Sturgill Simpson and Joe Rogan critique the music industry’s superficiality, from Everlast’s underground hip-hop influence to white rappers’ struggles like Shia LaBeouf and Mac Miller. Simpson’s band shares chaotic, drug-fueled studio sessions—Miles Miller’s solos recorded mid-joint, Chuck Bartels’ near-perfect takes—that clash with touring realities, forcing a "less is more" approach. They debunk fake live albums (e.g., Kiss Alive) while praising Head (1968), the Monkees’ psychedelic film. Rogan connects burnout to substance abuse risks like James Hatfield’s rehab, contrasting music’s grueling grind with comedy’s shorter tours. Simpson also slams systemic justice failures, offering a job instead of prison to a young man facing 13 burglary charges, highlighting U.S. inequality despite cultural mobility ideals. [Automatically generated summary]
There's no connection, because everybody that is close to you is sitting down, and then there's this giant picnic going on behind them up on the grass.
He's super cool, but I remember one of the first times I ever met him, it's one of those weird ones where you're like, am I really hanging out with this guy?
Is this really Everlast from House of Pain?
You know, Jump Around was such a goddamn gigantic hit.
It was like one of the greatest hits of all time.
One of the greatest, I mean, I guess you would call that a hip-hop song, right?
But it was a giant hit with my generation, so to be hanging out with him was super surreal.
Whoever is in charge of their career has one veteran's interest, which is pushing that single, and then it does its thing.
And if they can't come up with the identical thing again, they don't know what to do, and then they just stick them on a shelf and you never hear from them again.
How many, I mean, really, really good songs, if you stop and think about history, were from a band where you heard, like, maybe two of their songs ever?
How much is that changing for you guys because of the internet?
I mean, when you first started your career, how much of an effect did the internet have on promoting things or getting the word out on things versus now?
but that's really exciting you know when when someone mixes their style up as much as you do and you guys put together these albums you know each one of them is they're uniquely you but they're all different it's a it's a you've got a real weird thing going on man like if you went back and listened to your first album and then listened to the they're all awesome but they're awesome in like all these different ways man It's so cool to see all this experimentation, like this anime thing you're doing with this.
Well, the whole reason we went in the studio and made this thing is because we reached a point of burnout, I definitely did.
And then you also reach a point where now you realize the only way we're going to survive and make money as musicians is touring.
So why wouldn't we make this as fun for ourselves as possible?
You play these festivals and then you're rocking out three or four songs and then people are jumping at them.
And I just kind of asked everybody, why can't we just go do that for two hours and make music that people can dance and have a great time to and still...
Miles has probably been listening to me talk about Making a fucking dubstep rock and roll record for five years and we finally just did it.
Yeah, so we made this record June of 2017 and had to sit on it, couldn't play any of it.
You know, you go out and you do the other thing.
So now, almost two and a half years later from the time we recorded in the studio and I was writing those lyrics, we were making this music in the moment.
We'll go out, we've been rehearsing for two weeks and it's already at a point like, shit, I wish we could have recorded it now.
Because you have all these ideas that you just don't have in that moment.
And you get...
A year and a half later on a tour playing that material, it's a whole other animal, you know, because you just found all these little idiosyncratic nuances and things that you can flourish that you just don't think about when you're in a control room for 18 hours a day.
I'll write lyrics and stuff, or maybe have a rough idea, structure, and form.
But these guys are all bonafide musical geniuses, man.
Their flavor...
that's why you know like on this record i've never done it before but um at a certain point anybody that's in the room is contributing whether they're writing the songs or not just their presence the energy they bring to that track like they're if you got a guy that plays the perfect thing the first take what are you really producing you know you're hiring you're hiring someone for what for as a tool and you know like nashville
there's all these session players so in a sense it's just this giant toolbox.
And there might be ten guys you could call today to do this thing, but two of them might be way more perfect for this specific thing than those other eight.
They're all badasses, but you can flavor.
I just found the right flavors that I want to stand up there with.
I could make ten records with these guys, and they're all going to sound like ten different bands.
I'd run in a rail yard just overseeing the switching crews that when the trains would pull in from the east and west side of the yard, we would break those trains apart and look at other manifests and drive cars off other rails and build them into those trains and then crew them again and get them on the line.
You could never tell a kid, hey, you want to make meaningful music?
This is what you got to do.
You got to struggle in difficult jobs until you're about 35 and barely get to where you want to be, where you're really kind of freaking out about your future, and then pour yourself your heart and soul and then find success after that.
That's a good move.
If you want to have impactful music.
But if you get into music early on in your life and make a career early on in your life, you miss everything that you did by being an older...
If you're reading a horoscope or someone's trying to give you some sort of indication of what's going to happen serendipitously or by fate, either way, it's just someone making the shit up.
It's based on like mathematics and universal equations and shit.
I don't know.
Basically like don't.
Some people can get a little loopy with it, and they won't fly on an airplane.
They'll have their numerologist look at the flight numbers or the number on the plane and how these things all correlate, whether this is a wise decision or not.
She was called on by First Lady Nancy Reagan in 1981 after John Hinckley's attempted assassination of the President and stayed on as the White House astrologer in secret until being ousted in 1988 by ousted former Chief of Staff Donald Reagan.
She said, I was responsible for timing all press conferences, most speeches, the State of the Union addresses, the takeoffs, and the landings of Air Force One.
I don't think that anyone on this planet, I don't think there's an equal ability to perceive anything.
I think some people are way more perceptive, some people are smarter, they see patterns better, they see trouble coming, they see problems, they see things better than other people do.
And I think there's feelings that you get sometimes.
