Jamey Johnson

A true original.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Left Sets podcast.
My guest today is the one and only Jamie Johnston. Jamie,
you just put out a new album, Midnight Gasoline, your
first in fourteen years. But what's the break.

Speaker 2 (00:24):
About a lot of different things? I guess, Uh. One,
I'd just been on the road, uh, seemingly NonStop and
just didn't have time to write, didn't have time to record.
But there's also writer's block, and writer's block came in,

(00:46):
I guess from a head injury.

Speaker 1 (00:50):
So tell me about this head injury.

Speaker 2 (00:53):
Yeah, I was walking out of the studio one night.
Tw and I were leaving, uh, my studio and stepped
out onto the asphalt and it had frozen over while
we were inside working, And as soon as I took
a step on the asphalt, both of my feet came

(01:16):
up and broke the fall with the corner of my
head and I hit so hard that blood shot out
both nostrils, and of course we got cleaned up and
went on to the bar.

Speaker 1 (01:32):
Okay, you went to went to the bar. Did you
ultimately go to the emergency room or see a doctor.

Speaker 2 (01:39):
Yeah, it was a couple of days later, and i'd
had a concussion.

Speaker 1 (01:46):
Okay, so the blood you were bleeding, but you didn't
have like a brain bleed, which could kill you.

Speaker 2 (01:56):
What it didn't?

Speaker 1 (01:58):
So you know, I know, and I haven't had a
concussion myself, but I know people who have. So you're
after effects went on for a long time. How long
did the after effects the concussion last?

Speaker 2 (02:14):
Years? I think the first time I really addressed it,
I did this program out in Scottsdale, Arizona. Back then
it was called brain State Technology. A man named Lee
Gertis came up with a technique of basically playing back

(02:34):
your brain activity in your ears real time, and it's
like your brain can detect itself and fix itself in
certain ways. I remember Lee telling me, he said, I
don't have to know exactly how the brain works. The
brain knows how it works, and it knows how it

(02:54):
doesn't work. And that seemed to really helped me for
a while. The company has since changed names. I think
they go by Sarah set Now start with a C.

Speaker 1 (03:09):
Okay, so when did this fall happen?

Speaker 2 (03:14):
It's two thy ten?

Speaker 1 (03:17):
And do you think you're fully recovered? Now?

Speaker 2 (03:24):
I don't know what to think now, but it's a
lot better than it used to be, but it's still
not like it was before, if that makes any sense.

Speaker 1 (03:36):
Yeah, sure there's improvement. When it was bad, what was
it like?

Speaker 2 (03:44):
Everything seemed to put me in fight or flight. It
was like I was walking around nine point nine out
of ten almost all the time, and you and I
could be having a conversation and you'd say one thing
that triggered me, and it would absolutely infuriate me to
the point I need to separate myself from you. Different

(04:10):
things like that. It was like parts of it were
uncharacteristically angry about things, and the other parts were there.
You know. Songwriting used to be something that was an
ongoing process with me. I was always writing, even if
I was having a conversation with somebody, I was still

(04:32):
in the back of my mind etching out some sort
of a song detail or working on something that I'd
started earlier. But it was always running behind the scenes.
And all of that seemed to come to a screeching
halt around that time, and songwriting turned into a more

(04:57):
of a chore. It was something I they had to
dig into and focus on in order to even complete
the exercise. There's so many songs that I would that
I started and just never never finished. You know that
I would start and just leave little parts of songs
or just little lines or lyrics or you know, certain things.

(05:21):
It was almost like a junk yard of song parts
on legal pads laying around the house.

Speaker 1 (05:29):
Okay, in this period of years when you were having
the after effects of the concussions, were you on your
own or was there continuing medical treatment or did you
have a significant other orho was helping you? What was
going on now?

Speaker 2 (05:46):
I never really had any help with it. If I
ever did anything to treat it, it was, you know,
suggestions I would get from a friend here or there,
and things that I would try out well that didn't work,
and then just go back on the road. It's not
easy to get any kind of medical care when you're

(06:07):
constantly touring.

Speaker 1 (06:09):
So if this lead date, do you believe your ability
to write songs is fully re establish itself.

Speaker 2 (06:20):
I feel like I'm able to do it now, and
that's something that I haven't felt in a long time.
And I never really did quit. You know, I tried
and I but my productivity level suffered as a result,
and it was more important to me over the past. Ever,

(06:41):
how many years that I tour, you know, that's what
was paying the bills.

Speaker 1 (06:48):
So despite all these after effects, you could play and
you could go on the road. Yeah, how difficult was
that for you?

Speaker 2 (07:02):
I wouldn't say it was difficult. It was you know,
touring is the road trades everybody the same, you know,
it's it's the same level of stress and struggle that
everybody else has to go through. Those of us who
travel understand it doesn't It doesn't trade anybody any differently.
So I can't say it wasn't some kind of work,

(07:24):
but I don't think the road was any more work
as a result of a concussion.

Speaker 1 (07:29):
Okay, Willie Nelson legendarily got home and still slept on
the bus. And there are different ways to travel. At
the other extreme, there are acts the play stadiums where
they are in one location and they take a jet
to each gig. So you know, although all roadwork is stressful,

(07:53):
depending on the income, it can be more stressful. Would
you say that.

Speaker 2 (07:59):
There's all kinds of ways to do it, and I've
done it most of those ways. But yeah, there were
a lot of years there where I just lived on
the bus. I remember one year I went six or
eight months something like that and never even saw my house.

Speaker 1 (08:18):
And you know, some people that are on the road
because they have to make a living. Other people, I
know they're on the road because they just have to play.

Speaker 2 (08:26):
What's it for you, I'd say sort of both. I
could never come off of the road altogether and just
give it up. That's not in me. I'm more like
Willy in that regard. But I am getting to a
point where I don't have to be on the road
three hundred days a year anymore.

Speaker 1 (08:46):
You know.

Speaker 2 (08:46):
I've got a you know, Fyonce, and had to get married,
and so I'm looking for more of a lifestyle.

Speaker 1 (08:55):
Well where'd you meet her?

Speaker 2 (08:57):
We met at the governor's inauguration in Mississippi in twenty twenty.

Speaker 1 (09:02):
Wait wait wait, wait, hey, what were you doing at
the inauguration? B how'd you meet her?

Speaker 2 (09:12):
Well? All good questions. I got an invitation in the
mail to go to the inauguration from the governor's brother,
who is a friend of mine. He supports our annual
NICKI Mitchell golf tournament every year. And I remember when

(09:36):
when Todd and I first became friends, his brother was
the lieutenant governor. Well, I didn't even know he was
running for governor. We just don't talk about that sort
of thing. And I didn't get the invitation myself. My
assistant got the invitation in the mail and she said, oh,
I'm sure he'll want to go to this. So she
just put it on my calendar and it was about

(09:59):
a week and I remember looking at the calendar and
I said, Hannah, what is this inauguration thing? What am
I doing? And she said, You're going to the governor's
inauguration governor of what she said, governor of Mississippi. And
I went, I'll be damp. I guess he ran for
governor and won. So I had this idea that I

(10:24):
would go down there and be hanging out in the
back of a bunch of Mississippians and watching the inauguration
from the back of a crowd out in the open.
When I got down there, it was raining, like Noah
was going to be flooding by any moment, you know.
Animals were lining up too. By two and the Pearl

(10:47):
River had come up out of the banks. It was
an epic flood that year. So they moved the inauguration indoors. Well,
I'm wearing jeans and a denim shirt. I looked like
I came to change the light bulbs. So I'm standing there,
and they put me in a prominent seat at the

(11:09):
front of the room, sitting next to the treasurer and
his wife. Everybody in there is dressed to the nines,
and I look like the long guy that got ushered in.
But so the governor and his security staff start walking by,
and I backed. I stood up out of my chairs

(11:33):
and backed myself up against the wall so they could
make the turn and get around the corner to get
to the stage. And I looked over next to me,
and she was backed up on the same wall, right
there next to me, And I remember I asked her,
I said, what are you hiding from?

Speaker 1 (11:56):
So? Was it an instant romance? Oh?

Speaker 2 (12:00):
I can't say instant, but on my behalf it sure was.

Speaker 1 (12:05):
So who pursued who?

Speaker 2 (12:07):
Oh? You kid? And I chased her all over the
place after that. If I wasn't on the road, I
was making my way back to Jackson, Mississippi.

Speaker 1 (12:16):
And how hard was she to catch?

Speaker 2 (12:19):
She's nearly impossible. Took some doing.

Speaker 1 (12:27):
So what sealed the deal?

Speaker 2 (12:30):
Well, you know it ain't over yet. This is that wedding,
ain't till May, so there's probably still some room. I
don't know. I think I must be that kind of
guy that she never thought she would meet. And she's
certainly the kind of woman I never thought I would meet.

Speaker 1 (12:51):
And what's her life about?

Speaker 2 (12:55):
Well, she's an attorney. When I met her, she was
working with the State Supreme Court. She left that job
and got a gig working for the Attorney General. And
when she left them, she went to work with Morgan
and Morgan oh so, but she is incredibly smart, incredibly beautiful,

(13:25):
and she comes from the coast and I believe the
term is coon ass, but she's just a gorgeous coon
ass Mississippi lawyer.

Speaker 1 (13:39):
Okay, you're a musician who lives his life on the road,
So what's it gonna look like when you're married?

Speaker 2 (13:50):
Well, I guess that's what we're trying to carve out
right now. I can't stay on the road as much
as I used to, and I don't want to, you know,
I want to come home and have a have a
better version of a life with her.

Speaker 1 (14:08):
And does she plan to continue to work? And where
do you plan to live?

Speaker 2 (14:16):
She is definitely going to continue to work. We're probably
going to have house, a house in Nashville for my
music business, and probably a place down in Mississippi. And
her whole family's from m Kill.

Speaker 1 (14:34):
And so you're going to have children?

Speaker 2 (14:38):
Oh, I don't know. We'll find out.

Speaker 1 (14:41):
Okay, you're forty nine. How old is she today?

Speaker 2 (14:45):
She's thirty three.

Speaker 1 (14:46):
Okay, Well, the reason I asked is, you know, in
terms of having children, age can make a difference. Let
me go back a step. You talked about the governor's
brother going to your fundraiser golf tournament. Are you a golfer?

