Sturgill Simpson and Joe Rogan dissect touring’s physical toll, from Simpson’s month-long exhaustion after gigs to Rogan’s cardio-driven recovery. They debate surveillance ethics—Netflix’s Van Damme algorithm and Michael Hastings’ suspicious crash—before critiquing fame’s stifling pressures, praising Simpson’s late-career artistic freedom over industry trends. His minimalist setup (nine people total) contrasts with Nashville’s gentrification, while Rogan admires Chappelle’s unstructured creativity. Both explore how diet, cannabis, and mental states shape performance, with Simpson avoiding pre-show weed due to paranoia and Rogan relying on protein bars over sugar. Ultimately, their conversation reveals how intentional living—whether in music or comedy—can defy industry burnout while maintaining authenticity. [Automatically generated summary]
And maybe even build an instrument that is more comfortable to play because you're building to the exact specifics that maybe somebody doesn't mass manufacture.
A telecaster is basically this table bolted to a baseball bat cut in half.
You know what I mean?
It's hard to fuck that up.
So the rest of it is just electronics and the pickups have a lot.
And anything outside of that is just your fingers and who's actually holding the thing.
But to build one is not that complicated.
No, Les Paul or a Martin acoustic guitar, that's literally like a hand-shaped piece of work that has to be made from start to finish, whereas the guitars I'm talking about building, you're just assembling.
I think everybody that plays music and that really gets into it that heavily, it's an OCD. You have to have a level of spectrum or to sit and just do the same thing over and over repetitively 8-10 hours a day.
Especially as a kid, when you're really learning, when it gets you and you hook into it, it's like this other thing that nobody else can be a part of.
And also, I just don't think it's a healthy thing.
I think travel on occasion is okay, but I think once you start getting into every weekend flying, I've heard of people doing that, and I'm like, you're beating your body up.
Well, it's one of the best things about certainly my job and your job.
You get to go out and perform and entertain, but since things sort of took off, For me, I realized very early on, I get paid to travel.
The shows are free.
That shit's fun.
You know what I mean?
We're out there doing what we love to do, but it's all the in-between and the beat down your body takes and being out of any kind of routine and away from your family.
That's really the thing.
You come off for four or five weeks straight of that.
I'm a pretty healthy 39-year-old dude, and it takes me four or five days just to get off the fucking couch after a month-long run.
And my wife, she finally started to understand.
It's because you're...
The travel, you know, it's a different kind of exhaustion you can't really articulate, I think.
We're on buses mostly, unless it's like, the logistics is just crazy, but you know, you still got to be there, so you might bus part of it, and then one night you're flying everybody, or a red hour the next morning, do that thing and then get back to the bus or meet up with the bus.
My buddy Bobby that plays organ, he works out like a madman.
It's kind of insane you guys would get along.
I think a lot of it is to balance out You know, just energy.
Because every night we get two hours of cardio on stage and just massive adrenaline blast, especially when it really locks in and there's all this energy just slamming you in the face.
And then you walk off stage and it takes like four or five hours to come down from that every night.
Shit has to be off balance naturally, you know what I mean?
Just like you just had this massive blast of all these chemicals that your brain's pumping out, endorphins, and now the next day you're just like waking up trying to figure out where to take a shit and get a cup of coffee and is there a shower today?
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And it gets weird when you do a bunch of them in a row, right?
That's probably way better for you psychologically when you go on stage than if you're staying in some giant suite when you're walking around the suite and you get grapes on a plate.
When you start out and you start going on, you play festivals or shows with your heroes and they're on buses before you are and you go on and you talk to these guys and you realize they live in this thing.
They're institutionalized in the back of this bus and they never get off the bus.
You're like, I don't get it.
And then it happens to you, and you realize that that's like this little safe space.
Like a hotel room, overnight, for me, I'll go crazy waiting for a show.
You're like caged up in this little box, you know, with cable TV and nobody to talk to.
I think it should be legal just because I'm from Kentucky, and if they gave all those farmers and ex-coal industry employees an industry that would really thrive, since it grows extremely well in Kentucky, instead of soybeans and tobacco, those guys could actually generate an income.
Mitch McConnell, or somebody, some really staunch right-wing guy in Kentucky came out and was even pushing for legislation towards at least the hemp industry, which would be incredible.
Henry Ford's very first car that he made, he made the fenders out of hemp.
And you're watching him hit this fucking fender with a hammer and the hammer is just bouncing off the fender.
Check this out.
This is crazy.
I mean, I don't know.
When was this?
What did it say, Jamie?
What was the time it said there?
It was 1941. 1941. So in 1941, before it was illegal, so it was made illegal right around the time where alcohol prohibition had ended, and they needed something to go after.
So then they started using the same guys to go after weed.
And this was pre that.
Look at this.
He's hitting this fucking thing with the back of an axe, and it's just bouncing off.
She just had some health stuff, and it's like, you know, how do I... She's pretty old school.
Knowing there's this thing out there that isn't anything that these doctors are going to offer her that's just going to make her feel awful or have to go through all of that.
If someone will just give you comfort or ease nausea or make you want to eat food or those kind of things, why wouldn't you want someone you love and care about to have that?
But then at the same time, you want to be the person trying to feed pot to your grandmother.
And I looked over at her, and I saw the back of her head, like, I was on her driver's side, I was on that side, looking over at her, and all I saw was the back of her head.
She literally was looking at my car, and she was just looking at her phone, and working her thumb, and occasionally, like, looking up at the screen, or looking up at the windshield.
It's like, whoa, you crazy lady.
You think just because you're going 40 miles an hour, that's okay, because you're on a side street?