Like weird feelings.
Then someone will call you and you're like, fuck, I was just thinking about that, dude.
That is weird.
Like someone sends you a text.
You haven't thought about them or talked to them in months and months and months.
And all of a sudden you think about them and bam, a text comes through.
Maybe it's like they have a cleaner and they say to this guy, listen, I don't give a fuck how you find out what these people are talking about, but you can find out, right?
Yeah, maybe.
We'll see.
Just don't tell me.
Just do it.
Just do it.
And this guy just, like, this thing is just listening to every goddamn word you say and providing suggestions for things you could buy on Amazon.
Maybe.
What I was thinking about psychics, though, is I think some people are probably better at that.
I bet there is moments where some people have a weird sense.
I just don't think it's consistent enough for anybody to pay money for it.
I don't think anybody's ever demonstrated a real, like, provable psychic power.
But it doesn't mean that I don't think that that's Look, we can smell.
Why can we smell?
What is that?
It's some shit you can't even see?
And you can determine whether or not something's terrible based on it?
I mean, you can smell rotten meat.
You're like, oh, what the fuck?
That's your whole body.
You don't even see anything.
Where is that?
How do we not know that there's other senses that we can develop?
Like our ability to perceive good and bad in people.
Our ability to perceive whether or not someone's like a truly...
Kind person or with someone sociopathic.
Maybe there's ways to see whether or not people are compatible with your way of thinking.
Maybe there's ways to see weird shit that people are thinking.
Like if someone's planning and they're angry, they're about to hit somebody, maybe you could see it.
Maybe you could feel it.
Maybe you don't even know what the fuck it is, but it smells like the same way rotten meat smells.
Like, whoa, I gotta get the fuck out of here.
There's feelings you get from certain people that are just unhinged.
Just like early chimps were really bad at talking, you know, and then eventually they became people who talk for a living.
We talk all day.
You sing.
You know, fucking chimps.
A couple fucking noises.
That's all they have.
Do you know they lie to each other?
Monkeys do.
I was listening to this podcast.
I forget what they were talking about.
But they got to this thing where it was deception with primates that they'll pretend like that there's an eagle coming so that everybody dives down and they'll steal the fruit.
They'll make noises.
They'll make noises like different animals coming to get you.
And they fuck with each other.
Like, they have noises that equals eagles, and they'll duck down.
I'm hanging out with these guys because I'm a Green Beret and I got hurt and you saw the show last night.
So I'm speaking at the shows because Sturgill on his own...
Well, let me back up.
I got blown up in March and I was in the hospital.
Previous year, I'd come off of a deployment.
I had like 11 months before the second one was a bit down in the dumps.
Got divorced.
Had a dude die on the first trip.
So it was kind of like, it was real rough to deal with.
And then I was listening to these dudes quite a bit.
And then led into the next deployment.
I was there a month.
Boom.
Almost died pretty hard.
Teammates saved me.
And we had blood on the ground.
Like, I got blood on Target.
And then they made a hellacious movement to get me to the medevac.
Long story short, I'm eating dinner in the hospital.
One of the first meals, jamming out to these dudes.
And I was like, Mom, I want to meet Sturgill Simpson.
And then she tried to get a hold of him, SOCOM eventually did, and he came, hung out for like two hours.
I made my friend now, General Beaudet, wait like 15 minutes so that we could finish talking about what we were talking about, which when you're an enlisted dude, you don't make generals wait.
But I was on a lot of ketamine, so it was sweet.
Then Sturgill had it on his own accord to donate to the foundation.
So this little tour going on that coincides with the actual album release is donating to the Special Forces Foundation.
So that helps Gold Star Families, which are the families that remained of the friends that got killed on this trip.
So there were four Green Berets and two EOD techs.
And...
So that money's going to them, and that's what I care about.
I'm alive.
I don't have any legs below my knees, for those that can't see my legs on the video anyway.
And I don't have my testicles either, so that's a different set of challenges.
But I don't care about getting taken care of, other than the normal army processes, but I want them to get taken care of from the foundation.
I'm grateful to have these guys as friends now.
They're awesome.
They're amazing musicians, but amazing people.
And then I'm grateful to be here and just to push that out.
People that are coming to the shows, all that money goes to the Foundation.
And then people can go on the Foundation's website, which is SpecialForcesFoundation.org.
Yeah, you were, you know, you could tell you were seriously moved by this.
And, you know, for someone like you who truly understands the consequences of war, like the physical consequences in a way that none of us will understand, you know, it's very, not just...
It's brave of you to talk about this, but it's also so valuable.
So valuable for everybody that hasn't served to understand what it really is.
Well, I always say I really like combat, because I was in a lot of it, relatively speaking.
A bunch of guys have been in way more combat, a bunch of people have treated more casualties.
I'm a medic, but I was in a fair amount, almost got killed on the first trip a good handful of times, so I just don't like the war aspect when you see your friends get killed.
And, uh, you're stuck in a hospital bed on top of all this stuff that's, you know, I didn't shit for a week.
I pissed blood for a week.
I've had tons and nights of excruciating pain.
That's the life of an amputee or there are guys that are worse than me.
So I'm just grateful for having what I have.
And, uh, Yeah.
That's the beginning of it.
Like, especially on ketamine, when you're going through all that and you're just like, I was telling like the people that took the trash out in the room, like, hey, I'm grateful for you, brother.
So ketamine is an MDA antagonist in the brain, so essentially it's a dissociative.
So the way that it feels, because we learned this in class as a medic and everything, but the way that it feels is kind of...
It takes your perspective and it's like...
It always felt like a whirlwind if I was getting a push of it.