Speaker 2 (15:04):
I wasn't until Willie, and golf ain't even the worst
thing he got me hooked on when I had quit
drinking in twenty eleven and I kind of needed something
to pour all my time into, and Willie invited me
to go to his He called it his first annual

(15:27):
Fourth of July golf tournament, what turned out to be
his only annual fourth at golf tournament. And I learned
how to swing a club and hit a golf ball
at Willy's course. It was a burden Aalics country club,
but it's now Willie's cutting put. It's a nine hole

(15:51):
executive out there in burden Alice, Texas Spicewood.

Speaker 1 (16:03):
Okay, so you got sober, Willy invited you, you went
to the event. How much have you played thereafter?

Speaker 2 (16:14):
I guess for the first few years after that. I
took it on as an assignment. And I mean I
was out there on the course every time it rain
or shine. It didn't matter, man. I would turn around,
get out there and go spend hours out there, hitting
about a thousand balls a day, that sort of thing,

(16:35):
especially after Alice Cooper told me that that was really
what kept him off the bottle for a while. He
said he leaned on golf too.

Speaker 1 (16:52):
So how much do you play now? And how good
are you?

Speaker 2 (16:56):
I'm not good at all. I do enjoy it, but
it's not one of those things that ever registered with me.
I still can't go out there and you know, put
one right up the middle every time. I have to
go out there and figure out what am I doing
wrong today? But I enjoy it.

Speaker 1 (17:14):
But how much do you play now?

Speaker 2 (17:18):
I probably four or five times a year. I just
don't have a whole lot of time for it anymore.

Speaker 1 (17:26):
Okay, how does Jamie Johnson from Alabama country musician meet
Alice Cooper?

Speaker 2 (17:36):
It would have been at one of his shows, and
he was opening for Rob Zombie. And I remember that
night pretty well because we went back and forth. We
went and saw Alice's show first, and then we drove
from that venue to the Rhyme and caught Don Williams set,

(17:57):
and left Don Williams and got back over to Alice
This show right about the time Rob Zombie was on
his second or third song, so we got to see
all three of them in one night.

Speaker 1 (18:09):
Okay, you happened to look a little bit in terms
of you know your hero or whatever like Rob Zombie.
But what were you doing there to begin with? You
were Rob Zombie fan?

Speaker 2 (18:22):
Well, I had definitely heard of him because back then,
before my hair turned blonde and gray and everything else
when it had some color in it, I was constantly
getting confused for Rob Zombie. And when I met him,
I told him my name, he said, oh, you're Jamie Johnson.
I now looked at him and I said, yeah, well,
I see it now too. But I wasn't very familiar

(18:50):
with his music until that night. But man, he is
absolutely wonderful. And I wanted to go meet Alice because
I knew he and Willie were good friends.

Speaker 1 (19:02):
Okay, how did you meet Willie.

Speaker 2 (19:07):
H through Pooty?

Speaker 1 (19:11):
Okay, tell me that story.

Speaker 2 (19:14):
Well, Pooty Locke was one of Willie's old friends. They went,
they went back a long time. Pooty's business card with
Willie said he was the vibe coordinator. That's his role
on the Willie Nelson to her back then, Well, I

(19:34):
met Pooty at the exit in in Nashville, and all
I knew about him that night was everybody kept saying,
that's Pooty, he's with Willie. Well, I went and introduced myself.
We shook hands, told a few jokes. I bought him

(19:55):
a beer, he turned around, We traded numbers and just
became instant friends, you know. And the next thing that
happened after that, Willie invited me to go play farm Maid,
and I believe every bit of that came through Foody
and some of the other guys in the band that

(20:16):
i'd met. So the first time I played farm Maid
was in two thousand and eight.

Speaker 1 (20:22):
Okay, you played farm Maid. How did you go one
on one with Willy? And were you instant friends? What
was going on?

Speaker 2 (20:31):
Yeah, that was pretty well immediate. I had met Willy,
but it was in nineteen ninety seven at a show
he did in Auburn, Alabama, and it was brief. I
just got in a line of folks that were hanging
out outside his bus, and of course I had my
guitar and just like everybody else, hey would you sign

(20:53):
my guitar? Well, over the years, that signature that he
put on the side of my guitar rubbed off off
and so when I saw him again at Farm Maide,
I grabbed my guitar and had him sign the front
and this time I had to wear it with all
the spray, a little lacquer over it when I got
done and keep it from rubbing off. It's it's still

(21:14):
on there today.

Speaker 1 (21:18):
Are you know? You talked about introducing yourself to whody.
Is that your personality that you go up and introduce
and me connections?

Speaker 2 (21:29):
I did back then, but I was also kind of
the new guy and the music business and was still
kind of in a mode of network and I guess
at the time. Now I don't hardly ever go out
the bars, but uh, but back then, it was it
was my It was normal.

Speaker 1 (21:51):
Okay, But you've been in the business for decades. Are
you the type of guy who knows everybody or just
the people. No.

Speaker 2 (22:01):
I know who I know, And every now and then
I might meet somebody that walks up and introduces themselves.
And I meet people all the time that you know
I probably should.

Speaker 1 (22:13):
Know, so generally speak you know, some people I know,
they're on the road or they're home. They're on their computers,
they're sending messages to all these people they know. They
may not even see them for a while because they're
on the road. Are you the type of person who
keeps contact with your friends.

Speaker 2 (22:35):
I try to. I try to keep up with people
I love, and sometimes it's possible and sometimes it's just not.
But I feel like I surround myself with the kind
of friends that it's all right if you go go
awhile and you're not able to catch up. But I
mean I have to these days. It seems like I

(22:58):
have to schedule time to think about something.

Speaker 1 (23:02):
So are there one or two people that you can
really rely on?

Speaker 2 (23:09):
I've got way more than one or two. I'm a
very fortunate man in that regard. I'm surrounded by people
who love me.

Speaker 1 (23:18):
And are those people from people you grew up with,
people you met in the music business, People you just
met in passing.

Speaker 2 (23:26):
Some are everything, you know. I've got friends that I've
had since Man, there's a family of them down in
Montgomery I've known since I was three or four years old.
You know, the Walley family. But I've got some other

(23:47):
friends from elementary school, go back to first grade. And
I've got brand new friends that that I love just
as dearly as if we have known each other for
twenty years.

Speaker 1 (24:01):
And I mean, I realize you're on the road so much,
and after you're on the road, if you're home, you
don't want to leave. But generally speaking, are you the
kind of guy who if I say, hey, Jamie, you
know we're gonna go to this guy's house, there'd be
some good people there, you're gonna say no, or you're
gonna say yeah, that sounds good.

Speaker 2 (24:22):
I'm gonna say no, and I'm gonna be overruled by Britney.
Who's gonna remind me you're supposed to be getting out
and mingling with people and getting to know people.

Speaker 1 (24:30):
Let's go, Okay, that's good.

Speaker 2 (24:34):
I'm an introvert. I like to stay home and reach
charge the battery when I can.

Speaker 1 (24:39):
So you're still sober, right, Yes, sir, So, how do
you fill your time when you're home or when you're
on the road not performing?

Speaker 2 (24:52):
I would say I feel most of it writing songs
and recording in the studio, and I read a good bit.

Speaker 1 (25:04):
What do you read?

Speaker 2 (25:08):
That depends?

Speaker 1 (25:10):
I mean, I'm a big reader. There's magazines, there's newspapers,
there's fiction, there's nonfiction.

Speaker 2 (25:21):
Yeah, I've read all of it. Uh. I like the classics,
like a good Stein back Okay, I like JD. Sallenger.
He didn't uh, he didn't write much, but man when
he did, it was easy to get locked into his

(25:41):
writer's voice.

Speaker 1 (25:42):
Absolutely.

Speaker 2 (25:44):
It just kind of puts you puts me in a
in a mode. I don't usually pick up a Sallenger
without reading every single one of them back to back.

Speaker 1 (25:54):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (25:54):
Here. Lately, my my book of choice, oddly enough, has
been the the Bible. I started from Genesis and I
guess it's been about almost two months ago and right
now I'm finishing up Jeremiah.

Speaker 1 (26:13):
Did you study that stuff as a kid or is
this the first or second time around or what?

Speaker 2 (26:19):
I can't say I studied it, but I did hear
all the stories. And you know, I like to say
I read it, but I read it with a young
mind and I haven't read it since. And the things
that I have read I probably read twenty five years
ago or so, and this is my first time reading

(26:42):
them at this age with a little bit more life seasoning,
and the stories kind of hit different.

Speaker 1 (26:53):
So what inspired you to pick it up?

Speaker 2 (27:01):
It's hard to say. There's probably a lot of different
factors playing into that.

Speaker 1 (27:12):
Okay, are you a religious man?

Speaker 2 (27:19):
I think we all are to a degree, and I'd
say right now my degree has intensified over the past
several months.

Speaker 1 (27:28):
Was there a reason it was intensified?

Speaker 2 (27:32):
Probably a lot of life change is happening at one time.
It's a first record I've put out in fourteen years.
It's also getting engaged and having that wedding day coming.
But it's also some friends passing away and that sort
of thing.

Speaker 1 (27:51):
Friends died before their time.

Speaker 2 (27:55):
Yeah, that's happened a lot. You know. I've had a
lot of friends asked away, way to you.

Speaker 1 (28:02):
From misadventure or illness or accidents.

Speaker 2 (28:07):
Well, some of both, some of everything, you know. Some
I had one of them that overdosed, one of them
that died from type one diabetes, one of them got
shot in the head.

Speaker 1 (28:20):
Tell me about the guy being what were the circumstances
that he gets shot in the head?

Speaker 2 (28:28):
Well, the best I understood it was he was smoking
inside a bar and the bar owner didn't want him
smoking in there. And uh, I don't know what was
said back and forth, but Wayne was the kind of
guy that had the innate ability to absolutely uh infuriate

(28:51):
somebody with his words. He could make you so mad
with just a pointed comment. And he wasn't the kind
of guy that went around looking for trouble. But it
definitely found him that night.

Speaker 1 (29:13):
The guy shot him in the bar.

Speaker 2 (29:16):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (29:18):
Did the guy pay at the price for that, go
to jail or anything?

Speaker 2 (29:22):
Yeah, he did. He was convicted and I think he
might still be in jail. And do you want a gun, Yes, sir,
oh quite a few.

Speaker 1 (29:37):
Are you type of person who has it purely for
defense or are you a hunter or target shooter?