It doesn't make any sense that you mean I guess it does because then people could arbitrarily Decide to remove a leader and put a leader back in and like you would just be able to vote and change your mind with the tide like constantly But that's one more reason why we shouldn't have one person.
It's stupid should have First of all, we gotta overhaul the way we teach kids.
We gotta have more informed people.
Then once you have more informed people, you let them in on what the fuck we should do.
We all decide as a group.
Like, the way they do it now...
The way they do it now is just, it's bullshit.
It's fake.
Like you're pretending that you have a choice.
You do have a choice.
You have a choice between this guy or that guy.
Neither one you like, so pick it.
But both of them are embedded in all the special interest groups and all the lobbyists.
He's like, dude, I'm telling you, the stock's about to blow up.
The guy was a coke dealer, so I knew he was honest, trustworthy, easy to listen to.
I didn't know he was a coke dealer at the time.
I just thought he was a comic.
And so he would tell me about the stock and we bought into it.
I don't think I bought that much, but it was like a few thousand dollars, which is not that big of a deal if you're Looking at the greater spectrum of how much money people lose in the stock market, I lost nothing.
I mean, people lose their whole life savings, their fortune, what they've inherited.
People can lose it like that in the stock market.
So we bought in, me and my business manager, and it went up for a little while.
It went up because more people were telling more people to buy it, and then it just crashed.
It crashed!
And when I mean it crashed, it just went through the floor like it didn't exist anymore.
It was like, it went from, I forget what the number was, but it was like in the many dollars down to like a fraction of a cent or a cent or three cent or something like that.
It went down to virtually worthless.
And we were like, oh, we got pump and dumped.
Like, that's what they do.
They pump it up, they get a bunch of people to join, and then once a bunch of people are buying this stock, they're like, abandon ship!
Dude, I've heard people tell me that they were having conversations on the phone with someone, and then what they were talking about showed up in their Google Ads on their laptop.
Or, you know, all cars now, automotive bills, it's all, you know, electronic systems and GPS. Yeah.
I'm not a techie guy, so excuse me if this is a really ignorant question, but, like, what's to stop somebody from hacking into your car and crashing you into a fucking wall?
He was one of the best generals that, you know, it was like...
Very highly ranked.
And really respected by the troops.
And people were really, really pissed at this guy.
And he was starting to say that he was in danger, that his life was in danger.
And I think he even said something about if, for whatever reason he commits suicide, that he didn't do it.
He was driving his car and he drove straight into a tree at over 100 miles an hour.
I think it was on sunset.
His car exploded.
Engine flew from the car like crazy, horrific shit.
And then afterwards they talked to these computer experts and they said, well, is it possible?
To take a modern automobile with all sorts of...
There's all sorts of devices inside modern cars that make them hit the brakes if you're getting too close to something or literally move out of a lane.
Some of them have automatic pilot, so you could just fucking press the destination and it just navigates there.
A good buddy of mine who's a doctor was just telling me that when he was in college and he was going through all of his examinations, his friends started taking Adderall.
And he recognized this giant jump in their performance.
I'm not a beat aficionado, but I know that he was hopped out of his mind on speed and wrote the whole dang thing like in a scroll on a roof in Mexico while Ginsburg was probably downstairs molesting a little kid or some shit.
LAUGHTER Kerouac took so much amphetamine when he first discovered the inhaler high that he'd lost most of his hair and his legs swelled up with, what is that word, thrombophlebitis.
I wonder if that's when Johnny Depp started going wacky.
Holy shit, it probably is.
I'm going to spread a conspiracy theory.
Johnny Depp was reasonable and calm and polite and had his shit completely together until he did too much acid with Hunter S. Thompson, and that's why he's wacky now.
They definitely clamped down, and then, you know, you have a few college student massacres, and, you know, the sensationalization of the Manson murders probably didn't help.
But musically, since I should stick to talking about things I know about, which is music, I think that that was probably just the best shit that ever happened and ever will happen.
Like that 65 to 70, it just sort of exploded in all different directions and a lot of things happened that maybe they couldn't happen now.
Or even two decades ago that couldn't have happened.
Yeah, he was just a serious blues head and they wanted to stretch out and really push what the limitations of the gear at that time in the studio, you know, Well, I don't only want to have eight channels.
What if we had 16?
Some of the experimentation and things that guys like him and Pink Floyd and later bands, you know, ALO, just really pushing the parameters of what you could do with a traditional style of music in terms of arrangement and how you frame that.
They said Lennon actually, you know, when he was on heroin for a while, but that motherfucker laid in bed with like 18 cats, you know, and it didn't do anything.
And then they said Paul would be like, oh, I've got some songs, we've got to make a record.
And he'd be like, goddammit, wake up, I have to write five songs in a week.
Because he just, they said he'd just lay around like a sloth, butt naked, and tell all the maids to pretend like he wasn't there when he walked through the kitchen butt naked to get a glass of milk.
Yeah, but in the old days, like a king who didn't give a fuck, he would just stroll around and let everyone look at his cock and walk right through the fucking building.
Binge watching is great, especially if you're a touring musician.
Oh yeah, right?
I can never get into shows when they come out because I'll see a couple episodes and then we go on tour for two months and you're like, what the fuck happened?
But now I can come home and just...
You know, watch a season of something in a day while I'm recuperating.
But, like, if you were an Asian guy, though, I firmly believe no one would have a problem if they took an Asian guy and gave him some sort of facial prosthetics that turned him into a European-looking guy, and then gave him lead roles in a movie where he plays a European guy, people would have to shut the fuck up.
They would want to say something, But then they go...
If I'm at home and I'm by myself, I watch weird shit.
I like old films and a lot of old westerns and stuff.