But it's like you're starting to get your vision masked and you're still there but you're dipping into subconscious because you're still conscious.
Because unconscious would mean that you pass out and you cannot have a gag reflex depending on how unconscious you are.
Ketamine...
I would close my eyes and immediately trip the most insane balls that you could imagine and open them and I'd be back in the room and I'd be like, what the fuck?
And then a friend of mine, when I left my first rotation, he was an Air Force CCT that got blown up in the same village I had a few casualties in.
He stepped in ID, he's in above the knee, some missing fingers, but when he was on ketamine, when he was awake and looking around, he'd see the walls on fire.
And then there'd be like women, like white pale skin in the corners, peeling the skin off their back.
It must be like someone's psychology when they go in, like set and setting type thing.
But I was in it when I got a lot of ketamine.
My legs were blown off.
I'm getting worked on.
I'm telling dudes how to treat me.
I cut my own shirt off.
And then I get the ketamine.
And I'm like in and out.
And I see these visions back and forth.
And like I was convinced I was...
There are two distinct moments I was like, I'm not going to make it, and had that conversation.
And what's surreal about this right here is that you were talking to him on this show, and you guys talked about combat medics.
And you were like, and I'm just singing key.
And I was like, right on, they're talking about me.
And then I got all kinds of jacked up.
Makes you appreciate life.
And I've gone through a huge development last year through depression and then this year after this blast of being grateful and doing introspection and communicating and having empathy for other people and being a compassionate human.
Which General Mattis has told us, a group of us, on the way back from my first trip.
It's like, don't let this experience of war make you a more hateful human being because people haven't experienced it.
Let it allow yourself to go through post-traumatic growth and become a better human being and treat other people like you want to be treated.
And I would add on to that, which came from Tim Ferriss, treat yourself the way you treat other people, too.
No, because it just was loosely based on him, because in the movie, the guy experiments with a bunch of different types of sensory deprivation tanks, and everybody knew that this guy, he was a legitimate doctor, a brilliant guy, but he was also a ketamine freak.
And one thing he would do is take intramuscular ketamine and then get into the sensory deprivation tank.
Yeah, that's a double whammy.
Yeah, a double whammy.
So is that stuff difficult to get off of or do you have to worry about that?
I mean, for you it had to feel, I mean, because you were there at Walter Reed the whole time, you had to feel frustrated, but for somebody like Mike, the first time I came to see you, it was only what?
So he was still in a lot of, I mean, more pain than I could even comprehend somebody being in, you know, from nerve pain, for how many surgeries on each leg?
Were they taking, I mean, you described this, man, just like, how can anybody...
You know, and then he was still, as he said, the first time we met, he was highest giraffe balls on Academy.
But, like, I was profoundly impressed by even then, like, how clear-headed and articulate, and I was obviously, like, this guy's obviously brilliant.
You know what I mean?
Like, he just threw the fog and awareness of everything going on in the room, despite the pain he was trying to pretend like he wasn't in.
I just, and then that place was full of guys like him.
And then when I went back, it's like all new faces.
You know, these people.
But then when I went back, the second time I went to see him was there for a couple days, and it was like just in a matter of short time, it was leaps and bounds.
He's in the gym on one leg, like fucking busting out 20 pull-ups and everything, you know.
It was just kind of like...
There's got to be something, anything you can do to help in whatever way.
And these guys, since I've known him, I've never once ever heard him ask for anything.
His only concerns were for the families of the guys that didn't make it.
It's just like really around an album release if I'm going to have a bunch of attention on me I thought it would be a good opportunity to put attention on what other people can do to help these guys and their families because you know the sacrifices especially sitting in these rooms and looking at these dudes man I can't even you can't you know what do you call that?
If they hear that and it moves them, it's more of like a...
Just be grateful on a regular basis for anything.
I mean, Steven Pinker was on your show.
I ended up FaceTiming with him as a result of all this.
But he has that book about basically the Enlightenment worked.
And we still have war, and then there are people still fighting it.
But overall, the world is continuing to improve.
And like...
Steadily getting better and fewer people are dying from genocide and war, but it still exists.
So I would want the respect for war if someone is wanting to go to war.
You know, if someone is going to be a commander-in-chief and that's a heavy thing to like toss back and forth.
Yeah, extremely.
It means that I may never have kids because I don't have my balls, you know, like there's sacrifice.
And I'm the one that lived.
And I didn't have any kids, but, like, my friends have four girls.
My other friend has three kids.
So, like, if you're going to move the chess piece to war, then we need to understand the implications of what that means and try to do everything in political power and state strategy to avoid overt war, because it's nasty.
That's World War III. Mutually assured destruction is the strangest thing on Earth.
That we all have enough weapons pointing at each other to literally nuke every fucking man, woman, and child off the face of the Earth many times over.
And that's what keeps us from using them.
But yet we still have them.
And we still have them pointing at each other.
I mean, remember when you were kids and we were worried about Russia?
To be honest, I'll tell the story before I forget the thought.
It was everything else associated with what happened after that I found more impactful.
The stuff that lasts or stays with you.
It wasn't what actually happened.
It was seeing the aftermath and the system and how it all pans out.
We had two home invasions within 36 hours, I guess.
The first time the guy came in, in the middle of the night, about 2.30, 3 a.m., and our back door had this sensor on it and made a very signature noise.
And if you live in your house, you know the noise is in your house.
And for whatever reason, it just woke me up from a dead sleep, and I knew what I heard, and there's the only thing that would make that noise.
So I kind of snaked my way out the hall and down to the top of the stairs And when I hit the top of the stairs, I heard the dog growl and the door closed back.