Speaker 2 (29:45):
Well? I grew up in the country, and you didn't
necessarily have a gun out in the country for people.
You had it because if you were going to be
walking around anywhere, it might be a snake, it might
be a cootie, could be something dangerous that you needed protection.
From it probably wasn't going to be a burglar breaking

(30:07):
in your house. So I grew up around guns, and uh,
when I was nineteen I joined the United States Marine Corps. Well,
I've also been trained in how to use guns, and
they're very much a part of who I am.

Speaker 1 (30:27):
So when was the last time you fired a gun?

Speaker 2 (30:38):
It's it's probably been a couple of years now. No,
I can't say that I killed a I killed a nail.
Last year I went up to Saskatchewan, went hunting with
a buddy of mine up there, and left everything up there.
I didn't bring a gun in there. We used one

(31:00):
his and I left all the meet up there with him.

Speaker 1 (31:04):
What inspired you to join the Marines? And you don't
seem to me the type of guy who wants to
color between the lines and take orders from other people.

Speaker 2 (31:20):
I knew from the time I was a young kid
that I was going to be a marine. And I
don't know where I got that from. I just always knew.
And I had a free ride scholarship at Jacksonville State University,
and so I went up there and did a couple
of years learning music theory and all that kind of thing.

(31:45):
And when I was done with that, and I may
not when I had gotten my degree. I don't mean
I got a degree. I was just done with it.
I went and found a recruit we were in Montgomery, Alabama,
and told him I wanted to be a marine. It
was time for me to go do that.

Speaker 1 (32:05):
Now.

Speaker 2 (32:07):
They offered me a spot in the Marine Corps band
and I remember laughing at the recruiter and I said,
I'm not going to be that kind of marine. He said,
all right, he said, well, you you scored pretty well
on the as fab test. We don't we make you

(32:28):
a mortarman. So I became a mortarman in the Marine Corps.

Speaker 1 (32:34):
And so what did that actually involve?

Speaker 2 (32:36):
Doing a lot of yelling, a lot of go a
lot of going deaf, a lot of a lot of
shots fired out of a tube that sat right next
to my ear For about eight years. It was fun

(32:58):
and you had to love it and hated all in
the same breath. And I learned that love and hate
were the same emotion. They both come from the same place.

Speaker 1 (33:16):
Okay, so if you were doing it for eight years,
you weumped.

Speaker 2 (33:20):
Now when I signed up, they weren't offering any four
year contracts. They were only offering eight year contracts, and
so the one there were some guys that could do
four year active and four inactive, and then the one
that I did was called a six and two. I'm
also still kind of a control freak, and I was

(33:43):
back then too, and I didn't like the idea of
having to go to Okinawa and places like that, you know,
where I'd just be completely uprooted. So I signed up
as a reservist where I could pick the classes that
I wanted to go to, you know, where you'd go
do this for a couple of months, and then go
do that for a few months, and you know, at

(34:03):
least I had some kind of control over where I'd
be stationed and for how long and that sort of thing.

Speaker 1 (34:09):
Okay, was the reservist only the last two years of
the whole time.

Speaker 2 (34:15):
It was a whole time.

Speaker 1 (34:16):
Yeah, So when would they call you up and say, hey,
you got a report?

Speaker 2 (34:25):
Well, there was you know, your one weekend a month
that was always on the schedule. There was two weeks
over the summer. And in addition to that, if you
wanted to take different classes and courses and that sort
of thing, you could you could sign up and you know,
go to San Diego for a couple of months, train

(34:47):
at Camp Pendleton and be studying a specific kind of
thing for a couple of months, and leave that and
go go do something in Jacksonville, North Carolina, or wherever else.

Speaker 1 (35:00):
So if you had to do it all over again,
would you have joined the Marines?

Speaker 2 (35:05):
Oh? Hell yeah?

Speaker 1 (35:07):
So what exactly did you get out of it?

Speaker 2 (35:11):
I got a nice scar on the outside of my
right knee over here, got a bad case of arthritis.
I got some really cool camouflages closed I keep in
a closet because they're all too small. I got a
bunch of loud, long lasting friendships with guys that are

(35:34):
so close I don't even think the word brother would
be accurate enough to describe them. I've got some friends
from that generation of my life right there that you
know you can count on when everything else goes to hell,
the Marines come in.

Speaker 1 (35:57):
So you never saw any action or anything, no, sir,
And yeah there's a camaraderie. How about all the discipline
and you know, were you down with that?

Speaker 2 (36:15):
Yeah? But that's been there all my life. That didn't
that didn't even start with the Marine Corps. Uh. That
started probably from my mother more than anything her. Her
mother was a marine, so I knew how to make
a bed by God.

Speaker 1 (36:35):
So you see group in the country exactly where, well, that's.

Speaker 2 (36:42):
Spout what I'm thinking of when I say that in
the country's way out in rural Montgomery, Alabama. It's uh
south of the city, and it's on the road that
uh uh Stay Young wrote that song about the seven

(37:07):
Bridges road, right, the one that the song that the
Eagles recorded, right, But he wrote it he grew up
out there in the same place that I did. And
he called it the seven Bridges Road because if you
left Montgomery going down that road right there, you crossed
over seven bridges before you got to his house. But

(37:27):
that uh, that old moss in the trees, there's some
of the most beautiful Spanish moss. And if you catch
it on them, on them one of those big old
full moon nights and you see that stuff glowing against
the sky, it's one of the most beautiful things I'll
ever see.

Speaker 1 (37:46):
So how far from downtown was where you grew up.

Speaker 2 (37:54):
It was thirty minutes if you drive slow in fifteen
minutes if you drive normally.

Speaker 1 (38:02):
Okay, what'd your parents do for a living?

Speaker 2 (38:09):
My mother was a paralegal, and my dad was always
in retail sales in one way or another. When I
was born, he was managing a super Rex drugs down
in Troy, Alabama, and he did everything over the years.
He managed Wilson's and helped them trends what's the word

(38:37):
transfer into a service merchandise. He worked for Circuit City
for a while. He managed a warehouse for a furniture store,
all kinds of things.

Speaker 1 (38:50):
And what was your relationship with your parents then and now?
Were you the type of person who was testing the rules?
Your type person who's dying to get out of the house.

Speaker 2 (39:03):
I wouldn't say I tested the rules. I'm not one
that kind of just pushes to see how much somebody
can take, you know. But I do appreciate a good
amount of freedom, and I felt like they gave it
to me when when I was young, I learned that
if I made good grades, that the answer to whatever

(39:26):
I wanted to do was yes. And so I studied
hard and I kept my grades up and made sure
that I had enough leniency when the time came.

Speaker 1 (39:36):
How many kids in the family.

Speaker 2 (39:39):
I had three sisters, so there was four of us.

Speaker 1 (39:41):
And where are you in the hierarchy.

Speaker 2 (39:45):
Number two?

Speaker 1 (39:47):
And did your parents treat you all equally? Or because
you were the boy, you were the fear heard son.

Speaker 2 (39:55):
Well, from my perspective, I thought we all got everything equal.
But you listen to my sisters, you get a different
take on it. I thought it was I thought it
was fairly equal. All of us got some.

Speaker 1 (40:11):
And then you were good in school? Were you like
number one in the class?

Speaker 2 (40:21):
I know, I wouldn't say that. It was always somebody
in there smarter and made better grades. But I was
an age student. I hated getting bees. I hated missing
one if I knew I could get them all.

Speaker 1 (40:35):
Right, Okay? And what about friends in sports and other activities? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (40:45):
I played enough sports I did. I played soccer a lot,
I played some football, some baseball. I wrestled one year.
I tried just about everything. Just I was good. I
was a good fast runner, and I was always strong
as far as my size and my body weight. You know,

(41:05):
I never was a real big guy. I was a
guy that could hit the pull up bar and real
quick knock out twenty wow.

Speaker 1 (41:16):
So you were still getting these in high school?

Speaker 2 (41:20):
Oh yeah?

Speaker 1 (41:22):
So what if I talked to high school Jamie Johnson,
what would he have said his future path would be.

Speaker 2 (41:30):
I'd have probably said something along the lines of engineering
or architecture. I always saw myself as getting into building
science or something like that.

Speaker 1 (41:42):
You know. So how did it switch to music?

Speaker 2 (41:50):
I'd say that switch happened in Nashville. I had a
construction company do an insurance restoration. I was a general contractor.
We came in and rebuilt stuff that had been burned
in a fire, blown over in a tornado, and that
sort of thing. I wasn't a good business man, or

(42:12):
that company would have survived. But uh, I really didn't
do well in terms of business. I did did good work,
you know, but the business ended up bankrupt. I did
a reorganization bankrupt and paid off all the debt from it,

(42:35):
and I ended up paying off all that debt with
my music royalties.

Speaker 1 (42:43):
Okay, let's really buy a couple of steps. You got
this free ride to college, you're an e student. How'd
you decide to drop out?

Speaker 2 (42:58):
It was about money. I was tired of working like
crazy to pay a rent and only these utilities and
everything else, just to live this subpar kind of lifestyle
where you never had money to do anything. I mean,
I never had money for gas putting the car, and

(43:20):
I was delivering pizzas at the time, so it just
got to be a little too much of a challenge.
Even with the full ride scholarship, it was hard to
keep up with bills.

Speaker 1 (43:36):
But you were taking music courses there.

Speaker 2 (43:41):
Oh yeah. I was taking all kinds of music courses,
including applied science on French horn, and I think I
had gotten to a point where I felt like I
wasn't learning much. I was just practicing all the time.

Speaker 1 (44:01):
So how did you end up in Nashville.

Speaker 2 (44:04):
Well, I always knew Nashville was in my future. I
just didn't know when. When I decided to leave Montgomery,
I had already had a job at a cable company
where I was making all kinds of money going door
to door and signing people up for this new cable

(44:26):
company down there, and I realized I really didn't want
to be in sales for the rest of my life.
And I also realized that my writing, as far as songs,
was getting better and better. I had a little following
in a local bar down there called Pure Country, and

(44:53):
I had a lot of friends down there that really
supported me. I had a group of guys that were
in a band that I thought was really good. It
was called Southern Sons, and these guys had all come
to Nashville and were given the country music scene a
run for the money, and they were starting to have

(45:15):
some success. And one of them, in particular, had gotten
a job with CMT. He was a program director with CMT. Well,
Kurk Brewer is his name. Kirk told me about this
sign company that his wife was working for at the

(45:37):
time and said, man, they need a good outside sales
rep and this could be a way to get started
in Nashville for you. Well, I came up and interviewed
with that company and got the job, and so I
moved to town January the first two thousand.