I watch the same movies I've seen a hundred times over and over as opposed to watching a lot of the newer shit.
We do watch a lot of these old westerns from the 50s, and it's like, it's all white dudes painted up like Native American Indians with the headdress, and it just looks so cheesy, and they have these affected, horrible accents, and you're just like, how the fuck did that ever happen?
But then you get to the 80s, and you watch something like 48 Hours now, and it's the most sexist, racist, misogynistic shit, and they were just pumping those things out of studios two or three decades ago.
Any female characters in those films, you're either Hooker 1 or Secretary at Precinct who everybody dismisses.
I really feel like if we weren't completely embedded in it, that we would look at this as like a system that's pulling us into its web and And forcing us to be more and more entangled.
And this system is the system of electronics.
It's like almost like it's preparing for us to give birth to artificial life.
And so in the meantime, it's completely sucking us in and making us be completely embedded.
Phones in your pocket, constant Alexa listening to everything you do.
It's all just as deep as it can in the biological systems world until it gives birth.
We're going to force it into existence just by being completely fascinated with electronics.
But if someone has that kind of power, if there really is something that a person can think up that didn't exist 200 years ago.
200 years ago, there wasn't even the thought of it.
So in 200 years, two small amounts of measurement of time in relationship to the entire age of the universe, they could figure out a way to kill every person on the planet.
Like that.
Literally wreck the planet where no life would be.
It wouldn't be possible to have life.
There's enough nuclear bombs to do that.
What is it going to be like in 200 years from now?
It's going to be way, way, way, way, way more accelerated.
It's almost going to get to the point where the universe It's going to be a place where you could visit.
That cock and balls would be revered by people who have found it 2,000 years from now.
Why do we say it?
Yeah.
I mean, if you went to a cave 2,000 years from now, and they uncovered some cave, and it was a bunch of dudes just drawing guys jerking off, people would be excited.
Did I? When I used to live out west a long time ago, my buddy and mine were driving up to this little town called Leavenworth, Washington to go check out this weird little Aspen Swedish ski town in fucking northern Washington where you go get your potato soup.
That's another story though.
And we stopped at one of these roadside coffee stands, which are every 300 feet in Washington State.
But this one was on like this sort of timber road going up through the forest.
speaking of Harry and Henderson's wow it's all serendipitous but uh we get out of the car and the wooden statue from the beginning of that movie is like in the driveway it was this old Sasquatch statue and That's where I remembered it from.
I was like, that looks just like this thing from there.
We're stopping and we're getting coffee from this lady.
And I'm like, you know, whatever, trying to talk about the statue from the movie.
She's like, yeah, they stopped and filmed here.
And then she pulls out these, she had these old photo books, like family photo albums, like huge photo albums, two or three of them at least, full of Polaroids.
Of Sasquatch that her family had taken in this house, supposedly.
Yeah, Yeti, Neanderthal, I mean Sasquatch, there's like a bunch of different names for them, but it was a real animal that lived, I think they found bones that were as recent as 100,000 years.
So anatomically modern humans definitely lived in the presence of this thing.
And the problem, the real problem with people's memory, especially in some situation that freaks you out, like you think you might have saw a Sasquatch, your brain starts fucking with you.
It starts filling in the blanks with a bunch of shit.
And then you start repeating that shit as if it's the actual...
She saw elk running, and she saw a big-ass animal in pursuit.
But it easily could have been a bear.
And she could have filled in the blanks in her mind with all these false memories that are attributing, like, oh, I saw its face, it looked at me, it made a noise.
All that stuff, like, people get wacky.
Like, you think you saw something, and you didn't.
There's no bodies.
That's the problem.
There's nothing, like, no one's found shit.
No one's found anything.
Not a single fucking bone.
I mean, they found this gigantopithecus bone in an apothecary shop in China.
Then they did a dig.
They went back to the spot.
These anthropologists said, where the fuck did you get this?
They had this giant primate tooth that wasn't a gorilla, wasn't a human being.
They're like, where'd you get this?
And they take them to the spot where they got it, and they find bones.
They find jaw bones that indicate that it was bipedal.
It's kind of controversial, apparently.
But apparently by the way the jaw is designed, they knew that this thing stood upright.
I met some dudes from Stornoway, Scotland once, which they looked like they were from another planet.
They were like the biggest fucking people I've ever seen in my life.
There was four or five of these guys at this little music festival in Kilkenny, Ireland, and they'd all come down for the festival.
I mean, I'm not shitting, man.
They were the biggest people I've ever seen.
All of them.
They were just like fucking mountain men who just blocked out the light when they walked through the door and had these long gray hair and beards and shit.
And they're like, you should come up and play in Stornoway.
Fuck that!
It only takes eight fucking fairies to get there, you know?
I think of those dudes whenever I think of those Atlas Stones.
Do you know what Atlas Stones are?
Like the most manly way to work out ever.
You're basically picking up these enormous balls of stone.
And these dudes lift them and they get them on their chest and they hoist them onto these blocks.
They have contests to see who can, like when they do the strongman contests, they pick those Atlas Stones up and put them on progressively higher and higher shelves.
I got some really good buddies now in Glasgow, all musicians you meet over the years touring, and a couple guys particularly that if I go over sometimes I'll do a little pickup band with these guys, and they're both like hard Glaswegians, and my friend Lloyd went to the last time I was over there, he took me up on a proper car trip up to the Highlands and back down, and one day I think we got as far as like...
Oban or...
Anyway.
But yeah, there's parts of that stuff.
It just...
It looks like you're on another planet, man.
I can't even describe it.
I remember we got out of the car in a couple places and you try to wrap your head around how ancient that shit is.
And everything that took place there...
