of it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And please forgive me, fishermen out there, if I'm misrepresenting anybody who likes to do either of these things. | ||
| But my perception of it is... | ||
| Guys with a spinner reel, I just want to catch the fish. | ||
| If it means I'm flipping it out there, if it means I'm tossing it, if it means I'm jig fishing with it, it doesn't matter. | ||
| I want to figure out the way to catch the fish. | ||
| The fly fishermen, they like the process. | ||
| Yeah, I started out with a spinning rod. | ||
| I actually started out with a Zebco push-button spin cast jammies. | ||
| And then I went to bait casting reel for bass. | ||
| And then when I got into trout fishing, I eventually moved on to fly fishing and learned how to tie some flies. | ||
| So you're serious about it, so I'm still here talking about your... | ||
| No. | ||
| That's your hobby. | ||
| It's been a long time. | ||
| Now when I fish, I fish maybe once a year like on vacation. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's basically what happens for me is I charter a guy on a boat somewhere to go. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's fun. | ||
| Which is easy. | ||
| It's fun. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I've done it in Hawaii, in Mexico, and the great thing is, say, if you're staying at a resort, you could rent a boat, they'll take you out, you catch a tuna or something like that, and then you cook it and eat it for lunch, and it's amazing. | ||
| Yeah, no, that's great. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's about the extent of my fishing these days. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| My other outdoor activities have sort of overwhelmed my fishing time. | ||
| But there's something about the people that get into fly fishing that it's not just fishing. | ||
| One of the weird things about fly fishing is a lot of them let the fish go. | ||
| There's a lot of catch and release going on with fly fishing. | ||
| Yeah, and I like that too. | ||
| I used to let a lot of them go. | ||
| I get that, but I'm a little... | ||
| I'm a little tormented on that. | ||
| You're putting a fucking hook through something's head and you're gonna let it go. | ||
| Like, how about just not doing that if you really love the fish? | ||
| How about just fish with no hook at all and they bite it, you know, you know you would have had them. | ||
| That's probably fair. | ||
| Yeah, that's probably the way to go. | ||
| It's weird that we, it's this weird thing that we have in our head where we're trying to activate those reward systems that were there in place in order to keep ourselves fed. | ||
| Right? | ||
| There's a thing that happens when you catch a fish. | ||
| Like I've seen with my little kids, I've taken my daughter's fishing, and when they catch a fish, they have this look on their face like, oh, oh, I got it, I got it, I got it! | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| It's super exciting when they pull it out of the boat, and then the fact that they're going to get to eat it later, there's some weird primal DNA thing that gets activated when you catch something. | ||
| And I think that's what these fly fishermen that are letting the fish go are trying to do. | ||
| They're just little junkies for that feeling, that DNA activation, that reward system thing. | ||
| And obviously it's difficult, and obviously there's a tremendous amount of skill and finesse involved in fly casting and roll casting and trying to place this... | ||
| Fly right in this little pool and drag it with the current and get that nasty trout to bite onto it. | ||
| But you also want to own it. | ||
| You want to have him and let him go. | ||
| You don't want to say, I could have had you but there's no hook on that. | ||
| The dark side of fly fishing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You want to know you got it. | ||
| You don't want to know he bit. | ||
| You want to know you got it. | ||
| So no one goes fly fishing with no hook. | ||
| They go with a barbless hook, and they'll catch it, and then they'll let it go. | ||
| And they'll say, that's fine. | ||
| It's a barbless hook. | ||
| Like, okay. | ||
| How about I put a barbless hook through your fucking face? | ||
| That shit ain't good. | ||
| That's not good. | ||
| You're trying to ruin fishing for all catch-and-release fishermen. | ||
| I am not. | ||
| And I support it 100%, and I've done it. | ||
| I'm a hypocrite in that regard. | ||
| I have done some catch and release. | ||
| But I feel like there is a weirdness to it that it's this why. | ||
| You're not eating it. | ||
| You can't just look at them? | ||
| No. | ||
| You've got to catch them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You've got to catch them and have them and then let them go. | |
| But how are you going to look at them if you don't catch them? | ||
| Look at them in the water. | ||
| Here's the thing. | ||
| A good percentage, I don't know what the number is, especially when you're like salmon fishing and you're using like heavy tackle, a good percentage if you're catching and releasing that those fish are never going to make it. | ||
| Catch them with a big lure, barbed hooks, you get them deep in the throat, you pull them out, their gills are bleeding. | ||
| Well, that's different. | ||
| I mean, that's a scenario that you don't like. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| In that sense, most fishermen, I think, would know that you can't turn that fish back loose. | ||
| But you have to sometimes. | ||
| Well, you do have to sometimes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You have to turn them loose because it's the law. | ||
| It's the regulations. | ||
| And you turn it loose and you watch it swim away. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You're like, this motherfucker's got about a 40% chance. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, and everybody hates that. | ||
| Yeah, it's the worst. | ||
| But they still want that feeling. | ||
| The catching the fish thing is a weird feeling. | ||
| Apparently, it's that way with butterfly catchers, too, because human beings used to be insectivores. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, I was listening to this lecture once by Terence McKenna, and he was talking about that. | ||
| Terence Kent McKenna, the great psychedelic author and lecturer, he was talking about how he was really into butterfly catching at one point in time. | ||
| And the odd thing is that it activates this very primal reward system in your body the same way catching a fish would. | ||
| Because human beings used to be insectivores. | ||
| We used to eat a lot of insects. | ||
| So when you do find some rare butterfly that you've been after for months and months, and you have the opportunity to drop the net on it. | ||
| Get so excited about him. | ||
| That's a weird sort of trophy hunting, butterfly hunting too. | ||
| Because you're allowed to do that. | ||
| You can take that little fucker, dry him out and put him on a wall somewhere and nobody thinks you're a barbarian. | ||
| Like, people are real racist when it comes to what animals are allowed to be dead. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Pigs and cows are screwed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, pigs and cows. | ||
| But more so bugs, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Oh, no, yeah. | ||
| Nobody likes bugs. | ||
| Butterflies, sort of. | ||
| I went to an ashram once, and this lady who was running the ashram had a can of Raid, and she was talking to me about the ant problem that they have. | ||
| And I was like, hold up. | ||
| So you spray these ants with poison? | ||
| And she's like, yeah. | ||
| And I go, so you kill the ants. | ||
| I go, isn't that contrary to what you're teaching? | ||
| She's like, sometimes there's just things you have to do because otherwise the ants will get in our food. | ||
| And I'm like, okay. | ||
| I was like, huh. | ||
| This is odd. | ||
| You're in an odd crossroads here, lady. | ||
| You're a Buddhist living in an ashram with a can of poison that you use for living beings that you don't like being around you. | ||
| I have nothing. | ||
| It's fine. | ||