Speaker 1 (45:55):
Okay, let me kind of get this street we're and
when did you have the construction company?

Speaker 2 (46:03):
Well, the construction company was about my third job in Nashville.
That fast science gig lasted me, I guess until about
October that year, and I had to resign my posts
when I went to help this guy figure out the
color scheme for his restaurant, only to find out that

(46:25):
I couldn't help him at all, and he couldn't help me.
At all. And he kept asking me what color do
you think this ought to be? And what color do
you think that ought to be? And I finally had
to tell him, right, I can't help you at all
with this. I'm colorblind. He said, hell, I'm colorblind too.

(46:47):
So I had to go back to the office until
the owner of the company. I said, Man, I can't
thank you enough for the opportunity, but I can't do
this a fish out the out of the pond over here.
I can't be out here talking to people about very
specific colors too. It's not just hey, we think this

(47:09):
ought to be yellow, you know, it had to be
a They called them Pantone colors, and there's got to
be fifteen thousand shades of yellow, and man, you mess
that up one time, buddy, it's a it's a mess.
So I left that company and went to work with
a different company where I didn't have to discern colors.

(47:31):
I went to work with a company called Heartland Pump.
And this company would rent out big industrial water pumps
to do like a creek bypass if you were going
to build a bridge over a creek.

Speaker 1 (47:46):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (47:46):
And they also dewatered rock quarries and mines and all
that sort of thing, so we're bypasses whatever anything had
to be bypassed. They had a pump and a plug system.
And I loved that company. I loved everybody I got
to know there. That's where I was when nine to
eleven happened. By the way, I was sitting in their

(48:10):
conference room in Carbondale or Carterville, Illinois. That the owner
and I, well, he sold the companies since then, but
he and I we still talk and try to try
to keep current. And it would have been that company

(48:31):
right there that I left. When my then wife Amy
inherited her parents construction company, they decided they were going
out of business and that they'd been an insurance restoration
her whole life, and so they left her the assets
of the company. We started another construction company. But even

(48:56):
before that, back in Montgomery, I was framing houses all
the time in between jobs and that sort of thing.
So I've always had had a background in construction and
a hunger for it. I still love it. I still
love it. If I'm not building or renovating something, I
feel like something's wrong.

Speaker 1 (49:23):
So do you think you were a bad businessman because
you were essentially an artist?

Speaker 2 (49:32):
I think I was a bad business man because I
legitimately couldn't give a rat's ass about money. I don't
care about money. It's the least valuable thing on the planet,
and I just refused to ever learn anything about it.
The first time I ever had to dive in and
learn something about the principles of money, it was when

(49:54):
I first got to Nashville. I started listening to a
program on the AM RADI the Dave Ramsey Show, right,
And I remember listening to Dave Ramsey and starting to
feel guilty about my own personal finances. But that was

(50:14):
a That was the first time I ever, uh, it
ever dawned on me that you know, you should stop
and learn how money operates. And it just took me
a while to kind of catch on.

Speaker 1 (50:26):
Well, the music business is femous and raife, with even
the most successful musicians being ripped off. Since you weren't
an expert in money, have you've been ripped off?

Speaker 2 (50:38):
Well, if you're not an expert in money, you can't
say that you got ripped off.

Speaker 1 (50:43):
Excellent point. There's the A level student.

Speaker 2 (50:46):
Okay, you have to pay attention. Money cannot wait to
get away from you. And if you're not aiming it
in a direction. It's gonna go whatever direction seems like
the least resistance.

Speaker 1 (51:06):
Okay, when did you first pick up an instrument and
when did you decide you wanted to write songs.

Speaker 2 (51:22):
I'd say the first time I picked up an instrument
would have been a guitar. I mean picked it up
with the intent of learning how to play, not just
banging around and making a noise like you know sometimes
kids will do. And for me that probably would have
happened around five or six years old. I remember my

(51:48):
dad would play songs on his guitar and he would
strum some chords and the songs that he were playing
and I didn't know about you know, some people wrote
these songs and that sort of thing. I just knew
my dad sang all these songs. Well, a lot of
the Hank Williams songs that I learned from early childhood.

(52:13):
I thought those are my dad's songs. I remember first
time hearing Hank Williams on the radio and thinking that's
my dad's song. Who's this guy? I just kind of
I grew up with a passion for music, though, it's

(52:36):
what really drove me. And even if I didn't know
how to play. There was always this version of me
that was writing my own song, and it might have
just been taken the lyrics to somebody else's and replacing
them with whatever I was thinking about, but it was
always a hunger for me.

Speaker 1 (52:58):
Now, other than your father, were you listening to the
radio you were born in seventy five, MTV hits in
eighty one, What music were you listening to and where
did you find it?

Speaker 2 (53:13):
We didn't have MTV. We had those rabbit ears on
the TV that picked up the three channels for free.
Music for me would have been what we heard on
the radio. I remember I was a big Buddy Holly fan,

(53:36):
and it was like the first two or three tapes
that I ever bought were Buddy Holly, and I remember
when I found out that Whalon Jennings had played bass
and Buddy's band, and Whalen was also the guy on
the Dukes of Hazard, and that turned me into the

(53:57):
biggest Whalon Jennings fan ever. So it's all kind of interwoven.
But we didn't we didn't have no MTV in my
house growing up. We had vinyl records and my mother
was a big Alabama fan and she had every record
that they put out, and I'm talking about the day

(54:18):
it became available. She came home with that record. And
we also had a book that had the sheet music
of all these Alabama records. I think I had like
six different albums, including My Homes in Alabama. And that's
the first song I ever learned how to play on
a guitar and sing. I learned it right out of

(54:40):
that book.

Speaker 1 (54:43):
So you were listening mostly to country music. Did you
listen to any rock music?

Speaker 2 (54:50):
Probably, but I didn't know there was a difference. To
me the Eagles. That wasn't really rock, you know, the
main heaven. It fit just as good with our country
music as it did anything else. But that would have
been the version of rock and roll I listened to.
My sister was down the hallway with her Madonna records

(55:14):
and Prince and she even had that Guns and Roses
record when it came out.

Speaker 1 (55:20):
Did you like Appetite for Disruption?

Speaker 2 (55:27):
Not? Probably? Not at first. I mean, down on my
end of the hall, it was still Vern Godzeden and
Merle Haggard.

Speaker 1 (55:37):
Okay, So if you pick up a guitar at age
five or six, when you're in high school, are you
known as the guy who plays a guitar. Did you
play any gigs, form many bands anything like that.

Speaker 2 (55:51):
No, most people didn't even know I did anything of musical,
I guess until about seventh grade. And that's but I
also kept to myself. You know, I didn't have a
whole lot of friends. Well, we lived so far out
in the country. Wasn't like I would get home from
school and hop on my bicycle and go visit friends.

(56:13):
We just didn't have neighbors like that. I kind of
grew up on my own, So even if I did
learn something on the guitar, it wasn't like I had
anybody I could call up and share it with. I
just played for my dad when he got home.

Speaker 1 (56:32):
So okay, that seventh grade people learned you played the guitar.
How did they find out?

Speaker 2 (56:40):
Well, it wasn't guitar at first. It would have been
that French orn that I was learning in the beginner band.
And I didn't stay in beginner band for very long.
I practiced so much, and I had already learned how
to read sheet music. My dad taught help me on

(57:00):
my hand growing up. You take your five fingers right there,
and they represent the five bars of a staff and
if it's a line, it's every good boy does fine.
And if it's a space, it's face face. So he
taught me how to reach sheep music just looking at

(57:21):
the palm of my hand. And the more I practiced
on that horn, the better I got. Within a few weeks,
the band director of that junior high school had me
sitting in with the advance band.

Speaker 1 (57:37):
Okay, then what happened?

Speaker 2 (57:42):
I got into Drumming Bugle Corps. After that, this old
drum and Bugle Corps had well, they had a couple
of years back in eighty and eighty one, and then
they were just kind of coming back out. It's called
south Wind, and they had some auditions and I went

(58:03):
an auditioned for them and got into that where I
could travel during the summer. And I guess since it's
been since I was about twelve thirteen years old, I
started spending my summers out on the road traveling with
that Drumming Bugle Corps. So I've been a traveling musician

(58:28):
most of my life now.

Speaker 1 (58:30):
Okay, so what are you playing in the Drumming Bugle Corps.

Speaker 2 (58:35):
Well, they called it a soprano, but it was a
soprano bugle, which is akin to a two valve trumpet.

Speaker 1 (58:43):
Okay, okay, you started with a French worn your father
helped you out. You would greet how'd you get into
the bugle?

Speaker 2 (58:54):
That was it. I heard these guys were taking auditions
and trying to put this corps back together. I went
and auditioned, and uh, and became became one of them.
And uh, that's also kind of what started me down
that path of I guess you'd call it discipline, but

(59:15):
you had to have a good degree a discipline to
be successful in the drummer bugle corps.

Speaker 1 (59:23):
Okay, are you the type of person that you can
pick up and play any instrument?

Speaker 2 (59:30):
I wouldn't say that, but I can figure it out,
you know, I can. I can usually get some some
kind of tone out of anything.

Speaker 1 (59:41):
So you're in the drum and bugle cort and you're
traveling during the summer, where you're going.

Speaker 2 (59:48):
All over. We would travel, Uh, you'd stay at high schools.
You know, most of us had a little sleeping bag
or a bedroll or whatever enough closed to get you
through the summer, and did our work out on football

(01:00:11):
fields and that sort of thing. In fact, that's where
our shows were were in some of these uh big
old high school and college football stadiums. So that was
the kind of places we'd travel. We didn't stay in hotels.
I learned to sleep in a luggage rack on a bus.

Speaker 1 (01:00:31):
Well, I mean, you're in Alabama. How far from Alabama
would you go?

Speaker 2 (01:00:37):
Oh? Hell? I remember seeing Niagara Falls for the first time.
Oh wow, about thirteen years old. I mean we got out.
We did some sure enough, travel up New York, Maine, Kansas, Tennessee.
I mean just we went everywhere we toured.

Speaker 1 (01:00:57):
Okay, in the world of drumming google cores, was this
like a known good? I mean, is there a hierarchy
of drumming and bugle cores? Oh?

Speaker 2 (01:01:09):
Yeah. Ours wasn't necessarily one of the best. It was
a smaller cores. Back then, they used to have this division.
It was called Age sixty I think it was. And
all it meant was you didn't have as many members
as the bigger cores, and we didn't. We had a
very small drummer bugle corps. But for our size, we

(01:01:32):
were really good.