So I knew that was somebody leaving.
We have a huge fucking dog.
Basically useless, but he did growl and he made a very primitive noise.
I was proud of him.
And...
The guy didn't come in because of that, and I went downstairs and kind of swept the ground floor, and then he was gone.
I didn't want to freak my wife out, so I waited until the morning to tell her, and then we called the police.
Of course, one of the neighbors got on a ring cam in the back alley, the guy leaving and going down the street, so I had a very clear view of him.
For whatever reason, my wife and the kids, they had to go on down to where we actually live.
I was working that week in Nashville, probably mixing a record or something, so I had to stay behind.
As a result of me being home alone that day, I was cleaning and working on a firearm I had recently purchased and assembled.
Went to bed that night, locked everything up, and because they weren't home, I put the gun on the floor on a padded case next to the bed.
So I'm looking the next morning.
It's like 7.15 a.m., sun's shining, neighbors going to work, and I hear the back door open again.
And I was like, what the fuck?
Is that the maid?
Who would be here that early?
And I guess out of paranoia, For whatever reason, I grabbed that gun and just went to the top of the stairs to look.
I still think it's the maid, and when I hit the top of the stairs and looked down the staircase, same guy, same clothes, just standing in my living room, rolling the cord up on my headphones.
And I was like, well, alright.
I was almost impressed.
The one that he came back with was just like, I couldn't believe it was happening at this time.
So I started down the stairs on him, very quietly, and I got about halfway down by the time he turned and saw me.
And I was looking at his fucking head through a red dot, like a video game.
I'll never forget that image of this guy.
Probably thinking he's about to die.
And the back door was thankfully still open.
The only thing I said to him was, what are we doing here, man?
And I hit him with a strobe, which kind of like, probably to his brain, he thought was the gun going off.
Because he kind of like, seizureed.
And then I saw the adrenaline spike.
And he turned and went out the back door and jumped clean off my fucking porch.
Like never hit a single step and ran.
At the back gate, he had latched it.
I saw this on the video later.
When he came in, he shut the back gate back.
So he hit that back gate on a dead run and just blew it to hell.
Latches and wood splinters flying and took off down the alley.
I'm standing on my porch looking like a jackass.
My neighbors are literally walking out of the house going to work and shit.
I'm just like...
Okay, that happened.
So then, the next thing, there's like eight police officers in my living room.
All they wanted to see was my gun.
And every single one of them asked me why I didn't shoot the guy.
Which I found very interesting.
And I thought about it, finally.
One, when I'm going down the stairs, you would not believe how much shit can go through your head in like four seconds.
I had this whole conversation with myself as to like, Wife and kids aren't here.
You know, this guy doesn't even know I'm here yet.
I'm holding a fucking assault rifle and he's not a threat to me.
But if I put one through his dome, which I have every legal right to do right now, there's going to be news vans on my lawn.
This is going to be on your fucking Wikipedia page.
You know, all of that.
I'm just like, this guy is not a threat.
Yeah.
And thankfully he chose to go out the door.
It was just so weird.
They were like, why didn't you shoot him?
And I said that.
And they just kind of looked at me.
And I was like, literally by the time we engaged, man, two seconds later, he's running out the door.
I said, well, am I going to shoot him in the back?
I didn't do any shit like that when I was his age.
His toxicology came back clean.
He had one prior for possession.
It was a hard time.
I was desperate.
So I got subpoenaed.
Because I was the only one that actually met him.
And I go to the court case and, you know, that was a very interesting and telling experience for me because I'd never really been to anything like that.
And he was one of maybe eight or nine other people on the docket that day, all...
I signed the same public defender who literally shows up 15 minutes before they start the day to familiarize himself with every single case.
And you just saw this factory, like these young, underprivileged black males just getting pumped into the system.
The DA came over and she was just like, thanks for being here, yada yada.
And, you know, unluckily for him, he broke into like 13 other houses and they had him on tape and a lot of things.
So we had 13 or 14 aggravated burglary charges, which is pretty fucking heavy.
You know, every one of those is like a class B. So he was looking at 12 to 15. I think he sang like a bird, pleaded down, got six, and then if he does a successful rehabilitation program in prison, he could be out in two.
And she was like, yada, yada.
And I just realized, like, wow, they're just throwing this kid's life away because he...
Granted, he came into some people's houses and he almost got fucking killed.
And they caught him the next night, like three streets over in the act, doing the same thing.
But he had no priors.
He wasn't on drugs.
It was just like no direction, probably no discipline, no guidance, no heroes.
And I struggled with that.
I was like, man, there's got to be like, what if I gave him a job?
But there's so many people in this country that are set up to fail.
Their circumstances, their life, their environment, what they're surrounded by all day long, they're set up to fail.
And I've always said that if we really cared, we have this plan that we always sort of impart, we put X amount of money toward this and Y amount of money towards that, but if we wanted to make this country, we wanted to really make it stronger, you would want less losers.
So how do you get less losers?
You prevent them from ever becoming losers, but you help them when they're kids during their developmental period.
I mean, spend more money on education, spend more money on cleaning up impoverished neighborhoods and crime-ridden neighborhoods.
It's not impossible.
It's not like fucking breathing on the sun.
Like, it can be done.
Like, neighborhoods can get better.
They get better.
But the idea that there's so little time and effort put into fixing those parts of our own country.
I mean, we have the most resources.
We have this fucking spectacular country filled with amazing people.
And some of them just don't get a chance.
Because they're stuck in a rut from the moment they come out of their mother's body.
Dude, I mean, I have zero musical talent, or never pursued any of it, so I love music.