And, you know, how, one, we're just standing outside a car on the side of the road, and I'm like, I am fucking freezing to death.
You know, in the middle of August, it's just raining literally upside down, and it's not even raining.
Well, you know, another weird thing about it is you always appear, Americans especially, like where you're from, your ancestry and this and that.
I grew up in eastern Kentucky and then moved to central Kentucky, but most of the early settlers in the Appalachian region was predominantly Scotch-Irish and some German.
So the first time I went to Scotland to play music, I had jet lag.
And the first morning I woke up like really early, you know, and I was like, fuck, I might as well go walk around and check things out and get out of the city.
And everything's kind of coming to life and people are going to work.
And I'm looking around at the faces, man.
And I realized, I was like, yep, I might as well be in Hazard, Kentucky right now.
It's the same stoic, very guarded, you know, disposition, but then, like, once you get to know them, and especially once you become friends, it's just like they would do anything for you.
It's a very regal, stoic, working-class city.
There's something really special in magic about Glasgow.
We played somewhere in Ireland in this little town and across the street from the hotel was this guard tower that had been there for 1300 fucking years and there was like Viking boats they had on display around.
I'm just thinking, yeah, somebody a thousand years ago was up in that window with a bow and arrow.
It gives you perspective, though, especially Europe in terms of old world isn't that old when you think about China or a lot of Southeast Asian cultures.
You're talking about 10,000, 15,000.
Europe is a good example for me.
Every time I go, it gives me perspective because you think about everything happening in our country and everybody's like, oh, it's fucking going to hell.
Yeah, the oldest shit we have is like, when I was living in Boston, there was a cemetery that you could go to where you could see tombstones from like the 1700s.
I used to work at this grocery store in Nashville when I was out kicking it around.
This guy was really cool.
He was older.
He was in his 50s.
He was local.
He grew up in Nashville.
He was a big music guy.
He saw every show that ever came through town in the 70s and 80s.
He grew up in that.
He'd always tell me about the shows.
He saw Van Halen at the the little coliseum in nashville like down on the north side of town back in i think he said 77 so it was before the first album had come out and they were opening for black sabbath and you know but this time deep purple and all these like riff rock bands were just sort of the thing wow and he said these guys come out and he said it was like a bomb exploded in that fucking place man look eddie's like doing backflips off his amp and all that crazy shit nobody ever heard that stuff you know wow and he said
then Sabbath came out and everybody basically walked out after the third song because they realized they had just seen what was next.
I want to say maybe Page wanted him, but he couldn't do it.
I know they talked to maybe Rod Stewart.
Was it Faces at the time or earlier?
I know Robert Plant wasn't choice number one.
And they had to talk Bonneman to take the gig.
Paige and John Paul Jones had known each other through session work in the mid-60s, and when the Yardbirds broke up, Jimmy somehow thought he had rights to the name, and he wanted to put together a super band of all his favorite musicians he played with.
And Bonham was recommended by the bass player, John Paul Jones, but they had to go and talk him into it, because he was playing with bands at the time that paid him a lot more money.
I'm not glued into pop culture, but somehow you just can't not know what Justin Bieber's up to once a month just walking around the world anymore.
I would say that kid, for most people to be handed that type of existence and all of that scrutiny and all the shit that comes along with that, that does things to people, you know?
And not 21. I was talking to my friend John this weekend about this.
And I was saying that it's almost like if you made an epoxy, right?
You know, if you have epoxy, you just put a couple ingredients in.
Like, there's one thing and you mix it with another thing and then it hardens.
But if you add some shit in that that's not supposed to be there, and it's fully developed, you're not going to take that shit out.
Like, if you added oil, you threw some oil in the epoxy, like, ah, now you fucked that whole thing up.
That's kind of what you're doing to a person when you raise a person famous.
If you take some reality star from the time they're five, and then they're in a sitcom and a movie, and then you've gone through your whole...
I don't know why I said reality star, but you've gone through your whole life If you're that person, if you're Justin Bieber, you've gone through your whole life.
But now he lives a different life where people like Rihanna, they're like literally citizens of the world and any day of the week they could be in some five-star hotel and God knows where, you know.
I don't ever want to wake up and have that kind of career because it takes so many people around you on a daily basis just to maintain and keep a machine that large rolling, logistically speaking, that you become enslaved to the job.
You know what I mean?
Because you have all these...
There's always this name.
When you have Superstar X, you put this head right here and then everything below that just to make that thing go around.
It just turns into this...
It's like a corporation, really, with 20 semi-trucks and all this shit.
You've got to go out and make that happen because now all these people depend on you for their livelihoods and careers and...
So then that's going to affect the artistic decisions you make because you have to stay relevant, culturally speaking.
And if you want to do something different next time, well now this massive fanbase isn't really going to fucking deal with that very well.
My first record, we did shop to a few labels in town, but I was a little bit ahead of the whole neo-trad curve that sort of kicked off in the last few years.
I made this really traditional country record.
But it was like hard country.
It was very...
Like an album I'd always wanted to make.
And we shopped it to a few people and they just didn't really know.
It wasn't the right time.
So nothing came of it.
So we self-released it.
So then when I did the second one, Metamodern, and now I've got this whole record about like, you know, mind...
The journey of a soul or a mind or whatever, talking about turtles and fucking tripping and shit.
I knew nobody is going to get this.
I can waste time trying to find somebody to release it or we can just put the damn thing out.
And I'm so glad we did it that way.
Just because I know what happened was a result of people hearing it.
That was me being a smartass, because I was like, there's all this, like...
You know, you go to these festivals and stuff.
I'm like a grown-ass man.
You know what I mean?
Work fucking stupid jobs.