Speaker 1 (01:01:34):
And how many summers did you do that?

Speaker 2 (01:01:38):
Oh? I did probably two summers traveling with those guys.
But I probably did winter camps and that sort of
thing four years or so.

Speaker 1 (01:01:48):
So how did it end with the drum and bugle corps.

Speaker 2 (01:01:53):
Well, you age out at twenty one, but I didn't
get anywhere close to that. I did it up until
I got into high school, and by then I was
already working during the summers and didn't have didn't have
time to do it anymore.

Speaker 1 (01:02:06):
So when did you start playing guitar and writing songs
to the point where other people heard you perform?

Speaker 2 (01:02:17):
I guess by the time I was in tenth grade
or so, I was already sharing songs that I wrote
with some some friends, you know, some guys and gals
I was hanging out with aside from school, but not
to the point where I was bothering people with it.

(01:02:37):
Are you know, purposely pursuing Hey, check out this song
I wrote, just you know. But by the time I
was a junior in high school. I remember then there
was a group of kids from my church that really
thought it was a neat thing. But my dad had
me and my sister playing in church with him from

(01:03:01):
a young age. So for a lot of the people
in our church, they just that they knew since I
was about ten years old or so that you know
that I played guitar and sang harmony with my dad
when he would get up and sing in front of
the church.

Speaker 1 (01:03:19):
And did you ever play high school talent shows or
you know sweet sixteens bar Mitzvah's anything like that.

Speaker 2 (01:03:30):
No, I never got into that sort of thing. I
never saw music as a competition, and I just saw
it as a something I really wanted to do and
I wanted to do it well, but I didn't. I
didn't get into the competitive stuff with it so much.

(01:03:51):
And I did some of that. You know, the drum
Corps thing was a competition, but I really didn't care
how we did. I was in it more for the
getting the summer away from the house and getting to
travel than I was and anything else. And now even
the stuff or like state band competitions and all that
where you get the ribbons and all that kind of thing,

(01:04:12):
I didn't care about that. Junt.

Speaker 1 (01:04:17):
Okay, you grew up in Alabama. Even at this late date,
the North in the South are very different, and you've
also traveled around the country. What do people who don't
live in the South, don't live in Alabama, what don't
they understand about Alabama.

Speaker 2 (01:04:42):
Well, that's a tough one. I guess it had a
perspective comes into play. Being from Alabama is the only
perspective that I have, So I'm not real sure what
somebody else's perspective of Alabama would be. I am aware
that there's a lot of things that we considered normal

(01:05:05):
down there that that other people would consider taboo, like
putting cheese in your grits. Uh. Some people you have
to explain to them what grits are. So I don't
know that there's there's probably a lot of things that
uh about Alabama that would be taboo even to today's Alabama.

(01:05:32):
It's changed a lot, just like everywhere else in the world,
especially over the past since the information age came in.

Speaker 1 (01:05:48):
We're in wind in this scenario, did you meet your
first wife?

Speaker 2 (01:05:53):
I met Amy. When I first got to Nashville. It
snowed fores well for me, being from South Alabama, I've
never seen that much snow in my life. And I
had a couple of dogs I had rescued from this
shelter down there. They were Japanese akitas, and I took

(01:06:16):
them over to the side of priests dam where they
got a nice steep hill and I just let them
drag everybody around in the snow that day, where her
friends thought it was a lot of fun to grab
a hold of these two akitas and ride them down
this hill, let these dogs pull their sled around.

Speaker 1 (01:06:38):
So, hi'd you meet her? And how did it become
a romance in marriage?

Speaker 2 (01:06:48):
So they invited me to do to go to church,
and I started going to that church. It was it
was Two Rivers Baptist, and it was the biggest church
I'd ever seen in my life. It was a big, old,

(01:07:09):
massive building and it kind of helped me, you know,
meet some people and get rooted and get established in Nashville. So, oh,
I guess for me, Amy goes back to the very
beginning of my time in Nashville, which has been twenty
five years now. She wouldn't appreciate me mentioning the number

(01:07:32):
of years for that. For that, I apologize.

Speaker 1 (01:07:39):
How did it end with Amy?

Speaker 2 (01:07:44):
Willie says, you never have an ex wife, there's only
additional ones, So there is no end. Amy and I
are still wonderful friends today and we have a twenty
one year old daughter, and there's no end to that. Relationship.

(01:08:06):
It's just it's morphed into a beautiful friendship over the years.

Speaker 1 (01:08:13):
Well, who wanted the divorce?

Speaker 2 (01:08:17):
You know, some scabs are better left unpicked at up.

Speaker 1 (01:08:23):
Okay, Well, let's just put it this way. You're great
friends now you were married before? Were you always great friends?
Or where there were some bumps in the road before
you became great friends?

Speaker 2 (01:08:40):
I like any good friendship. We've had some bumps in
the road. We just chose not to dwell on them
longer than it took to put them away and move
on and forgive and forget.

Speaker 1 (01:08:54):
And what is your twenty one year old daughter up to?

Speaker 2 (01:09:00):
Whatever she decides is the correct answer. She's a very
smart young lady. And I mean she's got a brilliant mind.
She's got a wonderful discipline and a great disposition. She's
smart enough to do anything she puts her mind to,

(01:09:21):
and she knows that, and she's very selective about what
she will apply herself to, and when she does, there's
nothing stopping her. She goes to Sanford University. She's studying
physical therapy, and I'm sure that may change a couple
of more times before she graduates, but she's in her

(01:09:43):
third year right now?

Speaker 1 (01:09:45):
And did Aby ever find somebody new?

Speaker 2 (01:09:49):
Oh? Yeah, she got married probably four or five years ago.
I want to say it was during the lockdown with COVID.
And he's a good he's good to our daughter, and
he's great for Amy. So I like him a lot.
His name is Keith.

Speaker 1 (01:10:07):
Okay, So you move to Nashville because there's a job
with the sign company. You ultimately get into construction. We're
in this narrative. Do you say I want to make
music my career.

Speaker 2 (01:10:28):
I think the whole point of me coming to Nashville
was about making music my career. I guess I got
really serious in it, and it took me a while.
I had to I had to grow a business in
singing demos, and that started just about from the beginning too.

(01:10:52):
When I got to Nashville, I guess it was within
a couple of weeks. I had met a guy in
one of the bars down on Lower Broad UH named
Greg Perkins. And Greg was a fiddle and steel player. Uh.
He played with Tammy Wyett and some other ones. But
he he had asked me to come down to his studio,

(01:11:14):
which is in the old r c A building on
Music Row, and uh, and sing some demos. And so
the first thing, the thing I ever sang, uh, that
was recorded, was in that building. And that's that's where
my studio is today. His his studio was on the
first floor. Mine's mine's on the third floor. Oh but

(01:11:39):
I in one way or another, I've been making music
in that building ever since I got to town.

Speaker 1 (01:11:45):
Okay, so you meet Perkins and he says, come sing
on the demos. What happens after that.

Speaker 2 (01:11:56):
Well, I met some other folks, and you know, once
they start passing around these songs trying to get somebody
to cut these songs, your voice is going around with them.
One of the first things he had me do was
a duet and with a singer I didn't know at

(01:12:16):
the time. Again, I'm new to town. Everybody's new to me. Well,
this gal comes in and she's about twelve months pregnant
and she, I mean, you know, that turkey button was
just looked like it had popped three weeks ago. She
was very pregnant, about to give birth to this baby.
And walked in there, and I mean, within twenty minutes

(01:12:38):
had just delivered one of the best vocals I've ever heard.
I knew people could sing like that. And she walked
out and he explained to me, he said, that's Gretchen Wilson.
You're gonna be hearing that name, and boy did everybody
hear that name. After that, she was something else.

Speaker 1 (01:12:56):
So that was before her redneck woman hit.

Speaker 2 (01:13:00):
Yes, sir, and she she pretty much taught me what
it was like to walk in a studio and deliver
a vocal performance. You know, you could lollygag around in
there for three hours and get something that sounds like crap,
or you can you can walk in there and just
pour the coals to it and be done in ten
minutes and you make a make a good sized check.

Speaker 1 (01:13:22):
So, so what is the trick?

Speaker 2 (01:13:27):
Open up? Don't don't be so reserved with it. Don't
be in there humming around trying to figure out you know,
you got to go in there with everything you got,
let that personality come open, and then try to reel
that back in if it's too much. But uh, that's
what that's what I learned from watching her do it.

Speaker 1 (01:13:48):
Okay, you're selling point for these demos, Perkins or somebody else.
Immediately realized you had a signature, very unique and great voices.
That what made it happen.

Speaker 2 (01:14:02):
I would say, it's what God it started, you know,
But once people start hearing your voice, after that, it's
like that, it's how many times do they hear your voice?
If every time they hear a song and they go,
who in the hell is that singing? And it's your
name that comes out, they go, man, that guy, and

(01:14:23):
they start marking your name. And so I guess over
the course of a few years, I must have sang
a couple of thousand demos, and I became that guy
that everybody recognized my voice even if we'd never met.

Speaker 1 (01:14:42):
And at the time, will you pling out it all?
Or its all like recording?

Speaker 2 (01:14:48):
I was always playing out in the bars if I could,
and I was also doing writer shows. Anytime I could
get out in front of a crowd, I was, I
was going to I played a writer's round one night.
A buddy of mine that was he actually produced a
record on me, Dave Brainer invited me to do this

(01:15:12):
writer's round around two thousand and one, and I remember
that because it was about a week after nine eleven,
and uh, I went and played this writer's round and
on the other end of the round from me was
Randy Hardison. Randy was a studio drummer and a hell

(01:15:32):
of a songwriter. And I learned that that night, when
when every song that I did followed one that you
know that Randy sang, I learned that my songs suck
that you know, he had these these top level songs
down there and and and perfect delivery, and uh, I

(01:15:55):
realized all I was doing was singing down here. When
we got done with that round, he and I traded
numbers and he's He's the one that got me to
Buddy Cannon. He's the one that introduced me to Buddy
and Noroh and Buddy and I have been friends ever since.

Speaker 1 (01:16:15):
Okay, so you know you ultimately had a couple of
huge hits like Hockey Talk Badonka Donk. When did you
start writing songs that were circulated and how did that
happen as supposed to just singing on demos.