It's one of my favorite things to hear, stories about people, because...
I just love the idea of you going out and, you know, hey, we need a badass bass player, and they send you over to this place, and that's like a fucking gun for hire.
To me, as a kid growing up in Newton, Massachusetts, I used to always listen to music.
I never thought about doing it.
So when I see people that do do it, it's like, whoa, that guy is making a living making music.
There's, like, something to the way he's got, like, this...
He did a cover of Midnight Rider with Suzanne and Honey Honey at this, like, little hole-in-the-wall place in downtown LA. It was, like, maybe 100 people in the room.
Tiny-ass little crowd at, like, midnight on a Tuesday night.
And...
I mean, maybe I'm exaggerating.
Maybe there's 300 people, but it was fucking small shit.
And he did his Gary Clark Jr. version of Midnight Rider.
We've actually seen a guy take a bottle to the head, so I can attest for a fact that you can still fight after taking a giant, full, unopened bottle of Grey Goose to the head.
But only in a Mexican discotheque in McAllen, Texas.
He had a big white cowboy hat on, and he looked like a bodybuilder, and he had two ladies at the table, and he was flossing hard, and I think he turned around and spit a little game at somebody else's woman.
Oh yeah, let me back up that fucking story.
It was the first...
Real tour we ever did.
We finally got a booking agent and we went out and we did two weeks opening for Dwight Yoakam, which was fucking awesome.
It felt like an actual huge break.
You know what I mean?
We went from playing dive bar shitholes to 12 drunks to standing in front of 4,000 or 5,000 people.
And we were down in far Texas with P-H-A-R-R, which is right on the border.
And We went down and did the gig, and it was fucking amazing because it was in this giant auditorium, and they had these long tables like you would have in a school cafeteria, but there were rows of them as far back as I could see.
It looked like it might as well have been 1955, man, and we were playing the Hayride or some shit because it was white cowboy hats, just an ocean of white cowboy hats, whites and Hispanics, and everybody was seated and sort of turned sideways enjoying the show.
It was a very civil little vibe.
And then after the show, the promoters, these guys were like, you guys want to go to a club?
I was like, not really, but the younger guys might.
I was basically babysitting you assholes at that point.
They're all fucking kids.
So they round us up and take us to this fucking discotheque.
And we're the only gringos in this place, man.
And it was like, there was some serious mochismo being thrown around.
It was a little threatening.
And the guy starts telling us, they get on the mic with the DJ and And they're telling everybody that we're Dwight Yoakam's band.
I realized like, oh shit, this guy, we're a promotion tool.
You know what I mean?
To make his club look cool.
We don't play for Dwight Yoakam.
But they said it like 50 fucking times, you know?
And finally, we're just kind of sitting in the corner, not speaking and minding our own business so that we don't die.
And Miles and I were sitting at a table on some chairs and all of a sudden it's just liquid and broken glass just raining down on us from behind.
And I kind of turned around to see this guy...
Sort of stumble, and the dude's still standing there holding the bottleneck, and it was like he had these big, unopened bottles of Grey Goose, like big-ass Grey Goose bottles on ice, and the dude just came up to his table behind him, like, fucking necked one and took it to the dome, and the guy kind of stutter-stepped.
He turned around, he took his cowboy hat off, and he went at him and beat the fuck out of both of them.
And I told him, I was like, I think this is where we leave.
That was a lot of adrenaline, man, because we'd all, literally, everybody, we had all the horns with us, but everybody in the band, you know, as a kid, you dream about that shit right there from the time you even think about playing music, you know what I mean?
Going out rocking SNL. Before the second song, we were backstage, and I just told everybody, like, you know, this is most likely the only time we may ever get to fucking do this, so don't leave anything out there, you know?
Somebody wrote a great article about it saying that a musical artist named Sturgill Simpson just snuck in a song about the illegal heroin trade on SNL. Yeah, that happened.
Yeah, the military was guarding the poppy fields because in order to get information from the people that lived there, you had to get them on your side.
So the way to get them on their side was to protect their heroin production.
So you got the United States military walking through these poppy fields with Geraldo Rivera interviewing them.
I've seen that when, like, transients or bums come in on, you know.
It's always, part of our, we would have to find, like, young kids and shit playing hop car and, you know, doing the gutter rat lifestyle and the $1,000 fucking North Face parkas and shit.
It's like, what are you doing, man?
You're going to die.
But, like, bums would come in on the trains.
And this didn't happen in our yard.
It was over at the North Yard, this guy.
He thought they were done with the movement.
You know, you took 5,700 foot steel with fucking 45,000 horsepower on the front of it.
Like when it starts moving, it's very sudden and hard.
So if you just go to stand up all that thing, all of a sudden when it starts rolling and then you lose your footing and you fall down on the tracks between the cars.
But when you get run over by a train, it's not bloody and messy.
Especially if it's been on the main line, it's rolling really hard and hot.
You put a limb on a track or a body or a corpse, all that weight and friction and heat, when it goes over, it just cuts it like butter and cauterizes everything, like pinches you off like sausage.
Unless you hit a fucking cow or something standing in the middle of the track and you're going 70 miles an hour and then it's just asshole and guts hanging off the front of the train.
So it's all just gravity and downforce, keeping that thing going.
So you could put like a brick, technically.
You could take anything, a piece of fucking metal or a car jack and just lay it on that thing.
And when that train hits it at 70 miles an hour, it's coming off the rail.
Everything behind it is still going 70 miles an hour, stacking up behind it.
Every time you pull up to a crossing in the city and you see a train go by 10 miles an hour and there's like 20 tankers on there full of raw chlorine, you could really fuck some shit up if you knew what you were doing.