Now I was in this, all of a sudden, in this position of going out and playing all these festivals and looking at these kids and stuff, doing it and all.
And it's just great.
You make a lot of friends.
But there's a lot in any industry.
There's a lot of...
like for the wrong reasons you know what i mean like chasing something they want to see themselves in as opposed to something they see within themselves right right and so we started doing these festivals and there's a lot like what they call like the younger hipster kids and stuff when they had these 10 type photos that were really popular a few years ago and i was like well how can i out hipster the hipsters so i'll do a painting of a 10 type photo and surround it by like the tackiest outer space they did
My buddy that I did the thing with, we were actually trying to make the worst album cover of the year.
We ended up making a top 10 list on Rolling Stone.
We didn't get the cherry, but I was like, let's just make the tackiest fucking thing we possibly can.
But then, talented guys, and I was kind of a taskmaster, so it was such a young band because they wanted to play loud, and you've got to pull things back, or like...
kind of thing get it down to the structure of the songs and we spent like three months on the road just carving those songs out in the arrangements I had it pretty much you know duck pussy type which is waterproof and then you know we came off the road and went right into the studio the next day for four days and just banged it out So you just were in the groove.
Yeah, basically just plug up like five mics, don't move anything, and just lay it all down.
And then Dave and I, with the mixing, and then he had some great ideas in post-production, like getting the sounds around.
But then you come back, and we had all these separated recordings.
So to me, I realized the real fun is putting everything in sequence and making these cycle...
To maximize, I guess, the emotiveness of the records.
So, like, every time we do it now, it's always different.
Like, the record I did after that was...
Recorded that one a totally different way.
Still going fast, but, you know, I always wanted to make a big kind of lush orchestral soul record.
And then what I've learned is that I don't want to be in the music business because...
I'm just going to be in the Sturgill business because there's this mechanical timeline of it all.
By the time we go in and make that record, you're so, you've been processing and thinking about it so much for months.
And you get in and you have that release and it's like, I equate it to driving in a really heavy downpour rainstorm for like an extended period of time, which is like there's a mental exhaustion that comes forward, but you have to just kind of like keep going.
And by the time it's finished and mixed, you've heard this thing like a thousand times.
You don't ever want to hear it again.
But now you've got to go out and play it on the road every night for a year and a half.
So we're constantly trying to reinvent every night how to keep that fresh and exciting while holding the pause button on going over here and recording what creatively you may already be onto.
So I realized this year I'm going to take the reins and I'm going to play 30 festivals because those things are always so fun just to go out and get all the energy in your face and then we're going to do probably a double album and another record and record it all so that when I do turn around I want to go do a really big long two year tour we have all this new material and the old stuff to pull from.
I've learned, more importantly, what works for my family and my sanity.
I don't need to go play 300 shows a year.
I'd rather go play...
30 or 60 shows and know that every one of those was 110% as opposed to, you know, you got the Tuesday and Wednesday shows to get you to this weekend market where everybody's counting their checks already and shit and you're exhausted and then the shows suffer and these people pay money or maybe they don't realize that like you can't hear anything for 40 minutes because you don't ever want to project negativity.
from the stage if you can help it but there's you know the bad nights i just want every night to be great and then but most importantly right now for me the fun is is the studio and the the process of trying to push it and get to what's next yeah you do totally different albums every time you put an album out it's a completely different i'm a music listener and lover first and foremost probably a musicologist more than a musician at this point is that a word Yeah, that's my field of study.
Yeah, if I had to say that I have obsessed over one subject enough to where somebody should probably give me a fucking piece of paper that says I know what I'm talking about, it's probably music.
Well, I always played, but I'm glad I never recorded anything until...
Yeah, because when you're younger, you know, like Eric Clapton.
I love Eric Clapton.
Huge influence.
Never met the guy.
But there's great documentaries came up.
But you can look back in his career.
He was so young and passionate and talented.
There's one particular record he did with a guy named John Mayle.
It was like kind of the birth of like rock and roll guitar tone.
It's the first time everybody plugged a Les Paul into a Marshall and just cranked the fucking thing.
And that record, that sound, everybody's like, whoa, that was a thing that happened.
But you can look at his career, and he was such a chameleon going through all these phases, and a lot of it was emulation or reinterpretation because he got into substance abuse.
But you can see...
How much his career shaped him more so than all the people he'd been around and his friends wasn't exposed to and him rubbing off on them and vice versa.
Wow.
Anybody in their 20s is still, anybody I know in their 20s is definitely still figuring out who they are as a person, much less an artist.
I mean, even though you have a whole sort of entity behind you in terms of people carrying your stuff and all the jazz that's going on, all the equipment that's involved in doing one of your shows...
If you were doing something else, though, like say if you were a part of a band, that band was being promoted very heavily by some record company that had put the band together, you know, they do like those manufactured bands or something like that, you'd be in a situation where you're basically required to do commercially successful and viable music.
You couldn't just...
Free ball like you're doing and doing whatever you want to do.
And most of my friends are people that just kind of do their thing.
But there definitely is that element.
But there's, you know...
I never thought I'd ever sign with a record label.
Really?
Yeah, I never had any interest in it whatsoever.
When things kind of took off, all of them came knocking.
But it was working fine by ourselves, just sort of subcontracting my team and...
The only reason any artist should ever sign with a record label is for larger recording budgets, you know, a larger toolbox in which to use to make your product, let's call it, for lack of a better term.
The benefit of having a record company is simply somebody else's pockets.
It all comes back on you.
We don't want to pull the curtain back too much here.
I looked at it as like Going into business with a bank for at least two records, I'll take out a loan that I'm pretty sure I'll never pay back.
Because the recoup, you know, it's in there.
But I feel like I'm more of like a...