| But if she had cats that she was killing with a baseball bat, everybody would be mad. | ||
| No, she'd be in jail. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Weird, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We have weird rules. | ||
| Sorry to take you down this world. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| This is very interesting to me. | ||
| I didn't know that human beings used to be insectivores. | ||
| Yeah, apparently. | ||
| Learn something new every day. | ||
| Well, that's one of the things that they talk about in terms of the future of protein, that insects provide very complex, complete proteins, and they can provide it to large amounts of people fairly inexpensively. | ||
| And so cricket protein is very popular today. | ||
| I don't know if you know this. | ||
| No. | ||
| A lot of people eat cricket protein. | ||
| Yeah, they have cricket bars and shit. | ||
| Cricket bars? | ||
| Yeah, they make bars out of crickets. | ||
| Yeah, cricket protein bars. | ||
| And apparently they taste pretty good. | ||
| Well, you know, my daughter ate, you know, we bought like on vacation somewhere, like this novelty sack of like barbecue crickets or something. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Because the kids wanted to try them. | ||
| Of course, my son was like, after he actually got it out of the package, he was like, I don't know about that. | ||
| My daughter was like, I'll try it. | ||
| And she ate it. | ||
| And then she was like, it's pretty good. | ||
| They're not bad. | ||
| What is this? | ||
| A cricket milkshake. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey! | |
| Yeah, is that pre-made? | ||
| There's the cricket bars. | ||
| I think it would look more palatable if they didn't have a picture of a cricket crawling out of it. | ||
| Yeah, hide that shit. | ||
| So there's the cricket protein powder. | ||
| They cook the cricket, grind those little fuckers up, and turn it into protein powder. | ||
| And it apparently has a complete amino acid profile. | ||
| It's easy to digest. | ||
| And it doesn't make people feel bad. | ||
| Like, look at that. | ||
| Look at the grams of protein per 100 gallons of water, how much you can get. | ||
| For a cow, you only get 6 grams of protein for 100 gallons of water. | ||
| But for crickets, you get 71 grams of protein for the same amount of water. | ||
| So it's more than 10 times the amount of protein. | ||
| And I don't think it has near the impact on the environment. | ||
| In terms of raising them, they don't have a lot of the waste products and the issues that cows have. | ||
| Methane. | ||
| Smells. | ||
| This is amazing. | ||
| Sorry, dude. | ||
| Let's go back to music. | ||
| No, it's all good. | ||
| I'm sitting here thinking about eating crickets. | ||
| I'm thinking about switching. | ||
| I've had crickets before, man. | ||
| I was in Mexico, and they cooked them and left them in the room. | ||
| We stayed at a hotel. | ||
| Like it was a little snack. | ||
| Yeah, like a little snack thing. | ||
| They were almost like a soy sauce-based or some sort of a salt-based. | ||
| Like they're chips or something. | ||
| Yeah, and they were fried. | ||
| And you just crunch them. | ||
| And I was like, okay, these are actually pretty good. | ||
| They're essentially related. | ||
| A lot of bugs are related to shellfish. | ||
| Whereas we found on Fear Factor that if you're allergic to shrimp, you're also allergic to roaches. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, we found that out because we made a dude eat roaches. | ||
| And he started having an allergic reaction. | ||
| They had to get him a shot of adrenaline and take him to the hospital. | ||
| That's awful. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That was a bad day. | ||
| Yeah, you know, I guess your throat closes up on you and you start, you know, a lot of inflammation. | ||
| You start wheezing. | ||
| Yeah, it's not fun. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But crickets, good. | ||
| And high in protein. | ||
| You never eat anything weird? | ||
| Are you like a straight-laced eater? | ||
| I'm pretty, yeah, I'm pretty straight. | ||
| Wild game? | ||
| My dad was a bird hunter and a rabbit hunter growing up, but I never loved it. | ||
| No? | ||
| No. | ||
| It's all about how it's cooked, really, right? | ||
| Yeah, and I don't know if we ever got that down at my house. | ||
| Yeah, it's tricky. | ||
| Like, I think if you're around a real wild game chef, like there's a guy named Hank Shaw who's been on this podcast before who's a hunter who's also like a real extraordinary chef, and he makes these amazing dishes with wild game. | ||
| And he's one of those guys that's like, you know, you think it's bad because you haven't cooked it right. | ||
| Let me cook it. | ||
| Yeah, I think there's a lost art to some of it, or a lesser known art, maybe. | ||
| Where are you living right now, man? | ||
| I live south of Nashville, Tennessee. | ||
| So when you flew into hell today, and you see, like, literally, it's on fire. | ||
| For people listening, at this point in time, this is one of the worst fires in the history of Los Angeles. | ||
| It's pretty scary. | ||
| Yeah, because it's what's called a dry hurricane, meaning there's hurricane-force winds, but there's no rain, and the fires are going fucking crazy. | ||
| 50,000 acres down in a day is nothing right now. | ||
| Yeah, we've been here a few days and we got in two or three days ago and we've been doing some other things, TV things, whatever, but waking up to that on the news is not a fun thing to watch and I'm so heartbroken for everybody losing their homes and it's a pretty tragic, awful thing to have to watch. | ||
| Yeah, it certainly is. | ||
| You know, it's the side effect of living in a place that doesn't have any weather, you know? | ||
| There you go. | ||
| Everything dries out. | ||
| It so rarely rains here, you know, and when you get, like, these crazy winds, the Santa Ana winds that happen every year, just, this is extraordinary, the winds here, and just perfect time for fires, obviously. | ||
| So is somebody kicking these things up, or what's the deal, really? | ||
| No one knows. | ||
| It could be arson. | ||
| It could be... | ||
| It feels like that. | ||
| It could be. | ||
| Look, there's some sick fucks out there. | ||
| They know that the wind is a bad thing for fire, and then all of a sudden the fire shows up. | ||
| It's entirely possible that out of 20 million people, there's one or two people that are out of their fucking mind. | ||
| Yeah, that's way out there. | ||
| Is that what you were thinking? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I just watch it, and I'm just like... | ||
| I mean, how does the fire spontaneously start? | ||
| You know, that... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It just seems... | ||
| Well, you're probably right. | ||
| I mean, that's one of the suspicions, is that it's arson-related. | ||
| There's several fires. | ||
| That's what I'm saying. | ||
| There's so many going at this point. | ||
| I'm just like, is somebody running around, like, thinking... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Well, that's the thing. | ||
| Yeah, they happen simultaneously. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| All during the same crazy conditions and they happen like way far apart from each other So you talk to firefighters about it and they're like there's a lot of times We don't know but there's a lot of times some serious suspicions. | ||
| Yeah, you know, it's just It's unfortunate you would have to think about that. | ||
| I mean think about all these human beings and there's one or two or however whatever the number is that are so tortured And so in pain and so fucked up, the wires are so crossed. | ||
| Yeah, I don't get it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't get it. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| And I hope that's not the case. | ||
| But I watched all these guys on the news, you know, up on the roofs trying to save their property or, you know, firefighters putting themselves in harm's way or guys flying helicopters dumping water in zero visibility conditions. | ||
| And it's just like, man, it's just, it's awful. | ||
| It is awful. | ||