You'd kill a whole city.
You'd derail that train.
We'd have to think about that and Homeland Security would come out and we'd have to have courses and shit.
I watched enough of those things happen right in front of me, and it was my job to clean them up and get a crane out there.
I had a fucking cot in my office.
I would live at the yard for three or four days until we got everything repaired and back together and rolling.
But two or three times where you'd be sitting out there in the middle of switching leads, this happened where I'd be in a pickup truck at night or during the daytime with one of the guys I work with.
You know, maybe it's a guy, you're tired, you're trying to get done early, and you got a bunch of empty cars on the back, and the dude puts the throttle down before the air goes through the system all the way to the rear of the train.
So, you know, you got this dead weight, and he thinks, oh, fuck it, I got three locomotives, I can push you, it'll be okay.
Until...
When they designed the system 100 plus years ago, nothing has changed since then.
It's a very primitive, functional air brake system design.
You hook all these hoses up from the front to the back.
It runs air through, which allows the brakes to release.
So then the engineer can control those brakes.
Well, if the air doesn't go all the way to the back, the brakes are still on those cars.
So when all this horsepower...
Pushing rolling metal hits metal that does not want to roll.
It just buckles up in a teepee almost instantaneously, goes off, and you won't even feel it if you're 30 cars up that you're pushing shit into the dirt.
And it's all just piled on top of itself.
In only like two seconds, I watched this train go from being on the track to literally digging out a 10-foot trough of earth and just displacing it.
And I think, like, every day, me or one of my guys is standing right there.
So if you travel all the time, you don't get the same anxieties about travel that most people that don't travel all the time get.
I would rather ride a bus for 20 hours than go get on an hour flight in an airport.
Because that anxiety is just fucking palpable, man.
And...
You see, you go to this calm, weird place when we were out in the bubble on a long tour where everybody's just sort of not talking at the airport or whatever it is, and you're just in your little happy zone.
And I'm at this fucking terminal in D.C., and they announced this cancellation, and this place just erupts.
And it's like 30 people literally over there screaming at the Amtrak employees.
Isn't it interesting culturally that they have that, whereas China has very different.
China, they just bump into each other.
It's so weird.
And then, you know, every country has their own way of interacting.
It's so interesting.
Japanese...
I've only been to Tokyo once, but I was like, if you told me, if I didn't know about Tokyo at all, and someone said, hey, I'm going to take you to another planet where human beings live, and they're so much like you, but their city is very orderly, and they have beautiful neon signs and great architecture, and there's millions of them on this one island, but they're super considerate.
It's this weird parallel universe.
That's what it felt like.
It's like if you didn't know about the Japanese culture and then you went over there, you'd be like, what is happening here?
Well, I had the idea for the record first, then we played Fuji Rock in 2017. I have a very good friend, a Japanese friend, who grew up in Kentucky on an exchange program with my wife, and he later moved back to Tokyo for college, became a radio DJ. His name is Shunsuke Ochiai, and he did the radio thing for a while, and then he got into voice narration for Marvel over there.
He's just a good dude.
We were talking.
I went over for a couple weeks before we played Fuji Rock to hang out with him and my buddies and get some time on the ground.
The record was recorded the month before.
I was like, man, it'd be really cool to do some animated videos for this album.
If it's like one or two And we were sitting around his place watching a lot of old animation and anime films and the textures and the color and everything, just stuff you don't really see anymore.
And I was just thinking about some of my favorite cartoons from that, especially the older stuff, the 70s and 80s that came from that world.
So we decided to start taking meetings with producers just to get an idea of what would this cost?
How long will it take?
Is it even possible?
Would they do it?
It was kind of trial and error for a while.
We finally had a meeting with a guy named Hiroki who...
Was very understated in the meeting.
Sold himself short.
Just like a mid-50s guy in a tracksuit.
But we come to find out a week later he's the fucking man.
And all his buddies are the man too.
And those guys are also used to working under...
Not necessarily restrictions, but if they take a project on, it's from a big studio.
The story's already dictated.
The parameters are dictated.
Basically, they have to stay within someone else's lane with their vision.
He asked me what kind of animation I was interested in, so I named off some of the references of the things that I loved and was looking to get in terms of aesthetic and texture.
He just went straight to the guys that made those things, because they were drinking buddies with all of them.
Junpei Mizusaki especially was the one director who I think Shun translated all the lyrics for them because I wanted them to know, one, what the record was about so they could gauge interest.
And he just sort of said at dinner one night, he's like, you're talking about the same things that I deal with as an artist.
He's like, you know, I feel like this could be me talking.
We deal with the same things in terms of dealing with business and commerce versus art.
So he just sort of reacted passionately to the music, and he just said, I want to do the whole record.
He's like, this is kind of a dream project for me.
And I said, okay.
And then I was like, well, how are you going to do the whole record in a year?
Because we've already been sitting on this thing for a year and a half now.
And they assembled four other directors who were running teams or project teams at the same time simultaneously and breaking the songs up into chapters.
So even though there's somewhat of a linear narrative told out of chronological order, and then two little side vignettes, which are sort of same universe, different world, just to give a different perspective on some of those songs, because some directors were doing one song, other teams had two, and he was overseeing the entire team, but had them all working simultaneously on it so we could finish on time.
So I went over six times in the last year, and I realized about the second trip that those...
Visits were very beneficial because those guys don't do half-ass.
You know what I mean?
And they definitely pride themselves on their work and they all wanted me to be impressed.
So every time I would come back, they knew I was coming.
I could tell that was really motivating them to go outside the box.