Speaker 2 (01:16:34):
I was already working on an album in two thousand
and one and with with Dave, which we released it
on my own and uh May of two thousand and two,
so that that would have been the first stuff that
I put out there. I put it out. It was
a record called They Called Me Country and even at

(01:17:00):
the same time then I'm still singing demos and singing
singing songs for everybody else as a songwriter. That that
would have been the first stuff. Uh, but donka don't
came later. And this this was after meeting a bunch
of studio musicians. You know, Randy Hardison, he got killed

(01:17:24):
probably with I don't know man, six months after I
met him. We were talking about doing a record together
and and you know, writing together and all this kind
of thing, but we didn't even have enough time to
get anything on the calendar. Really yeah, and uh, and

(01:17:44):
he was well, I say, murdered, even though them guys
got off from from it, but they still killed my friend.
But through him, I got to meet a bunch of
other studio musicians and I kind of learned by that

(01:18:07):
time the ropes of the demo business. So I started
hanging out with other writers that had publishing deals and
was starting to kind of I had booked my first
session that em I was helping me with, and at

(01:18:29):
the time I wasn't even signed to em I, but
they were willing to pay for a session or two
on good faith. And I had written this great song
the night before and I couldn't wait to get into
the studio the next day because it was my first
tracking session on these new demos. Well, I was gonna

(01:18:51):
bump the donk a donk off of that session, but
I'd been out drinking the night before. I think I
was playing that new song for Luke Bryan hanging out
in the car of the parking lot in front of
tin roof, and uh whatever whatever happened next. I remember
I was late to the session by about ten minutes

(01:19:12):
or so, and when I walked in, the band was
already playing Badonka dont I thought, was it too late
for that? I guess.

Speaker 1 (01:19:24):
So you were hanging with Luke Bryant before he had
a deal.

Speaker 2 (01:19:30):
Yeah, yeah, we were. We were all kind of yeah,
just good friends back then. You know, there was a
there was a group of us that hung out and
the bars together, and we all knew each other from
the writers rounds and from the from the various things
that we were all getting into. Yeah, Randy uh Howser

(01:19:58):
is a good friend of mine. Jared Nehman, Dallas Davidson,
Rob Hatch, we were all friends back then and supported
each other. It was wasn't a competitive thing, you know,
like you're trying to get somebody else's gig or nothing
like that. If I find out these guys are playing somewhere,

(01:20:21):
I'm gonna go hang out and support, just be there
for them, you know. Plus it's good music.

Speaker 1 (01:20:34):
The people who had success of a grander scale, like
Luke Bryan. Did you see that in advance? Were you surprised?

Speaker 2 (01:20:46):
Oh? I wasn't surprised, but nobody. You couldn't predict that
stuff back then. You know, I couldn't look over that
group of friends and decided in advance who was gonna
hit one over the wall. And you know, I knew
every one of them was capable, and still are. You

(01:21:07):
never know what to expect out of those guys.

Speaker 1 (01:21:09):
Okay, so the first album, m I paid for it.

Speaker 2 (01:21:16):
No, I paid for the first one. Actually, I'd have
to correct myself on that. Mister Garner paid for the
first one, John Garner. I paid him back though, if
that counts.

Speaker 1 (01:21:30):
Do you remember how much it was?

Speaker 2 (01:21:36):
If I had to guess, I'd say it was probably
about thirty thousand dollars something like that.

Speaker 1 (01:21:41):
Okay, you cut the album, what happens after you put
it out?

Speaker 2 (01:21:52):
You can almost hear yourself going broke. It's a it's
the sound of going broke. You play in your own album,
in your own truck, going up and down the road.
It's not like any kind of there's an immediate change,
and suddenly I'm, you know, hearing the sounds of registers

(01:22:16):
ring in the background. I think I printed two thousand
copies of that album, and we probably sold half of them,
and I gave a bunch of them away to the
USO at one point. And I still get a lot
of those guys and gals and bring me their copy

(01:22:38):
to sign that they got when they were overseas. Of
course I see them still. They people put them on
eBay and sell them.

Speaker 1 (01:22:50):
So did the first album? Did it lead to something?
Did it cause a certain success?

Speaker 2 (01:23:00):
I guess you have to look at it like it
was a business card, and it made its way around
to a lot of offices, and later on a lot
of good opportunity came from that. People who wouldn't have
taken a meeting with me otherwise, but because they had
this CD sitting on their desk, you know, they had
something that was at least somewhat representative of what I

(01:23:23):
can do. I wrote just about every song on there
with the exception of a couple of cover songs, and yeah,
it definitely opened a lot of doors. E AM. I
paid for the first demo sessions that I did after that,

(01:23:45):
and they helped me a lot kind of getting my
feed in the door of the labels. Back back in
that day before it was before social media, and so
the only kind of attention you would ever get would
have been word of mouth in town. And it helped
me tremendously to have the biggest publisher in town open

(01:24:07):
all these doors and start pitching my songs to A
and R representatives at labels. That's how I met Brian Wright.
Brian was an an R rep for Universal of Mercury
and MCA, and he's ultimately the guy that after a

(01:24:30):
my attempt with BNA Records failed, I wrote in Color
and a bunch of other songs, went and recorded an
album called That Lonesome Song. And it was Brian Wright
that brought me into Mercury Records in two thousand and eight.

Speaker 1 (01:24:50):
Okay, but you did make a record for BNA.

Speaker 2 (01:24:55):
Yep, it's called The Dollar And how did.

Speaker 1 (01:24:58):
That come to happen? What happened in the week of
that coming out?

Speaker 2 (01:25:07):
Well, I guess the record would be an A. At
the time, I kind of had a buzz going around
town and there were some opportunity at some labels, but
Joe Gilani was the first one to make me an
offer and and put a record deal together, and I

(01:25:34):
took the opportunity. It seemed like a It seemed like
a great deal to me at the time. And you know,
if I had it to do over again, I'd still
do it. I probably would have done some things different,
but I got to put out a a Buddy Cannon record,

(01:25:56):
so I know it's a good record. It sounds great.
Some of the songs on there I probably would not
cut if I had it to do over. But it
ain't a bad record.

Speaker 1 (01:26:09):
So how is it in with BNA such as you
get on Mercury.

Speaker 2 (01:26:17):
Oh, I was kind of a problem child for Joe,
and I've apologized to him since, so I could. I
think it's all right to tell the story, But uh,
I don't know. Like like you said about the Marine Corps,

(01:26:40):
that discipline only goes so far with me. And I
guess when I got my opportunity with bn A, I
was done with people telling me what to do and
what time to do it, and uh, it just kind
of it didn't set well with me, So I stayed
drunk a lot of the time. Plus I was dealing

(01:27:00):
with a divorce and my life was changing in all
kinds of ways, and a lot of it wasn't real good.
And so that that deal lasted as long as it
took to to try and push a single or two
at country radio and country radio where that didn't embrace

(01:27:21):
me at all. They I must have repelled them in
a lot of different ways.

Speaker 1 (01:27:28):
Okay, we're in this scenario. Do you give up your
d job.

Speaker 2 (01:27:34):
That would have been before that BNA record?

Speaker 1 (01:27:39):
So what happens first Mercury is interested or BNA says
we don't want to work with you anymore.

Speaker 2 (01:27:49):
Well, Mercury didn't come until after BNA. But even when
I did that BNA deal, after Joe had made me
the offer, I still call Brian right and told him, man,
just bring me an offer.

Speaker 1 (01:28:03):
Well.

Speaker 2 (01:28:03):
The reason I couldn't get an offer from Mercury at
the time was because James Stroud had joined Lewis at
Mercury and he had had a policy that he was
going to be producing any new artists that were signed
under the umbrella for that duration of his tenure there. Well,

(01:28:24):
I already had a relationship with Buddy Cannon, and I
was determined he was going to be the guy producing
my record and I didn't Uh, I didn't see the
need and it would have felt like a betrayal to
me and I couldn't do that.

Speaker 1 (01:28:44):
Okay, So how did you get involved in writing give
it Away? And Ladies Love Country Boys?

Speaker 2 (01:28:56):
Well, ladies love country boys? It was uh, kind of
a nod to Ladies love Outlaws. That's been so long ago,
I can't hardly remember.

Speaker 1 (01:29:12):
I remember.

Speaker 2 (01:29:17):
Very little. I can't e I can't even remember writing
that song though, that's been a quite a while back. Now,
what other one did you ask me about?

Speaker 1 (01:29:32):
Give it Away?

Speaker 2 (01:29:33):
I would give it away? Well, give it Away was
kind of was written after the BNA deal, and that
was my first time to write. I think it was
my first time to write with Whispering Bill Anderson. Buddy
had called me in and said, hey, you need to
meet Bill. So we came in to write, and I

(01:29:58):
had written that idea, but I didn't expand on it
even in my notes. And so when I told them
the idea, they asked me to explain it, and I said, well,
you know, sort of like she was storming through the
house that day and I could tell she was leaving,
but I thought, all she'll be back. And she turned

(01:30:20):
around and turn her pointing at the walls and all
this stuff, and said, you see that, just give it away.
Well I spit it out and something just like that,
and Bill said, I love everything you just said. How
do we incorporate that? That might be your whole first verse?

Speaker 1 (01:30:38):
Had?

Speaker 2 (01:30:38):
I had to back up the tape and play it
just to find out what all I had said, and
I wrote it down the way that it came out.
She was storming through the house that day and I
could tell she was leaving, but I thought, all hell,
she'll be back. So that I remember we were sitting
there talking about putting the mellow to all those words,

(01:31:03):
and Buddy said, why don't you just let it be
a recitation? And I remember hearing Bill Anderson go a
recitation that's brilliant. The I learned a lot right with

(01:31:23):
those two guys. You know, Bill Anderson, he is the
consummate Nashville songwriter. He's had a hit in every generation,
in every decade since well before I was born and
just one of the greatest people you could meet, one
of the greatest songwriters ever.

Speaker 1 (01:31:47):
So how long after you've that afternoon did he get
to George Street and it came out?

Speaker 2 (01:31:58):
It didn't happen the afternoon wrote it. We put together
a work tape and and I mean, I don't know
how many times I even had that song demos over
the years. I'd say within a couple of months. Though.
My manager at the time was IRV Woolsey, and IRV

(01:32:20):
was also George Strait's manager. And I remember I was
in Myrtle Beach. I was working on one of the
shows that I had booked, and I got a call
from IRV and he said, George just cut your song.
They were down in the shrimp boat in Key West,

(01:32:41):
Jimmy Buffett Shrimp Boat Studio, and IRV told me, he said,
you know, George just cut your song. Of course I'm
doing double backflips on the other end of the line
and I had to ask you, but I said, what
what song are you talking about? They said, give it away?
And I thought, man, I would have never thought George

(01:33:02):
Strait would cut that, but I'm glad he did.