| You know, around this time of year, you really appreciate firefighters. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I think a lot of people take them for granted most of the time, until you need them. | ||
| They're superheroes that only get credit when they do some shit. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And when they do do some shit, you realize, like, oh, without them... | ||
| Like, I talked to a firefighter once, it freaked me the fuck out. | ||
| He was saying, it's just a matter of time to one day... | ||
| With the right winds, there's a fire that burns all the way to the ocean, just goes right through L.A., and there's nothing we can do about it. | ||
| And I was like, what? | ||
| And he's like, it's a matter of time. | ||
| He goes, everybody thinks it. | ||
| It's just a matter of catching the right fire. | ||
| And then you realize today, like, oh, he's right. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Bel Air's on fire. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Where all the rich people live. | ||
| That's on fire. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| No, it's, like I said, it's like live on the news. | ||
| We were watching it in the hotel room, you know. | ||
| It's just... | ||
| Pretty hardcore. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, we changed our route to get over here today just because there's road closures and things like that. | ||
| Did it take you more time? | ||
| I think we gave ourselves like an hour and 20 minutes, hour and a half to get over here today. | ||
| What else you got going on right now? | ||
| We did a few TV things, and we're kind of winding down for the year, and then we'll kick back up. | ||
| In January, we got the Grammys in January, I guess, and then kind of slowly get back into it. | ||
| But my wife's pregnant with twins, so we're trying to be... | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| Congratulations. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And she tours and sings with me pretty much all the time, so we're trying to figure out the new reality of that. | ||
| We have two kids out with us, but now we're going to four, so it's... | ||
| How old are your kids? | ||
| They're eight and seven. | ||
| So do you bring a tutor on the road with you? | ||
| How do you do that? | ||
| My mother-in-law is a retired second grade school teacher. | ||
| Convenient. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So we homeschool our children on the road. | ||
| But when they study the Boston Tea Party, they get to go look at all the stuff in Boston. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, wow. | |
| It's a different kind of education, but things like that kind of live and breathe for them a little bit more than what I got growing up. | ||
| And hopefully someday they'll appreciate that. | ||
| Oh, I'm sure they will. | ||
| I mean, it's got to be interesting to them too to see their dad go from being a singer-songwriter to all of a sudden being a celebrity singer. | ||
| Have they realized that? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I think to them, they're young enough that it just seems like, yeah, mom and dad have to go sing a show. | ||
| It's just what they do. | ||
| When are your mom and dad going to go sing? | ||
| My mom makes houses. | ||
| She doesn't sing. | ||
| They don't have real... | ||
|
unidentified
|
What's the... | |
| They don't have anything else to compare it to. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Point of reference. | ||
| Yeah, point of reference is what I was looking for. | ||
| So that's just kind of what life is to them. | ||
| When you tour, how long do you go? | ||
| How much of a stretch? | ||
| Well, we very rarely try to... | ||
| I mean, we try to be weekend warriors as much as we can and do, you know, Thursday, Friday, Saturday runs. | ||
| But, you know, some things logistically that doesn't make any sense. | ||
| If you're going to run across Canada or we're, you know, based in Nashville. | ||
| So if we want to run the West Coast, we're out here for a couple weeks or something like that. | ||
| But never longer than that. | ||
| You know, we never try to stay out. | ||
| We're not very rock and roll about it. | ||
| We don't live out there and don't want to, you know. | ||
| So I love to play shows. | ||
| There's a limit on how many I can sing in a week. | ||
| Three's the limit. | ||
| So we stick with that and try to make that have as much kind of home time. | ||
| So all the guys in the band, the crew, everybody's got kids and families and things. | ||
| It's a hard way to make a living if you're always gone. | ||
| Like months and months and months gone. | ||
| That's the rock and roll way of doing things a lot. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I know Sturgill had to do that like that for a while. | ||
| He didn't have to. | ||
| He chose to. | ||
| Chose to. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I had to convince him of that. | ||
| You had to convince him of that, that he didn't have to? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Only he convinces himself of anything. | ||
| I'm not going to say that I convinced him. | ||
| I know what you're saying, but you influenced him. | ||
| Well, I'm not even going to say I influenced him, but I would tell him. | ||
| Suggested. | ||
| I would tell him. | ||
| Hey, man, you don't have to. | ||
| Why are you doing this? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, okay. | |
| So he felt like what... | ||
| I think all his years of working regular jobs, you know, working on the railroad and doing all the shit that he had to do, when success came, he was like, Jesus Christ, I've got to keep this fire going. | ||
| Oh, absolutely. | ||
| Well, and... | ||
| Get the kindling, you know, chop wood. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| You have this moment, you know, when you have a little something going on where you're like, well, I've got to, you know, make hate while the sun's shining. | ||
| I understand that wholeheartedly. | ||
| But, you know, we're only human beings and we all have limits. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you have a limit of the amount of days that you could sing in a week? | ||
| Yeah, three. | ||
| That's it? | ||
| That's it. | ||
| And then your voice starts to get strained? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I sing pretty hard, too. | ||
| Yeah, that's the end. | ||
| You know, and I have, you know, conversations with other singers when I run into them. | ||
| It's like, how many shows can you play in a week? | ||
| And, you know, some guys it's two, and some guys it's like, I can play every day of the week. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| But that's not me. | ||
| Three shows is kind of the limit. | ||
| Do you ever have a greedy McMoneybags agent that's like, listen, Chris, four shows a week, 25% more money? | ||
| Well... | ||
| Just one more show. | ||
| I wouldn't call anybody I work with greedy big money bags. | ||
| Not going to hurt you, Christopher. | ||
| Two shows a night, not a big deal. | ||
| But certainly, you know, certainly everybody, you know, everybody wants... | ||
| You know, as you work with. | ||
| And that's their job, is to try to maximize what you're able to do monetarily. | ||
| And, you know, sometimes you just have to look at them and go, sorry, I can't do that. | ||
| So ultimately you're the captain. | ||
| Yeah, not physically possible. | ||
| And then they have to deal within those parameters, and we figure out how to maximize that. | ||
| Does every country music singer have to live around Nashville? | ||
| Is that, like, requisite? | ||
| Um, I don't... | ||
| It seems like it's a giant collection of you fuckers living in this one spot. | ||
| Well, I mean, that is kind of the hub for, you know, like, actors living in L.A. or something. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right. | |
| Or New York, whatever. | ||
| I think it's L.A. If you want to be in a certain industry, it helps, you know, must be a present to win, you know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| To some degree, you know? | ||
| Do you feel that that place has a certain energy to it as well, though? | ||