It all comes down to the bean counters eventually.
My records sell two, 300,000 copies and at some point they'll have to decide whether that's fiscally viable to them anymore because they don't make any money off me unless I sell records.
You know what I mean?
It was a very friendly structured deal.
Touring and all that publishing shit is completely separate.
And I get to make the records that I maybe couldn't or would make on my own.
I don't know.
But outside of that, a record company provides marketing or reach or push or even, sadly, in the music business, there's probably less bullshit in politics.
There may even be less politics in politics.
You know, I probably would not have been up for album of the year at the Grammys last year had I been on 30 Tigers as opposed to Atlantic Records.
And that can make you feel, like, jaded against it all, or you can be like, okay, well, you know, Wiz Khalifa, they probably spend more money marketing one single for Wiz Khalifa than my entire project costs.
It's a trickle-down Right, and it's all based on the money that they made from a long time ago, really, and then maintaining some sort of grip on the community now.
My tour manager is like the sweetest, most empathetic human being I've ever met.
He's not just responsible for me.
He's like the babysitter and the mother of the whole family.
But like sometimes if we've been on the bus for a while or rolling, more than anything to give everybody else a break and do them a favor, I'll go off on my own and like stay at a different hotel or I'll go to a different city for two days.
And he's always like, you know, he's from New Zealand.
He's like so sweet.
He's like fucking gigantic.
He's like, would you like me to book your room?
No, I got it, man.
He's like, are you sure?
And he's almost like, I almost feel like I'm hurting his feelings because I won't let him take care of my day.
When little kids start drawing, they gravitate towards this expansion of the creative aspects of your mind, like whatever it is in your mind that causes you to have these ideas.
Whatever in your mind that causes you to think of a story that you want to write down or a drawing that you want to try to accomplish and try to put down, those little things to a kid are magical.
Because they didn't have any of that before.
I mean, they just learned how to talk.
She's seven.
And she's only been talking for five and a half years.
You know, all that other stuff before was gibberish.
And all of a sudden, she's sitting in front of the pad and no one tells her what to do.
Little seven-year-old, like, hmm, I think I'm going to paint today.
And she gets out the paint and just puts a little of this and a little of that.
You're flexing those little muscles, you know, just as if you were doing push-ups.
Like I was saying earlier, I had this train job, and the first year I was there, I was just, like, out on the ground, like, throwing the switches and disconnecting the trains and hooking them back up and that kind of thing, and then I got promoted to what they call, like, a yard master, or, like, well, you know, a yard boss, and you're in the truck, and you're sort of in charge of The inbound and outbound manifest and everything that comes in and how it gets blocked apart and switched over to this track and you're building other trains and you've got to get them out on time.
And as soon as they put me in that job, it was like the greatest job I've ever had because I was playing Tetris.
You know what I mean?
I was just like fucking Baron von Mutchhausen in my little fucking truck with my 8,000 radios, like tearing trains apart and just watching it all happen and get it out the gate on time.
But if somebody came up to you in the middle of that good job and said, you don't have to do this ever again, you can do whatever the fuck you want, you would leave.
Well, they have the downfall of being highly efficient individuals and other CEOs recognize that and be like, I can put you on salary and work you 90 hours a week and you're going to get it done because you won't let yourself fail, but you'll probably fucking drink five pots of coffee a day and Well, listen, Sturgill, if you keep going, you've got a good position in this company.
More of a funny way to put what is originally a concept, as far as I know, that was first described in detail by a Jesuit priest named Pierre de Chardin.
All about the omega point in the universe and how all consciousness emits from this one central point of origin where the whole thing banged out from And it's all just expanding and reciprocating back to itself and like absorbing everything going on.
But it's this one point where all things spiritual, scientific, metaphysical, all matter in the universe, all fucking knowledge emits from.
And he got blackballed from the Vatican for preaching that.
Because he was like, you don't necessarily need to stand in a building to talk to God because God is everywhere and all around you and inside you all the time.
Whatever you want God to be or, you know.
So I got it from a Stephen Hawking book where, and it's weird, you can go around the world and there's all these ancient civilizations, whether it be some Native American tribes or parts of Far Eastern Asia where they find like these adherence to turtles and elephants and old culture and Hindu mythology.
There's even a Hindu illustration representing sort of a similar figure or myth that it all sat on the back of this great turtle flying around in space because they held those animals in such regard as old and wise creatures.
Actually, turtles are the oldest living species on the planet.
And the symmetry of their shell designs, no matter what species, it's always 13 pieces, which a lot of the old tribes thought had something to do with the lunar phases of the sun and how it was all tied in together with, you know.
But it's all these things I sort of found or symbiotically were connected.
I was reading at the time and I was about to have my first child and I was just like, man, I want to make a country record about all this shit or like you know write a song about the book of the dead and but as a traditional country record and then incorporate some classic rock psychedelia so that was all that was That's how I found you.
So I sat down, and for a couple minutes, I just started getting really cold and clammy.
And I was like, yep, I'm going to puke.
So I went over and I was like, fuck this guy.
So I puked right in his sink.
And I was like, dude, I gotta go home.
I feel like dog shit now, and I'm pretty sure I'm dying.
So we lived in this apartment, and I went out the door and turned the corner to go down the hallway to mine, and it was full on vertigo.
Every time I took a step, the hallway got twice as long.
And I was like, this is fucked up.
My wife was out of the country on work at the time.
I remember I was sitting down in the hallway.
Just, like, trying to get my shit together, man, because I thought I was having a fucking heart attack.
It was just, like, sweating.
And I remember this voice saying, get up, you stupid junkie fuck, before somebody comes out here and sees you, you know, sitting in the hallway like a dumbass.