And everybody wanted to be the guy that blew my mind the most.
You know what I mean?
And they did every fucking time.
It was just like...
Some of that stuff, I know how they did it and I don't know how they did it.
Skip the lead up, the whole traditional setup, because we're not...
we don't fit that model right just by making records we're antiquated you know but they put a single out so they put one section of the movie up on youtube which i think we'll take down now that the whole film's out but uh yeah for people they'd be like what is going on here Yeah.
I mean, I wrote the initial story, the main byline screenplay, and then told Junpei.
We were trying to do an homage of specifically Ojembo and then a couple other famous samurai films like Takeshi Kitano's Zatoichi and a lot of Kurosawa things like Very reoccurring storylines.
And we were watching Kurosawa films in the studio making the record on silent in the control room just to kind of keep our mood right.
Like to keep everything kind of dark and ominous and no second guessing.
But yeah, it's kind of like a futuristic dystopian Yojimbo, which is also a fistful of dollars where you got...
One town of people being oppressed by a couple rival factions or gang leaders and sort of using them for their own billing.
So in the future now, Junpei and I talked about it.
Sex, drugs, and weapons, and war are really the main drivers of the economy.
So let's just say that those are the only economy.
Those are the only things that have value anymore at that point.
And he got weird.
So I gave him a rough script.
I said, but I want you guys to do what you do, so feel free to add or take things in any direction you want at any time.
So then you get...
30 women with their tits out dancing.
That was Junpei's idea.
I told him there was a very old famous samurai film called Zatoichi and at the end of it, this blind swordsman conquers this evil force and the townspeople celebrate and there's this very famous scene in the end of it with this traditional dance and they're doing this dance and I said, can we sneak this in as a dance sequence slash homage?
Anybody that has to be a film buff geek like me would get it.
Anybody else just be like, this is fucking cool.
So they decided to take the gimps and the sex-trafficked slaves, so to speak, and then just make a big chorus line.
But then they had a woman, a traditional Japanese dancer, come in and they put her on motion capture and green screen and she did the actual dance from the film and they animated everyone to that.
If they want to run with the story, I'd be all about it.
Either prequel or sequel action.
Oh, wow.
I wouldn't want to make this sonic signature.
I would probably use traditional Japanese musicians and then contemporary production methods and actually have dialogue and sound effects and make a story.
Well, High Top and Metamodern came out like nine months apart from each other.
Sailor's Guide was 2016. Now here we are 2019. But we recorded that record 2017. No, man, it's like there is a tread water or drown mentality now.
Everybody thinks you have to be in front of people all the fucking time.
Or you've got to be blowing air into your brain balloon on Twitter and showing everybody how funny and enlightened you are to be a musician.
But like...
I think sometimes the best thing you do is just go the fuck away and process and recharge and look for holes that aren't being filled and exercise other interests.
Like I said, these guys, I don't want to play music with anybody else.
The only reason I would need another band is if I made a bluegrass record.
You know, so you just get the hang down and the people you want to be around and love and have a good time with.
Like I said, we could make ten records, it's all going to sound like ten different bands.
Because all these guys have extremely broad and diverse influences and ability.
I don't want to be in a box.
I don't want anybody to put a lid on it for me.
And we love all kinds of music.
So it's not really saying we're going to make this kind of record.
Well yeah, you got a certain point you just realize you're not in charge.
And I'm a very controlling personality.
I like to feel like I'm in control at least of myself.
With music I've learned like you can put ideas out there but they decide what they want to be.
You know I knew I didn't want to put a wanky fucking noodley guitar solo on every single song.
Two or three of those on a record you're pretty good to go.
Especially now when the guitar is kind of dead.
But Bob's an amazing keyboard player, and we had this badass old Moog Model D synthesizer that does the Dr. Dre shit.
And we did it on one song, and we just kept going and cracking it out and putting higher and a lower octave and then running it through amps and blowing it out and getting it really dirty like a big cracked out laser beam.
And I was just like, that's the fucking sound, man.
We've got to put that on everything and cohesively tie the album together.
So most of the solos are Bob.
Making this fucking sweet ass like synth thing over some Black Sabbath and I never heard that record growing up, you know, so we made that record.
So when you're touring with this music now and you're fucking with it and you're switching things up, like when will you decide that it's time to write some new shit?
I used to sit down with a guitar and like, I'm going to write this song.
You get like a part and words and you find meter and phrase.
I've discovered I'm really just a poet.
It's easier to write the words out and craft the meter and phrase to those words musically in the studio.
I would say both, all the other three records, I would probably wrote half of them while you go in to make the record.
You think you have the songs, and you realize that those songs are not supposed to be a part of this record, and I would go home at night and write songs that fit that record.
Where I would come in with parts, like Sailor's Got, I had a lot of parts of music that get pieced together in the studio, and these guys probably all thought I was fucking insane.
It scared Ferg to death, because he's like, I want to hear the songs.
I was like, I got some notes, you know?
But really, the music happens, you lock yourself in that room with the right people for a matter of days, and you just keep going until it's done.
And you have ideas in the moment.
But now I don't even pick a guitar up to write.
I just write what I want to say, what I'm feeling.
And then these guys, you know, push and encourage and motivate me to try to do the other thing as well as I'm able.
And I'll go through and just scribble out sections or pick this can fit with this.
This record was very...
Deconstruct it, I guess.
We did some loops and we would record riffs in a certain key and then record that same riff in every other key so I could take it and chop it to a loop and make it super precise like a hip-hop album.
And then some stuff was just live as fuck, you know.