| It does have energy to it, and it has had energy to it, and it's a very changing energy at the moment. | ||
| I don't live in Nashville proper anymore, but I did for years. | ||
| But it's a different place. | ||
| It's a music place, but there's so much else going on. | ||
| There's 19 or 20 cranes building condos downtown. | ||
| What's going on in Nashville? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Everybody wants to buy a condo, I guess. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't understand it. | ||
| But yeah, there's an influx of people who all of a sudden think it's a good idea to move to Nashville. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, that's what I had heard. | ||
| I had heard that it's almost becoming like LA-ified. | ||
| A little bit. | ||
| I don't know what that means. | ||
| But if that means that there's a lot of condo building going on. | ||
| Do you see a lot of chicks with lips like this? | ||
| Man, I really... | ||
| I'll be honest. | ||
| I don't... | ||
| I don't run around. | ||
| I go into Nashville when I have to go into Nashville for certain things. | ||
| For supplies. | ||
| Yeah, for supplies. | ||
| And then I park myself out in the country. | ||
| So that's where you live. | ||
| That's nice. | ||
| Got a spread? | ||
| Yeah, we have a little bit of land. | ||
| Wildlife, animals? | ||
| Oh yeah, none of those bobcats and turkeys. | ||
| Oh, that's nice. | ||
| Deer, you name it. | ||
| Yeah, what I've heard about Nashville is that Nashville started out as sort of this pure sort of music environment and then over time it became a money grab and people realized that it's a music environment and they said how do we capitalize on this and then people said oh I heard this is a music environment I'm gonna move there and then it became like a place to be to be seen and that it's it's still got the music there but it's it's also like weirdly compromised does that make sense? | ||
| No more than anywhere else. | ||
| Is that human nature? | ||
| Man, I don't know. | ||
| I don't want to say... | ||
| It sounds very like any corporate involvement of anything to say that it's been tainted or it's all a money grab or something. | ||
| I don't think it's all. | ||
| I'm definitely not saying that. | ||
| I love Nashville, by the way. | ||
| Okay, well, no, I do too, but I'm just trying to... | ||
| Wrapped my head around the relayed opinion of...or was that your opinion? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| It's other people that...I know people that have lived there and then moved back. | ||
| Gotcha. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Just people that had this romantic notion of, I want to go there, and this is sort of a country-ish city where everybody's soulful. | ||
| They're all singing songs, and you go down and see all these amateur bands or these bands that are just starting out, and they're amazing. | ||
| Yeah, I don't think that that's really... | ||
| That's some kind of Mayberry version of what Nashville is. | ||
| Narnia. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's some kind of unicorn that you're inventing in your mind if you think that that's any town that you're going to. | ||
| It's like, I don't know, I don't know what the equivalent would be, but feeling like you moved to some island somewhere and everybody walks around and has yachts and just drinks martinis all day or whatever. | ||
| It's just like... | ||
| That's not even true. | ||
| Well, there's places that you're supposed to go to. | ||
| When I was in Boston, when I first started out doing stand-up, I'd heard about the Comedy Store. | ||
| That was like the Mecca. | ||
| You had to get to the Comedy Store in Hollywood. | ||
| It was like spoken with hushed tones. | ||
| And everybody sort of came to that place. | ||
| It drew everybody in from across the country. | ||
| And from my friends, like Honey Honey and other people that I know that lived in Nashville for a while, Nashville was kind of that to them. | ||
| What it was, was this kind of It's a place where you'd seen and heard so much amazing music has come out of that part of the world, and it's so music-centered. | ||
| It has a different vibe, because it's a very artistic city. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| But there's also a side to it now, and it's been in the last five... | ||
| Sorry, Nashville, if you feel like I'm talking about you, but there's a thing now where you go downtown, and It's more like you're going to a giant bachelorette party or something. | ||
| It's just like everybody's, I don't know, just looking to drink their face off and listen to bad covers. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| I need to apologize. | ||
| No, it's okay. | ||
| You're being honest. | ||
| But it's, you know, and it's great for the city in a lot of ways, tourism-wise and monetarily and all those things, but it also changes that, whatever, some notions of that romantic thing that you're talking about. | ||
| Those things still exist, but they have to be, like a lot of things that have sold, they need to be sought out. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like the difference between a real old-school barbecue joint and TGI Fridays. | ||
| I have nothing against T.G. Alphardis, but I know what you mean. | ||
| I know what you mean too. | ||
| I see you laughing at me like backpedaling all the potential. | ||
| No, no, no, no, no. | ||
| I'm forcing you into this. | ||
| I didn't mean to. | ||
| I'm just talking about... | ||
| My point about all of it really is the idea of artistic integrity is a fleeting thing and a sacred thing and a critical thing for a guy like you to create the kind of music that you make. | ||
| And I'm always interested like how someone cultivates that. | ||
| How someone protects that. | ||
| Because I think it's what goes away. | ||
| When things go off the rails, it's usually the focus away from the creative aspect of it, the art. | ||
| Making the thing that you loved in the beginning when you got into this thing. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, and sometimes people get... | ||
| It happens to comedians in a big way. | ||
| Movies and they become famous and then they believe their own bullshit and they put out these specials that are terrible. | ||
| It's real easy to fall into. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And, you know, but there's also, you know, there's a side of that I would argue that maybe that is what's in their heart at that moment and that's just as real as anything else, you know? | ||
| I would argue that it's in the wrong environment. | ||
| It's been surrounded by the wrong people with the wrong influences, and they have the wrong focus. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I'll go with that. | ||
| But everybody's going to evolve in one way or another. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| For better or worse. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And everybody's going to have these high points and low points of where they really were in the zone, so to speak, or not in the zone. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Creatively, I think that that's just life. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| For me, if there's a way to try to preserve some notion of integrity, it's just that thing I was saying earlier. | ||
| It's just like, if you let all the other stuff just... | ||
| Put the blinders on and go, all right, here I am. | ||
| Here are the guys that I play music with and the girls. | ||
| We're going to sit in the room. | ||
| What are we going to do? | ||
| What will we do if none of this other stuff existed? | ||
| And that's the way you keep it. | ||
| where it should be. | ||
| As you keep it right in the moment and right in the room and don't let some notion of trying to outdo yourself or outsell yourself or, you know, make more money than the other guy or have a number make more money than the other guy or have a number one over top of the other or, you know, because all that kind of stuff is manufactured too, like number ones. | ||
| Those are just numbers. | ||