Speaker 1 (01:33:07):
Okay, what about what it became a huge hit. He
went to number one.

Speaker 2 (01:33:16):
It felt in a lot of ways like redemption. It
felt like I think I described it in a song.
It felt like I'd been forgiven for all my wrongs.
And it really put me back in the gear of

(01:33:39):
writing songs and looking to record again. It's like George
decided country music wasn't done with me just yet.

Speaker 1 (01:33:50):
Okay, you make a deal with Mercury and Luke Lewis
and you make an album and Dave Cobb is the producer.
Dave Cobb is one of the hottest guys in Nashville
today and has been for like a decade at this point.
But when you were working with him, it was at
the very beginning. How'd you get involved with Deve Cobb?

Speaker 2 (01:34:14):
Well before Dave, I had already finished that album. I
had already written everything I was gonna put on it
and recorded everything I was gonna put on it. We
were in the studio working on the mixes, and Shooter
had introduced me to Dave before that, and Shooter Jennings
and Shooter keeps telling me, and I mean now he's

(01:34:37):
calling me every other day going, hey, you got to
come work with Dave and I said, well, Shooter, I've
already I'm already done with this record. You got to
give me some time to get this thing. But he said,
you don't need to release that record until you come
out here and meet Dave. I said, all right, Well,

(01:34:58):
I had this promotional thing I had to go to
LA for for this show called Nashville and not the
one that everybody got crazy about later on, but this
was the preliminary version of Nashville. When they first told

(01:35:19):
me about it, they said it was a documentary. Later
on I heard the word docu soap, and it turns
out this was what is it they call it when
reality TV. This was before they ever had coined the

(01:35:41):
phrase reality TV. This would have been one of the
first kind of kind of things like that. And I
had to go out there to promote that show. So
I told Dave. I said, while I'm out there, let's
take a few days and get in the studio. I'll
bring all the songs that I've got. We could even
write some out there, and if it doesn't work, you're

(01:36:02):
eating the cost of this. And I really got to
love Dave Cobb getting in the studio working with the
band he had out there those guys were just starving
for some good country music, and I happened to have

(01:36:23):
a bucket full of it. We sat down and had
the probably one of the best three day sessions I've
ever been through in my life. It was just one
song after another, and when I got done, I realized
I now had a perfect conundrum. I've got to figure
out what to do with all these songs. And so
I got back to Nashville and t W and I

(01:36:44):
sat there in the control room. We realized, Man, we're
gonna we need to take a couple of these songs
and put them on this record before we put it out. So, yeah,
Dave Cobb helped me help me produce some of the
that Lonesome Song, and then after that we put out
that double album, The Guitar Song, which was a lot

(01:37:06):
of those Dave Cobb produced songs on there. And yeah,
he was a fine producer, but not in this way
where like he's dominating the sessions and that sort of thing.
David just has this finely tuned ear for guitar sounds.
If I told him I really want to sound on

(01:37:29):
this like Leonyard Skinnard in the seventies, he's going to
know exactly what amp, exactly what guitar, and not just
know what they are. He's got them hanging on his
wall and go over there and pick up a nineteen
fifty whatever, Les Paul, and here's a Princeton amp that
you play that through. And a brilliant idea guy and

(01:37:56):
a strategist in the studio. He doesn't waste time and
he doesn't let it all slip away. He can really
get to the heart of something really quick. He's a
truly talented human band. So I stole Dave's band and
took him on the road.

Speaker 1 (01:38:15):
You made him a full time producer.

Speaker 2 (01:38:18):
No, I literally stole his band. I took his drummer
and the guitar player Raddy Cope, and I put him
in my traveling band and took him on the road.
And they've had to move to Nashville to steal them back.

Speaker 1 (01:38:33):
So you know, on that record and on the new record,
another producer credited is the Kent Hardly Plea Boys, And
obviously that's a joke. Knt Hardley Plea Boys, is that
just basically.

Speaker 2 (01:38:47):
You No, No, that's my old demo band. Those are
the guys I used to make a living with We
were kind of we were just a squad of hooligans
that figured out a niche where we could make a living,
get the bills paid. All we were doing were cutting

(01:39:07):
demos that for songs that other songwriters had written. You know,
we'd get in there and chart them up, get a lyric,
put them all together, tw do all the mixes, and
we ran pretty much. It was like a cycle. You know,
we could we could have all that that stuff done,

(01:39:29):
probably knock out an album in four days, you know,
track it one day to a couple of days, vocals
and mixes, and have it turned in after that, you know,
better than some people's albums.

Speaker 1 (01:39:43):
And you're still working with those guys today on your
new album.

Speaker 2 (01:39:48):
Well, work is a strong word for it.

Speaker 1 (01:39:50):
But yeah, it's a strong word because you don't consider
playing music work or there is something about the guys.
What do you mean.

Speaker 2 (01:40:01):
It ain't work. We get together and hang around and
somebody will play a work tape and next thing you know,
we got the headphones on and we're laying it down.
That ain't work. That's just loving what you do.

Speaker 1 (01:40:20):
Okay? On that album in color is on that did
you realize that would have as much of an impact
as it did.

Speaker 2 (01:40:31):
No and color came around after a BMI award show.
So let me back up completely and tell you I'm color.

Speaker 1 (01:40:46):
Blind, right, Well you said that. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:40:52):
So they were playing some photos on the back wall
of the BMI that night, and I really didn't gather
until I saw Lee Thomas Miller. I ran into him
on a sidewalk out in front of B of My

(01:41:14):
a few days after that, and he was telling me
about those pictures. He said, did you see at the
b of MY Awards the other night those old black
and white pictures they were playing on the wall? And
I did. I was sitting there looking at him, but
it didn't occur to me that they were black and white.
And he said, I know what I see when I

(01:41:36):
look at those pictures. I see Bill Anderson and a
couple of random people. But I wonder what Bill Anderson
sees when he looks at those pictures. Well, as soon
as he started talking about black and white, my brain's
over here on autopilot. And I remember growing up hearing
about the Wizard of Oz when they had corrected the

(01:42:01):
color and put it in code of color. And the
big deal at the time was that It was an
irreversible procedure that they did on the original tape, and
so there was no going back and reverting back to
the original black and white version of it. Once they
did this, and I remember the big slogan was where's

(01:42:23):
the diva? I see it in color? So that's hanging
around in the back of my mind. And when he
got done telling me, you know, what does Bill Anderson see?
I said, yeah, you should have seen it in color. Huh. Well,
we laughed and had that Dewey Cox moment where we're
gazing off into the wilderness trying to see if some

(01:42:47):
ideas come. But we wrote down a writing day to
get together and write that idea. In the morning we
got together, we were still poor in the coffee, and
James Otto called me and said his co writers had
canceled on him that day. I said, well, me and

(01:43:07):
Lee are about to sit down and write this song
and it ought to be a pretty easy rite. Why
don't you come over here and join us. So when
we got done with the song, we realized we had
put a little bit of each of our grandfathers in
that song. And I didn't really realize even then that

(01:43:28):
we had written a song that was based on an
entire generation. It was really based on our personal experiences,
and the experience is just sitting there looking through an
old photo album where everything's in black and white. Ours
is the first generation that saw those old black and

(01:43:51):
white pictures turn into color and saw color pictures turn
into digital. So I guess that's where the idea impacts.

Speaker 1 (01:44:06):
Okay, stopping for a second, did you do a lot
of those writing sessions still do? Okay? And the record
was a huge critical success in commercial success, how did
that feel?

Speaker 2 (01:44:28):
Everything got busy, I mean busier than you can ever imagine,
Like you can't keep a calendar. You have to have
somebody nearby who has the calendar, You have to have
somebody else do the drive, and you got to have
somebody else that can get us past security in these

(01:44:49):
places because you're in a hurry. You know, you got
a lot of things to do and very little time
in the day to get them all done. So that
was the first impact that I remember it having. I
remember it was the first time I had to have
somebody whose whole job it was to buy clothes for
me because of all the different events we were doing

(01:45:12):
that year.

Speaker 1 (01:45:15):
So after that cycle ends. To what degree did you
have pressure from Mercury to have another hit.

Speaker 2 (01:45:26):
I don't know that there was ever any real pressure.
I know that they had a high cost of living
that they sent out the country radio and it was
immediately rejected, And there was probably some other songs that
we sent out there, and if there was a pressure,
it was one that they didn't pass on to me.

(01:45:46):
But over time I kind of recognized that country radio
was never going to play my songs and it seemed
like a big waste of financial resources to keep going
around the country and asking them to. You know, every
time you go out there and work a song at
these radio stations, you're spending a lot of money to

(01:46:07):
get around there to visit them. Well, I had already
done by this time several times over and running up
huge bills with these record labels wasn't what I intended
to keep doing, especially if it was never going to
pay off. So I kind of retired from from pitching
songs to country radio. And that would have been around

(01:46:29):
eight or nine.

Speaker 1 (01:46:30):
Really, So how did it end with Mercury.

Speaker 2 (01:46:36):
Well, it ended when Luke Lewis retired, That's what I figured,
and I just really didn't want to make another record
after that. You know, I was by twenty ten, I'd
already had that concussion, and Luke retired. They brought in
Mike Dungan, who was nice enough to let me out

(01:46:58):
of my deal. But when when Mike and I first met,
I I told him my heart just wasn't in it anymore,
and uh, it was it was time for me to
step aside. And uh, he was nice enough he let
me out of my deal. And I think it was
maybe two weeks later they had already signed Chris Stapleton,

(01:47:21):
and hey, man, I couldn't be more proud. I was like,
they nailed it. They nailed it. They got the best
damson singer in town.

Speaker 1 (01:47:30):
Had you known Chris before?

Speaker 2 (01:47:33):
I didn't know him. I knew his wife, Morgan. Uh.
We were both demo singers together, and she was also
on B and A the same time that I was,
and uh, she and I did some demos together back
in the day. I knew of Chris because he was
one of those voices that every time I got stunned

(01:47:55):
listening to a song and asked, who is that? My God,
that's Chris Stapleton. Jesus. He was one of those guys.
It was just every time I heard his voice, it
was distinct, it was as real and just as man.
It was so good still is he's great.