A big part of it too, to be completely honest, was every other record I've made, even the ones that some of these guys have played on, it was much more like I came in You're the songwriter and session musicians.
And then you go out and you're the commodity.
You're the singing head.
You're the star.
And I think maybe around 2017 there was a big part of me that really rejected all that.
The newness of it and the responsibility of it.
All I ever wanted to do was play guitar in a band as a kid.
And maybe I wanted to feel like a part of something that wasn't all about My fucking head.
You know what I mean?
And I realized I was finally in the band I'd always wanted to be in since I was 13 in my bedroom.
Yeah, Bobby, I met, I actually met Bobby before I met Miles.
Bobby played organ on my very first record.
I'd never met him.
He got called down by the producer.
And we instantly, I was just like, okay, this guy's cool as shit.
And then I think we were hanging out for like a week and we were both going pretty hard in the paint still back then.
Bobby and I would go out drinking and then come home and wake my wife up at four in the morning and eat all the ice cream.
And that was like...
And I think it was one night in particular in Nashville.
I was working at a fucking grocery store.
He was sleeping in his car.
We're both just pretending we're not miserable and enjoying each other's company.
And we went out and got real shit-faced, man.
And...
We were walking up to Mumbry and going to the only place that was still open to get some food at like 3 in the morning.
So all these meat market bars are letting out.
And we both look like a couple degenerate scumbags probably.
We walk by and there's this group of like four or five obviously Vandy fucking football players, like just huge dudes, young men, and pretty inebriated.
And we're walking by and I hear one of them say, oh look, it's the Strokes.
He's like, I love your records, man.
And I blew it off, whatever, I'm a grown-ass man, and I just kept walking and I got about 10 feet.
I don't know why, I could just tell Bobby wasn't with me anymore.
And I turn around and look back to see this motherfucker standing in the middle of the circle of all of them, like literally eight inches from this guy's face with his hands on his hip, wearing his leather jacket.
And Bobby's from Detroit, man.
He don't fucking play, you know?
And I look, I was like, all right, well, I guess I'm going to jail with Bob tonight.
And I turn around and like kind of walk back over there.
And about the time I get to the group of dudes, one of them was eating a street hot dog.
And I will never forget this as long as I live.
Bobby, like, snatched the hot dog out of his hand and kind of crushed it like a paper wad and bounced it off his forehead.
It was pretty fascinating to watch them all immediately knew that they were dealing with something that they'd never experienced and they wanted fucking none of it.
I was like, I think this is my new best friend.
I'm going to be friends with this guy the rest of my life.
Yeah, those guys, the great things about comedy is you only have to go out for a weekend.
Sometimes I'll travel somewhere for one night and come home, and most of the shit I do is around L.A. It's like the practice stuff, just to stay sharp.
But I have friends that do the long touring, and they start to go crazy.
But to me, it sounded like they were performing the songs faster, which I always attributed to them being hyped up because they're in front of an audience.
I fell on my back in some rehearsals for a movie last year.
We had to go to New Orleans for like a week and rehearse this scene because it was going to be one like 12 minute shot.
And Daniel Kaluuya and I had to like body slam each other on the pavement about 20 times one day and I guess I landed on the pad on the curb wrong.
I got home that night and it felt like my kidneys were on fire and then I had to piss like every three minutes for the next week.
I had some blood tracing and so of course the next week is when we went to actually film the fucking thing in Cleveland in the middle of the polar vortex.
We're out there in the shoot and the whole time I'm just like I feel like I got a bladder infection from just from falling down one time wrong.
Definitely when it comes to anything that's going to be throwing you around or battering you into something, the more muscle, the more strength you can put into your body, the more you can protect yourself, but obviously only so much.
But when you think about wrestlers or anybody who does anything when they're getting slammed to the ground a lot, they're mostly doing it, if they're doing it as a competitive wrestler, doing it on mats that are cushioned.
If you're doing it on the street, and they've got you doing some sort of stunt maneuvers, what kind of pads do they have underneath you?
And then when they actually shot the thing, the only thing that we didn't...
There was a part where...
I definitely had to like judo flip his ass off onto a pad and we did all that but then like the stunt guys came out and did that shit for real onto frozen fucking concrete in negative 20 degrees and I was like oh yeah y'all can have at that you know but they for real like dude straight up suplexed this motherfucker on the pavement and they had knee pads and elbow pads on everything but you know it had to look real Those are the guys you wonder
So this jaguar, he seeks out these plants, eats them, and then he's just lying there like, The thing about the people who take that ayahuasca too is they see jaguars.
It's part of the vision.
I wonder if what they're doing is connecting to some jaguars that are out there tripping balls, too.
Born into a strict Mormon family, Brown was a gifted child.
That's the open parts of a novel that goes terribly wrong.
He had a miniaturization technique for clitorises.
He took the patient's penis and turned it into a clitoris, apparently guaranteeing his client's full sexual pleasure.
He presented his work at the 1973 Medical Conference, where his technique earned him the respect of some of the world's most famous surgeons.
Without surgical qualifications, Brown had to perform his operations in the most unlikely and inappropriate locations.
One early patient remembers going to his office assuming he would do a checkup but awoke from the anesthetic to discover that he had operated in the office.
He turned his garage into an operating theater.
And the more operations he did, the further his standards slipped.
The movie's so insane, James Franco made a movie about the making of the movie, about how insane it was.
A guy was like this dude who's like an actor and things weren't going so well, so he put together enough money to make his own movie, but it was terrible.
And in every scene, he was like making out with girls.
You're going to have to just, like I said, go home, kids are asleep, spoke blunt, watch our anime film, and then right after that, watch Chuck and Buck.