| And some of them are so tainted by people just doing things that manufacture that number that they want to have that it's not even a real thing at that point. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Well, I always felt weird about contests and things and any sort of ranking system that involves art. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So you're way anti any kind of award. | ||
| Well, I just think that the Oscars and the Grammys and all that kind of shit, I don't give a fuck who you think is great. | ||
| I don't care who you think is the great at number one. | ||
| And the winner is... | ||
| Open the envelope. | ||
| Oh my god, is he going to get it? | ||
| The work is the work. | ||
| The work is done. | ||
| Apocalypse Now is a great fucking movie. | ||
| It doesn't matter if you give him a gold statue or not. | ||
| What's the work? | ||
| The work is great. | ||
| For it to win a thing or not win a thing. | ||
| You know, and some of the things that have won, you can tell that the win is tainted by the political climate, that the people are, like, leaning towards something that's socially aware and kind. | ||
| So somebody made a movie with lesbians that saved the planet from, you know what I mean? | ||
| It's like, that kind of shit becomes, like, transparent and obvious, and you can do that and rig the system and win an award. | ||
| I think that awards for art are goofy. | ||
| Awards for comedy or every comedy competition I've ever seen, they're super goofy. | ||
| It's missing the whole idea of the thing. | ||
| The whole idea of the thing is supposed to be the art. | ||
| It's not supposed to be trying to win an award. | ||
| No, it's not. | ||
| But, you know, if you win an award out of that, it allows you to make more art. | ||
| And it makes people pay attention to the art. | ||
| So be it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's sort of a bastardization. | ||
| It's always felt like about that. | ||
| There was a show called Last Comic Standing. | ||
| And the good thing about it was that it got a lot of comics that people hadn't heard of. | ||
| And they put them on television and helped their career. | ||
| But the bad thing was they're doing like a contest. | ||
| And like, who's the audience? | ||
| Clap for more! | ||
| Do you want mic? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yay! | |
| What about Debbie? | ||
| Not too much. | ||
| That's fucking weird. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| We have a lot of those shows. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| There's not as many anymore. | ||
| A lot of them is singing, right? | ||
| Yeah, that's what I'm saying. | ||
| People like to watch those shows. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because people also like the idea that you can be one thing one minute and one moment on television can make you some other totally different person. | ||
| People love that. | ||
| That's why Susan Boyle was so famous, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| We saw this woman. | ||
| Everybody was doubting her. | ||
| She goes out there, and she's got pipes! | ||
| And she belts that song out, and you can see Simon, who's just a douchebag, was like, holy shit! | ||
| She's amazing! | ||
| Like, you could see it, like, undeniable, you know? | ||
| Those are good moments though. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Those are good moments. | ||
| Those are the best moments. | ||
| The other good moments are like when they have American Idol and they have those people that have no business being there and they play their auditions too. | ||
| Those are the other good moments for the wrong reasons, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But, you know, if you're watching that show, you're watching it for that, too. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Is there a good show to introduce people to country music? | ||
| Like, you know, they used to have... | ||
| There used to be, like, shows where people could, you know... | ||
| Yeah, we used to have, you know, like, Nashville Now and things like that. | ||
| I don't think that really exists anymore. | ||
| Like a country music-specific show? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, I don't think we really have that anymore. | ||
| Like a variety show, like Johnny Cash show or Glenn Campbell's show or something like that. | ||
| No, we don't have that anymore. | ||
| anymore. | ||
| And I don't know how much people want that anymore. | ||
| Otherwise, it might exist. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| I think there's the right person to do it. | ||
| Maybe there's not the right person to do it. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Well, I just think someone needs to make it. | ||
| I feel like there's so much. | ||
| You're telling me about all these artists I've got to go look into, and I'm sure there's a bunch that are coming up that are probably equally talented, and maybe they just need an opportunity like that. | ||
| Something along those lines, some sort of a show, a variety show where really talented people can come out and show their songs. | ||
| It'd be good. | ||
| Well, the closest thing to that right now, have you seen this Mike Judge show? | ||
| Mike Judge, the guy from King of the Hill? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| It's like Tales from the Tour Bus or something like that? | ||
| No, what is that? | ||
| He talks to all these old school, like, Texas country acts. | ||
| It's all the folklore of country music. | ||
| And he does it like interview style, and they're all telling these stories. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Play this trailer. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, man. | |
| I want to hear this. | ||
| It's phenomenal. | ||
| I love Mike Judge. | ||
|
unidentified
|
George Jones. | |
| He had 36 brand new cars. | ||
| My favorite had a horn sound like a dying bull. | ||
| The wild Terry Lee Lewis. | ||
| He bought a machine gun and shot up a demo at it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It was next door to $50,000 worth of false teeth. | |
| I knew he was fixing to shoot, and I didn't want to be in the land of fire. | ||
| So they would tell stories and then they'd animate them. | ||
| Yeah, but all these guys that you see animated, these are the real guys that lived a lot of these things and are telling these stories. | ||
| These are not made up characters in any way and I know some of the guys that wind up being animated on these things and And I have for years said, you know, if even half of the folklore that exists in country music could be told, it would be the biggest thing in the world, you know? | ||
| And that's what he's doing right now with that show, and he's doing an excellent job of it, and it's really... | ||
| For me, and maybe it's not as entertaining to other people, I don't know, but for me as a musician, knowing some of the folklore and knowing how many great characters and storytellers exist in country music and have existed, it's so refreshing to see these guys get stories told about them. | ||
| That's awesome. | ||
| I didn't even know Mike Judge was a country music fan. | ||
| I didn't either, but I gotta tell you, he's knocking it out of the park as far as I'm concerned with this TV show. | ||
| I hope it does really well. | ||
| I'm so glad you brought this up. | ||
| Yeah, it looks hilarious. | ||
| It's awesome. | ||
| And I don't say that about much. | ||
| I don't really, like, get super pumped up about a lot. | ||
| Do you watch other shit? | ||
| Yeah, you know, I like a lot of, I like, I mean, some pretty obvious things like Game of Thrones and Walking Dead. | ||
| I'm into that. | ||
| I like, you know, I like kind of science fiction based things and, you know, I like, but I like, I like things that are done well, whatever it is. | ||
| And I think both of those are done well. | ||
| So do you binge watch TV shows? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| That's the only way I can watch a TV show, you know, because half the time I'm doing something when it actually comes on, you know? | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| So when you look at yourself right now and you look at all this cool shit that you're doing, do you hope to just keep doing it this way? | ||
| Do you have some grand plans? | ||