And I managed to, like, pop out of it.
And as soon as I got back to my place and sat down on the couch, everything was fine.
But it was just so initial in the rush.
I was just like, nobody needs to be that stone, you know?
Somebody very close to my life recently that was dealing with that.
Vertigo?
No, like heavy medical issues, health issues, and we got him some edibles, and he's like the only thing that made it okay, that discomfort.
So when I had to have a sinus surgery, We talked about this.
When we played the Grammys out here last year, I was sick as fuck, man.
Like, I was getting all year, for like the last year and a half on the road, I was getting these horrible sinus infections all the time.
And I just assumed it was allergies.
Tennessee's really bad about that.
Or we'd go to Texas or Atlanta places in October when all these crazy dogwoods are kicking off.
And I would lose my voice.
And, you know, by no fault of my own, it became very frustrating from a touring standpoint.
Because I felt like I was always sick.
Because I was.
So when we flew out and did the Grammys, I was all plugged up, couldn't sing.
Obviously, biggest gig in my life, kind of stressing it.
So the label guy sent me to this doctor who looked up in there and realized, you know, I probably had my nose broken at some point or just a really deviated septum when I was younger.
So like a broken air filter.
But then when they did the scan, like all the cavities were just completely caked with residual bacteria and infection.
He's like, he's like, if you get on a plane and fly home, you're probably going to get meningitis.
I don't even know what he did, but it opened it up for like a day.
That's where I was able to sing.
So the next day, the whole band, they flew home.
I had to stay out here for like nine days, I think, and go in every morning twice a day for IVs for him to clean that shit out so I could fly home.
Wow.
surgery to correct it all and like went in there and scraped and cleaned them all out and shit and uh along with the the septum they fixed the septum so i haven't had a single issue since all that happened i haven't been sick one time which has like changed my life but while i was recuperating long story short i didn't want to take any of the opioid or the fucking pills that they gave me to deal with the pain it's I was like, I'm not taking that shit.
You're going to give me this for four weeks?
Like, no.
No way.
And so I just got a bunch of medical strength edibles.
And my wife and the kids, they had to come out my way to rent a house.
I had to be here to recover and shit.
And man, just laying in bed listening to headphones stoned out of my mind for like a week recovering.
And that's...
It's kind of awesome because you feel like when you're actually in pain or when you need that heavy type of alleviation, what it is actually doing and offering you in terms of relief.
And it gave me a whole new understanding and respect for the medical side of that shit.
Here we are back on pot again.
And then my buddy who dealt with some pretty serious cancer said it was literally the only thing that made him feel better.
I laid there listening to headphones and came up with the record I'm working on now, which is great for me because it was like, that's what I want to do next, you know?
On a mass legality issue, I mean, if anything, I know it's just going to fuck pot up, you know, but from a medical stance, I can't see any reason why we're still even talking about this.
We're being fucked over by giant pharmaceutical companies that are making billions of dollars and they would realize how much more money they would be losing every year if marijuana becomes fully legal.
They've already lost money for sure.
I guarantee you there's people that are buying edible marijuana right now that would have bought pain pills.
One of the first interviews I ever did, I think, I talked about the first time I moved to Nashville and how I didn't really know anybody.
This was like 2005, and it was a different town then.
And I said, I spent most of my time listening and playing bluegrass and drinking.
Which is pretty much what everybody does the first year they moved to Nashville.
But then I said, like, after that, well, I moved out to Utah and got this job and got sober.
I was working all the time.
So somebody put on my Wikipedia page that I've talked about my struggles with alcohol.
And those people read that shit, man.
When I had to get a life insurance policy, like they showed up, they'd read all the interviews and like, wow, you've been really open about this and that.
And I was like, yeah.
And they're like, so you do the whole medical test.
And of course I test positive for THC because I'm on the road all the time.
And I was like, but I don't, I don't smoke it.
You know, I vape or edibles.
Like I don't, I'm not a smoker.
I never smoked cigarettes.
But they list you as a smoker.
And now I have like a criminally fucking insane yearly life insurance policy.
Because of course, like, you know, they think, well, musician too.
This guy who's on Adderall because he's got a prescription for ADD and you don't have a problem with that, that guy's fucked.
There's a lot of people that are fucked out there, and these insurance companies that think that a guy who smokes pot is more likely to die, there's no statistics to back that up.
There's no statistics that say that people who smoke pot are more likely to get diseases or die of some sort of a fucking debilitating syndrome that came about because of overuse of THC. It doesn't exist.
But they're not even testing you for alcohol.
They ask you how much you drink, but they're not testing you.
It's really strange because in the Navy and the Railroad, there were very stringent, obviously highly stringent drug policies, but drinking your ass off every night is completely fine.
Completely fine.
Don't smoke a joint at 5 p.m., but kill that six-pack and come in here and build this train the next morning.
Whoa, and they're moving around like they're a normal, a woke person.
Hashtag woke.
Yeah, there's a weird contradiction we have in the society.
We were constantly drinking drugs in the form of caffeine, constantly getting drugs in the form of whatever your doctor prescribes you for depression or anxiety or ADHD or whatever that is, constantly going out and having drinks, taking drugs, the drugs being alcohol, taking a whiskey drug and a vodka drug, and no one thinks anything of it.
I ended up going up to Malibu to Rick Rubin's house and was playing him some of this record I'm working on just to get some feedback and it's one of those moments when you realize you're sitting like Rick Rubin's like all Indian style on his couch head banging like a fucking caveman and he had literally the best sounding stereo system I've ever heard in my life.
Actually, Nashville, the real estate has gotten pretty crazy.
I don't live in Nashville anymore, but...
I don't know.