| We far surpass any grand plan that I might have had like years ago. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So I'm... | |
| I'm hopeful that we get to continue to do some cool things and have fun doing it. | ||
| I'm at that age where I'm just old enough not to be stupid with what we're doing and hopefully young enough to really get to keep doing it for a little while. | ||
| You know, I don't know, man. | ||
| I'm grateful for anything that we've gotten to do and we'll get to do in the future, and hopefully the next few years will just be a continuation of that. | ||
| That's all you could ask for, man. | ||
| I mean, what you're doing now is so awesome and so much fun. | ||
| Yeah, I can't imagine. | ||
| If I could write a script for how... | ||
| This is how the curve of I want my career of putting records out to go. | ||
| I couldn't write it any better for me. | ||
| And I get to do... | ||
| I have freedom to do basically whatever I want, and play however I want, and sing about whatever I want, and it's the greatest thing in the world. | ||
| Do you get young guys coming up to you, young girls coming up to you that have dreams of being a singer-songwriter? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And ask you for advice? | ||
| Yeah, and my advice is always just be nice, you know? | ||
| Be nice? | ||
| Be nice, yeah. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, well, I think that's, you know, I think that's... | ||
| It's always easier than making too many enemies. | ||
| You'll inevitably have people that Don't believe in what you do. | ||
| That's all that subjective thing. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Yeah, being nice is important. | ||
| But also being you. | ||
| Be you and be nice. | ||
| If you do those two things, I think that's the best recipe to hopefully for you to put yourself in the position to get lucky. | ||
| Is this something that you had to figure out yourself? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, but you know, when you start, and I don't know how it works from your end what you do, when you start And when you get your first little, you know, I get a publishing deal and you get to be around some of what an industry is. | ||
| And then you slowly but surely get to meet people who are successful in different facets of it. | ||
| And I think what I find is the people that I gravitate towards and that I really respect and look at and go, A career like that would be nice. | ||
| They're very nice caring, giving individuals who support younger artists and they do nice things for their communities and they do nice things for people out in the world. | ||
| And they make music that's in their heart. | ||
| And those are the things that I think are good to aspire to as a musician. | ||
| And those are the things I respect. | ||
| I respect that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| A whole lot. | ||
| Not just talented, but nice. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Now, what about, like, work ethic? | ||
| Do you have people asking questions about, like, how do you motivate yourself? | ||
| Or how do you sit down and write? | ||
| What's your process? | ||
| What is my advice to them? | ||
| I say write as much as you can with as many people as you can find who know what they're doing. | ||
| And that's how you learn how to write songs. | ||
| But I'll also say, I used to have a songwriter friend who said, you can't learn how to be a songwriter. | ||
| You can learn how to write better songs more often. | ||
| But it's not, you know, it's like, and forgive me if this is a wrong analogy, but I don't think you can really learn how to be funny if you're a comedian. | ||
| I used to think that. | ||
| I used to think that. | ||
| Because I used to think, well, you're either funny or not funny. | ||
| And then I realized, like, oh, some people need to learn how to be comfortable enough to be funny. | ||
| You think? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I've met people that sucked, and then they got good. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Like, really good. | ||
| Well, I'm giving the wrong advice then, because I don't think you are. | ||
| I personally think, like... | ||
| Some of it has to be innate, and then you have to learn how to sharpen that tool a little bit. | ||
| Well, I think whoever you are can change. | ||
| And I think if you are in a position where you are incapable of writing songs or incapable of being funny or incapable of writing books or doing paintings, whatever it is, it's because of whoever you are right now. | ||
| But that doesn't mean that whoever you are right now is who you're going to be five years from now or whatever. | ||
| I think if you can go through enough personal growth and enough introspective thinking and objective realization of your environment and the way you interface with people slowly but surely changes and evolves and matures, your art will, your expression will, because you're not who you were. | ||
| You know, you're not who you were five years ago. | ||
| You're not who you were ten years ago. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| This is my thought. | ||
| I mean, I don't think it works without everybody. | ||
| There's some people that just aren't fucking funny. | ||
| Don't get me wrong. | ||
| But I used to think that it was just, if you sucked in the beginning, you're going to suck. | ||
| And then I met some people that sucked. | ||
| But there has to be some element of spark or drive, even. | ||
| I think, would you say that if the person that was trying to be funny was not funny at first, they at least knew that they weren't funny and had to get better at it? | ||
| No. | ||
| No. | ||
| Sometimes they think they're funny and then they become funny. | ||
| I used to think that there was much more of a clear, defined pattern than I think now. | ||
| But I think it's about being clueless. | ||
| I think cluelessness is the enemy of anything that you're going to make that's going to have a real impact on people, if you're clueless. | ||
| If you don't see how people perceive you, if you're not aware of how they're taking you in when you're communicating with them, your art is going to suck. | ||
| You don't have a connection with them. | ||
| You don't have a connection with people. | ||
| You don't have a connection with yourself. | ||
| I think... | ||
| Unless there's some sort of a solitary thing that you do, like maybe sculpting or painting, like you could be a madman who's totally in your own world and create some crazy art form that someone can come along and look at and go, wow. | ||
| But anything where you're interacting with people, I think there's a big part of that interaction is... | ||
| The way you look through other people's eyes and the way they take in what you're saying, not just what you want to get out, but also your recognition, whether peripherally or whether it's obviously, your realization of how they're perceiving your thoughts and ideas and what vehicle you're delivering these ideas in. | ||
| Is it clunky and too loud, or do you have the same thought and make it smooth and calm and sinking into people with The right words and the right cadence and the right... | ||
| You can have the same ideas, but they just need a better vehicle to get through. | ||
| And I think cluelessness prevents you from objectively analyzing your own work. | ||
| Gotcha. | ||
| So self-awareness. | ||
| Yeah, self-awareness is a really important part. | ||
| And brutal honesty, you know. | ||
| With yourself. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I'll go with that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, you must have that with songs, right? | ||
| Like, do you have songs where you write and then you go back and go, what the fuck is this? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| You know, but you also have songs where... | ||
| Every day you write a song and you get done, you don't get to the end of the day without thinking that you did something good. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But it's only on, you know, you've got to get away from it a little bit and then re-listen to it or re-examine it and go, eh. | ||
| Or, hey, that was a good one. | ||
| So I think it's easy to feel like you were a genius in the moment. | ||
| Right. | ||
| As a songwriter. | ||
| Especially if you've got a couple of drinks. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| How much of the stuff that you actually write becomes a song that you publish? | ||
| Say if you're writing, how many of the days spent does it actually come out to be a full song? | ||
| Oh, I can write a song in three hours. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| But you can also not write a song in three hours, right? | ||
| Yeah, if I don't want to. | ||
| Are you asking if there's a schedule to write something? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, no, no. | |
| I mean, how much of it really connects with you? | ||
| I'm sure you must be sitting... | ||
| Sometimes you sit down, and on the first draft, you just fucking nail it, right? | ||
| You got an inspiration? | ||
| Oh, yeah, me every time. | ||
| But I'm just trying to see if there's parallels, because comedy is probably ten to one. | ||
| Ten things I write are bullshit in one thing. | ||
| I'm like, hmm, might be something there. | ||
| Yeah, I think if you're doing ten percent of what you do is work that you deem good enough to put out in the world, I think you're probably doing pretty good. | ||
| I mean, I think that's a pretty good average of things that are worth something. | ||
| You hope for better, but if you're doing that, I think that's doing your job. | ||
| I also believe you've got to go through some of the ones that aren't there just to kind of flush them out. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| You have to get that out, otherwise it's stuck there and it's going to mess with everything else you're doing. | ||
| If there's something on your mind to work on, work on it to the end. | ||
| Make it the best you can make it. | ||
| Then look at it and go, hey, was this really something I should have worked on? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yes or no. | ||
| And then you can push it out and kind of move on. | ||
| I think that's important to kind of flush out your mind that way creatively. | ||
| Do you ever come back to your stuff, like sort of almost like come back to it when you haven't thought about it in forever and look at it with fresh eyes, almost like you're collaborating with somebody else and redoing their stuff? | ||
| I'm very much the guy who believes the first instinct is probably the correct one most of the time. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| I don't like to go back and edit and edit and edit. | ||
| It's not me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| So when you write a song, you write a song. | ||
| Pretty much. | ||
| Wow, that's interesting. | ||
| Does everybody do it that way? | ||
| No, no, not at all. | ||
| There are guys who will take a whole year to write one song. | ||
| Really? | ||
| And I can't write with those guys. | ||
| I respect them. | ||
| But I don't have that kind of patience. | ||
| I don't. | ||
| And they've written some songs that I think are fantastic. | ||
| And I really do appreciate them. | ||
| But I'm completely impatient writing songs. | ||
| I feel like... | ||
| You know, my favorite songs are ones that just kind of fall down out of the sky in a bolt of lightning, and you write it in about 10 minutes, and you're like, that's exactly what it was supposed to be. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Great. | ||
| I'm done. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm going to go eat a sandwich. | |
| Right. | ||
| How much of your shit do you write under the influence of something? | ||
| I don't like that. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Really, to do that. | ||
| Nothing? | ||
| Well, I mean, I might have a sip of bourbon or something, but, you know, I don't like that that much, because I like... | ||
| I like the clarity. | ||
| Some guys can't do it without it. | ||
| Some guys, it's like that makes them all of a sudden turn into the Michael Jordan of songwriting. | ||
| For me, if I'm going to do something like that, it's recreational and I'm going to go eat a bunch of chips and watch a movie or something. | ||
| It's just like... | ||
| I'm not going to get any real... | ||
| Not much worthwhile is going to come out of that for me. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's an interesting thing that people have this different approach to essentially what's an open-ended creative avenue. | ||
| Creating a song, it's a blank sheet of paper. | ||
| And so many different people have different approaches to how to make that thing come out of their head. | ||
| Yeah, well, and I'm not saying that I haven't tried many different ways to make things happen, but I find, you know, for me, the process of clarity works better than trying to alter myself to get to some other plane. | ||
| Maybe there is another plane I don't know about, but I've never been there. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I would want, like, George Carlin had an interesting way that he wrote comedy. | ||
| He would write comedy sober, and then he would smoke a joint and punch it up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hmm. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| So he'd write the initial ideas, he'd write it all out, write out the bit, and then he'd... | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Let's look at this thing again. | ||
| Well, I mean, I think that probably works in comedy. | ||
| Yeah, I've started adopting that. | ||
| I used to write almost all high. | ||
| And now I write 50% high, 50% sober, and then I punch up high. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Yeah, but not too high. | ||
| And punch-up is a comedic term for editing. | ||
| Yeah, pretty much. | ||
| Yeah, it depends on some styles of writing. | ||
| Some guys write in bit form, like they say, so, the other day I walk, and they write it out like that. | ||
| And other guys would just, like, say clocks, like the idea of clocks, like the arbitrary decision that we all made, that there's You know, these little numbers around this dial. | ||
| It's a minute is this amount of time. | ||
| And you'll just start writing all these different things. | ||
| And out of that, you might write a whole essay. | ||
| Out of that, you might have one paragraph that makes sense. | ||
| Like one quick one-liner about time. | ||
| Maybe it's an answer to a pretentious friend. | ||
| It's like, there is no time, man. | ||
| Well, if you fucking show up late and you get fired, it's time for you to get a new job, bitch. | ||
| That could be a way where you could take time and just take this big essay on it and you would extract an idea that could eventually be humor on stage. | ||
| But everybody's got a different style of that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That's a lot of thinking. | ||
| Fuck, man. | ||
| It's all a lot of thinking, right? | ||
| Dude, that's why I always love talking to people that do something completely different than me, like you. | ||
| Because I always want to know, like, okay, how does a guy who writes books do this? | ||
| How does a guy who writes songs do this? | ||
| How does a guy who makes movies do this? | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Because it seems like it's a lot of the same muscles, but then in talking here, I'm not sure that the processes are exactly... | ||
| I don't know that they always translate. | ||
| I think the focus is the same thing. | ||
| It's like whatever your end goal is, whatever you're trying to create, it's all about showing up and doing that work and staring at it and trying to figure it out. | ||
| And then for comedy, it's a lot about getting in front of the crowds. | ||
| You got to work a lot. | ||
| If you don't work a lot, it's not going to work. | ||
| It just won't. | ||
| You have to be out there. | ||
| You can't just create comedy on your own, whereas I think you with a bunch of talented musicians, you could probably develop a fucking jamming record before anybody ever got a chance to see it. | ||
| And that's what you do. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| It's a completely different style of creation. | ||
| Although we do try things out on the road, and you kind of get a feel for them sometimes that way. | ||