Much like Austin, I mean, five years from now, there may not be any music in Nashville, because I don't know how many musicians are going to afford to live there.
Okay, now that little street where you're talking about, that corner on 8th Avenue, there's Zaney's, you got Douglas Corner, then there's a lot of shops that I go to on Sundays.
They're auctioneers, they do all these old estate sales and really cool furniture.
But that little pocket, that intersection is probably one of the few remaining bastions of funk left in Nashville.
Like that's probably my favorite little corner in Nashville because I can just stand there and it still feels like relatively similar to what it probably felt like 30 years ago.
One night, I think I came to watch your show at the store, and this was like a year ago, and you had to jet right after the set and go to Pasadena for another set.
My buddy that I brought with me, we're going to hang here, see who comes out, and Jeff Ross or somebody comes out, and he's doing his bit, and right in the fucking middle of it, The back curtain opens and Chappelle walks out and just kind of like taps Ross on the corner on the shoulder like, fuck off, I got this, you know, and just jacks the mic and pretty much everybody else's set who was supposed to perform that night and stands there for like three hours, man.
We're just sitting there.
I was like, dude, this will probably never happen again in your lifetime, so I'm not fucking leaving.
And we just sat there the whole time and he sat there rocking tequila bombs and getting drunk and just really talking.
There were times where it was...
The funniest thing I've ever seen, literally, and there were times where it kind of got dark, and you're like, what the fuck's happening?
Where's this going?
And he was working things out, and then later on, those Netflix specials land, and I realized I've already heard like 90% of these jokes, because the guy was just like, I'm going to go hijack the main room, work my shit out, because I got it like that.
Because the night at the comedy store, it did feel like he was just sort of making the shit up on the spot.
And then you see the Netflix specials, and it sort of feels the same way.
Like he's just being Dave.
And the little subtle things that I noticed, like, probably ten times throughout the night, at really awkward moments, he would call the waitress to get him another drink.
But he would only say, bar whore.
And every time he'd say it, it'd get a little more awkward, like a little less appropriate each and every fucking time.
Eventually, everybody in the room was like, that's not really cool.
And then at the end of the night, the last thing he said was like, I'm really sorry, I called you bar whore, I just don't have any fucking jokes.
When I write on a computer, there's no way I can write with my hands as quickly as I can type.
I can type pretty quick.
So if I have an idea, and I don't want to hear my voice, so I don't want to say it into a microphone, I want to just figure out what the beats are of things.
If there's a song I want to learn and you've got to remember all the words, I'm never going to remember them until I just sit down and write that song down on paper.
Once I write it on paper and see it, it's like it's there.
Whether it's mine or somebody else.
I only forget the words to the shit I write, weirdly.
That's kind of...
In shows, it never fails.
If I get lost or forget something, it's always a song I wrote.
It's something about the way it hits me when I inhale it high it becomes more heady And internalizing, like, any anxiety or the paranoia people talk about.
The only time I've ever experienced that is when I've smoked weed.
But my problem is I don't like going on stage stoned anymore because...
You're so ultra-sensitive.
My ear becomes...
I already struggle with it enough.
I'm hearing everything happening and dissecting it all hypercritical in real time.
And you can't do that and perform and let go.
So you kind of have to...
It's two different brains.
But if I'm up there singing and looking at an audience, if I'm stoned, I know enough about myself to know I'll get internalized and just only start listening to the band and the music.
And you sort of forget that there's all these people there.
You have to...
Give a show to.
And again, maybe that is the show when we get lost in the music.
And then I've also played some of the best gigs I've ever played in my life on edibles.
Because, you know, it's sort of like an anti-anxiety and just like very free and you feel everything much more delicately in terms of response.
But it's not something I was like, oh, we got to get high.
I don't know what the hell I ate, but I literally had to put my hand on a railing so I could squeeze my butt cheeks together harder so I couldn't shit myself.
It broke through some weird barrier where I thought, I knew I had to take a shit, but I was thinking maybe I could let a fart out first when I'm on my way to the bathroom.
But that barracuda that I used to have, this cool 1970 barracuda, it was named the Sick Fish.
The reason why I named it the Sick Fish is I got food poisoning.
I ate linguine with clams in Illinois.
There's no fucking clams anywhere near Illinois.
And those things got me hard, man.
I couldn't even make a fist the next day.
I was walking around like a zombie.
I was dead.
I spent the whole night throwing up and shitting myself.
And then the next day, I was just dead.
I drank like five or six cups of coffee because we had to film this thing where they were putting the engine in the car and they were going over the design.
I was like barely able to stay awake while I was doing that.
I had it one time from this Chinese buffet, and it hit me hours later, seven hours later that night, and all of a sudden it was just in this bathroom for four or five hours, and it was those things like...
It was the worst shape I've ever been in.
But in the back of your mind, you're like, it's okay.
I know this is food poisoning, but it's okay.
It's going to go to a point.
And then throughout the night, it just kept getting worse.
And I kept asking, where is this point going to be?
I don't know if that helps, but I'm hoping that that helps and that when I eat something funky, all the good stuff that I eat, like I eat kimchi almost every day.
It used to be flooded with it back, you know, 1800. They hunted them out and they repopulated, I want to say in the 90s, maybe early 2000s, and now there's so many that they're opening it up again.
The only thing, I tell you what, man, we got all the snakes and spiders and all that shit.
See, I grew up around playing with, like, baby copperheads in the creek, and my mom spanking the shit out of me when she caught me, because I don't worry about this stuff.
But I'll tell you what's fucked up.
My wife found, she was sweeping, we get ladybugs that come, like, in this time of year, they try to come in on this, like, sun porch, and she's sweeping a pile up and found a scorpion.