| So yeah, we do some of that. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| But probably not as much as what you're talking about. | ||
| Yeah, I think it's a different art form, right? | ||
| Do you ever do things specifically with the intention of getting material out of it? | ||
| Like in life? | ||
| Yeah, like go do something. | ||
| Like maybe if I go do this, I'll figure out, I'll get some songs out of this or something. | ||
| You know, I don't know that I'd ever specifically do something to get material out of it, but I do do things because Something comes up and I go that sounds so weird. | ||
| I'm gonna go do that and then from that and then from that Either good things happen or I have a story that yeah sounds like it's fake That might be the best way to do it right to just live a happy Fulfilled life and mine that happy fulfilled life for ideas rather than chase Interesting things with a specific intention of turning them into creativity Yeah, | ||
| no, I don't think I'd ever do that, but I'd definitely, I'd go do things that might make me uncomfortable or, you know, put myself in situations where, like, this sounds like the weirdest thing ever. | ||
| Like what? | ||
| Well, you know, case in point, and it turned out to be, you know, we're now good friends, but, you know, the first time I ever met Timberlake... | ||
| Justin Timberlake? | ||
| Yeah, I got a call to basically play at his birthday party. | ||
| His wife called me. | ||
| And this is no live, like he'd seen a YouTube video or something and said, hey, would you come play? | ||
| I thought I was getting punked or something. | ||
| And I was just like... | ||
| And the conversation with his wife, Jessie, she was like, yeah, you know, there's not a lot of things that... | ||
| He's done a lot of things. | ||
| It's hard for me to find new experiences for him. | ||
| And so I was wondering if you would like to come play at his birthday party. | ||
| And so I'm thinking, and so this is what you came up with. | ||
| You know, this dude he saw a YouTube video on, get him to come play at his birthday party. | ||
| And it turned out to be fine. | ||
| And we hung out, you know, But on paper, to me, it was just like, this is really strange. | ||
| I don't know what's going to happen. | ||
| But out of that, we've become friends and done things together, and good things have come out of it. | ||
| But there was no intent out of it other than I thought it would be interesting to go do. | ||
| And so I went and hung out, and it turned out to be great, and we're good friends now. | ||
| That's pretty badass. | ||
| Yeah, but that's how we met. | ||
| Look at you two. | ||
| Yeah, there we are. | ||
| And I was literally his birthday present one year or so. | ||
| That's wild, man. | ||
| That's pretty cool. | ||
| Yeah, I think that might be the formula. | ||
| Just, if you can, do things that you find interesting, and just have those as being, like, Excellent side adventures in your life. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And nobody else has to understand it but you. | ||
| And that's the cool part about it. | ||
| People used to get on to me. | ||
| I used to be in a bluegrass band. | ||
| And they're like, why are you spending time being in a bluegrass band? | ||
| Well, out of being in that bluegrass band, I got a cut on Adele. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Who would have thought that that was the A plus B equals C formula for that? | ||
| Go be in a bluegrass band, and you'll get a pop cut on the biggest pop star in the world. | ||
| Isn't that funny, though, that someone would say, hey, why do you want to be in a bluegrass band? | ||
| Well, they wouldn't say, hey, why do you like going fishing? | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| You like it. | ||
| Yeah, I like it. | ||
| Why do you like bowling? | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's interesting to me. | ||
| So I'm going to follow that road until it ends or takes a curve or runs off a cliff. | ||
| Do you do anything specifically to try to enrich your mind? | ||
| Do you read a lot or anything? | ||
| I'm not a huge reader. | ||
| I just play a lot of guitar. | ||
| I think that's my thing that I really kind of internalize on. | ||
| Like almost like a meditation? | ||
| Yes, absolutely. | ||
| If I'm feeling bad or in a bad headspace, I'm going to pick up a guitar. | ||
| If I'm, you know... | ||
| That's what I do. | ||
| If there's a centering thing, I'm going to pick up a guitar to get there for me. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know if that's flexing your mind a little bit. | ||
| It is. | ||
| It's something. | ||
| Playing the guitar is one of those things where you never think that you're ever getting any better at it until one day you wake up and you understand something that you didn't understand and hadn't understood for the ten years you've been trying to understand it. | ||
| And then all of a sudden you have this new You know, new space to live in on it. | ||
| And it's the coolest thing in the world to me. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| I know what you're saying, but I don't know what you're saying. | ||
| It's like plateauing and working out or something. | ||
| You hit a new level. | ||
| Like you're working out and you're working out and you're working out and you work out for 10 years and you never get... | ||
| You hit this point where you're like, all right, this is the peak of what I have. | ||
| And then someday... | ||
| For some unknown reason your body or something makes sense and all of a sudden you could do something you could never do before. | ||
| And that's what playing a guitar is. | ||
| I kind of understand the space you're talking about and I think that applies to a lot of different things. | ||
| You know, there's this Miyamoto Musashi quote that I use all the time. | ||
| Once you understand the way broadly, you see it in all things. | ||
| And that this place that you're talking about, like these new level places, like that exists in martial arts, it exists in comedy, it exists in writing, it exists in... | ||
| I'm sure it exists in music, although I don't do music. | ||
| I think this thing of this Zen samurai thing you're talking about, of just like this constant focus until you reach some new understanding of the thing. | ||
| And you don't even know how you're getting there, but you're... | ||
| But you're working towards something that you don't know what it is until you get there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then you get it and you have this new piece of knowledge or it's a piece of – and it's a new – all of a sudden you're something new too. | ||
| And maybe that's the thing you were talking about earlier about people who suck at comedy. | ||
| All of a sudden they're funny. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That's what I get off on, is finding that. | ||
| And I don't claim to be... | ||
| I don't belong in Gary Clark Jr. world or anything like that, but I do love guitar enough to know that I'm always playing enough to try to find that new space to live. | ||
| And that's the coolest thing in the world to me, because I'll never get to whatever... | ||
| There's never an end to it. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Yeah, there's no perfection. | ||
| There's no perfection. | ||
| There's no... | ||
| There's never an end to it. | ||
| It's just a constantly trying to get better at doing what you do. | ||
| Or being you. | ||
| Trying to make yourself better. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that thing seems to manifest itself more with a singular focus. | ||
| Like guitar. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| You have to be, like, way obsessed with one thing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's it for me, for the most part. | ||
| Chris Stampton, you're a bad motherfucker. | ||
| Thank you for coming on the show, man. | ||
| I really appreciate it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, man. | |
| It's been a real joy. | ||
| It's a real honor, man. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Go buy a shit, folks. | ||
| It's fucking awesome. | ||
| Alright, we'll see you tomorrow. |
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