Speaker 1 (01:48:14):
So it ends with Mercury. You've had the concussion. Do
you think you're never going to make another record? Are
you depressed? I mean, what's your state of mind? Then?

Speaker 2 (01:48:36):
No. I was absolutely convinced I had made my last record.
I just knew it. I didn't have it in my
I wasn't inspired anymore. You know. I'd made all of
these records or recorded all of these songs, and I
had yet to have any kind of financial success in

(01:48:59):
the and the record business. In fact, somebody else owned
my publishing and somebody else owned my masters, and it
was one of those things. It was like I didn't
get anything out of it. You know, radio never even
played my songs. I got some trophies, but hell, who
wants that, you know? So it just didn't do me

(01:49:21):
any good. And I was really done with it all,
to be honest, and I just didn't have a reason
to make another to record another session. I didn't want
to do it. And I still had friends that would
hate come sing on the song with me. And you know,

(01:49:43):
do stuff like that here and there, and I guess
I had enough of that. Where I was still appearing
on fifteen albums a year, there were just everybody else's records,
and you know, I was content with that for the
longest time. It wasn't really until Toby Keith passed away

(01:50:05):
that I kind of woke up and recognized that's the
end of his contribution to country music. That's it. Whatever
he's recorded up to this date is all we're getting.
So I started paying attention to my own and realizing
I'm nowhere near done. I got a lot of work
to do. I got a lot of music I got

(01:50:27):
to put out just to even get caught up. So
that's what kind of got me back in the studio.

Speaker 1 (01:50:35):
Okay, but in that interim, you were continuing to work live. Yeah,
But were your numbers going down because you had no
record in the marketplace.

Speaker 2 (01:50:51):
I don't think so. I think it was quite the opposite.
Brian Wright tells me all the time that those records
are still type performing records at their label. The thing
that happens is after you, when you're not on a
major label, there's no more of the parties where they
celebrate you now have a gold record, or your gold

(01:51:14):
record's gone platinum, or now you've gone double platinum. And
it wasn't until I put out another record where they
are I aa uh, I think that's what it's called.
And they've certified. They refreshed all their numbers one day
and I got to see what some of these albums

(01:51:35):
had actually done. And it's kind of nice.

Speaker 1 (01:51:39):
And you know, you rent up a lot of costs
going to radio whatever. Do you make any money off
the records?

Speaker 2 (01:51:47):
I suppose I've made a nickel or two. Now I
don't know what all's recouped and what happened recouped. I
think that's that's something for the lawyers and the CPAs
to sort out.

Speaker 1 (01:51:58):
So how did you end up making a new record
with Warner.

Speaker 2 (01:52:05):
It started with Brian Wright again when he and Stephanie
left Mercury. His wife Stephanie that they left Mercury and
I told him, I said, well, I guess we're making
another record. He didn't have anything, He didn't have anything
else to do, and I really didn't either. But at

(01:52:27):
the same time, Chris Lacy, Chris and I pretty much
started our careers running the same time, and We've been
friends for an awful long time. Well over the years,
she moved up through the ranks of a publishing and
got into the record business and ended up with Warner

(01:52:48):
and handed up in the in the driver's seat over there,
And she came to me one day and just says,
we're not done by a long shot. She says, I
don't want a record from you in hopes that we're
going to make a bunch of money off of you.

(01:53:10):
I just want you to get back to doing what
you were put on this earth to do, and get
you back to making country music records. And I don't
care what it takes. I'm here to help. And so
I didn't have a reason not to anymore. And I
just kind of I gave up on the whole idea

(01:53:33):
that I would never make another record. I abandoned that
whatsoever and just started from scratch and started back in
the writing rooms. And man, it took me forever to
figure out how to write songs again. You ought to
hear them first ones I wrote. They're absolute garbage. It's

(01:53:54):
like any kind of craft, the more you do it,
the better you get. Really had to get back in it,
and I mean with a lot of time invested in
writing with some of the greatest writers that I can
get in the room with, and Chris Stapleton was one

(01:54:15):
of those. He really helped light my pilot light again
and get me back to going.

Speaker 1 (01:54:24):
So how long to go did this process begin?

Speaker 2 (01:54:31):
I'm trying to figure it's twenty twenty five now. I
guess this would have been uh as far as the
record goes, probably two or three years now. As far
as the writing, Chris and I really started writing together,
I guess around twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen. We'd written some
songs together back back around nine twenty ten, but I

(01:54:57):
mean we really got to, you know, working together, around
eighteen or so.

Speaker 1 (01:55:04):
So the album's been out for a while, you can reflect,
what do you think about the experience having done it?

Speaker 2 (01:55:15):
I thank God every day that he put friends around
me that loved me enough to remind me what my
purpose is. It would have been easy for everybody just
to leave me alone and that would have been the
end of it. But I have all these people who

(01:55:36):
love me in my life enough to make me get
up and do it again. That wouldn't leave me just
sitting there.

Speaker 1 (01:55:46):
And now that the project has finished is Warner, and
everybody's still excited as excited about moving forward.

Speaker 2 (01:55:56):
I hope so I have an answer. I haven't checked
the numbers lately, but I don't I doubt that even
if it didn't perform well that they would give up
on me. They seemed like such a great team of
people over there, and you know, I really enjoy making
records with them, and I really never thought i'd enjoy

(01:56:19):
that aspect of working with a label. I always kind
of looked at the at the labels and thought, man,
I can't do nothing to make them happy. Every song
I wrote was to this or to that, or too
long or too short, or too country and not country enough.

Speaker 1 (01:56:44):
So how did you get sober?

Speaker 2 (01:56:49):
Well, that's a long story too. I got tired of
waking up surprised I would. I was a heavy drinker
and I wasn't a social drinker. It wasn't like I
was gonna have two or three after work and then

(01:57:12):
go home if I If I had one, I had
just decided how the rest of the evening was gonna go.
So drinking wasn't one of those things that I It's
not like I didn't have the ability to stop. I
didn't ever, just said that I didn't have a reason

(01:57:33):
to see if I had the ability. I just really
liked a drink, and I found out from years of
therapy later that it was probably masking some other kind
of pain or hiding something else behind it. I quit
drinking in twenty eleven. I still taste it when I

(01:57:58):
burt all these years later, seems like it's still fresh
on my mind. I don't think I'll live long enough
to forget what Jack Daniels tastes like. I quit smoking
pot probably around twenty fifteen, and I didn't smoke for

(01:58:25):
the longest time, And I also didn't write anything for
the longest time, and didn't record anything that didn't have
any passion for most of it for the longest time.
And for the most part, I still don't smoke. But
every now and then I may have one when I'm

(01:58:45):
writing a song or something like that, if I felt
like I needed to lift an inhibition or something. And
what it is it is like you sit down to
write and you get this washing negativity over you. It's
it's the analytical part of my brain that I can't

(01:59:06):
seem to get past. It's it's a bunch of cluttered
up noise, and it stops you from being as creative
as you should be.

Speaker 1 (01:59:17):
What were the triggers to stop drinking and to stop
smoking pot?

Speaker 2 (01:59:28):
The main trigger to stop drinking drinking would have been
my daughter. She was at the time seven years old,
and was you know, you're being an example one way
or the other, and up until that point in her life,
I'd been a bad example and I was adamant about

(01:59:51):
correcting that. So she she was a driving factor and
quitting drinking. Pott was not really something I felt like
I ever had any kind of issue with. I was
always kind of, you know, take it or leave it.

(02:00:12):
As far as POT was, I never saw the harm
in it.

Speaker 1 (02:00:18):
Going back to drinking, when you stop drinking, you have
to change your lifestyle because you're not going to the
bar and your friends always say, oh, let's go out
for a drink. What's wrong with you? How did you
actually stop drinking? And how hard was the transition?

Speaker 2 (02:00:38):
Well, you're gonna have to change a lot of things,
and that is one of the things I had to
change was my entire social life was happening in these bars,
and it wasn't much of a life to begin with.
If I'm being one hundred percent honest. People tell you
had a good time, but if you don't remember having

(02:00:59):
a good time, did you really have a good time?
So it wasn't doing me much good to begin with,
and it was starting to damage my relationships beyond repair.
And it was not something that I had to have
a whole lot of coersion to make a decision that

(02:01:20):
this wasn't doing me a lot of good. You know,
I don't. If you know, there's people out there who
can drink and it doesn't do anything at all. There's
other people who when they drink, their life starts falling apart.
And those people know what I'm talking about. When you
drink and it starts impacting your relationships with people you

(02:01:42):
love and people who love you, it's time to examine,
and it's probably time to pull up and give it
a break.

Speaker 1 (02:01:52):
So did you go to rehib did you go to AA?
Did you just cool turkey?

Speaker 2 (02:02:00):
I'm a very stubborn man, and all I had to
do was rewire the drinking into that part of my
mind that makes me upset. And once I had it
wired in there correctly, it was one of those things
that I knew I didn't need any more help to

(02:02:20):
deal with I'd already dealt with it. I realized that
that sort of thing doesn't work for a lot of people,
and so I don't advocate for that style. But if
I tell you I'm going to do something, you can
take it to the bank. And if I tell you
I'm not gonna do something, there's nothing you can do

(02:02:41):
that'll make me even reconsider my position on it.

Speaker 1 (02:02:46):
Okay, something you said at the top was you're an
angry guy. Now, needless to say your regular demeanor in
talking that doesn't come cross. But tell me more about
your anger.

Speaker 2 (02:03:07):
I wish I knew more about it. It's it's not
there always, And I don't know that I would describe
myself overall as angry. I think I would describe myself
as it was more like high blood pressure. It was
like being being always at the at the brink of stress.

(02:03:35):
You know, when your stress is at a perfect ten
and any little thing can tip you over the edge.
And I think that's what the concussion had done to me.
It it had raised my stress level to a permanent level.
Drinking didn't bring it back down anymore like it used to.

(02:03:56):
Nothing did, and that that's the part that that sent
me to the brain state technology and leke artists and
all those guys to start getting I guess it's called
brain balancing.

Speaker 1 (02:04:17):
I'm not sure. But the anger do you feel separate
from other people in society and do things frustrate you?
Is it that kind of anger? Or you're out with
some people and somebody is just talking and you're saying, men,
they just can't handle this anymore.

Speaker 2 (02:04:43):
No, it's not a It was more personal things, you know.
It was more things that I had to deal with.
I guess over time. I think the root word that
I've been learning in the Bible here lately is forgiveness,

(02:05:03):
And what does that really mean? To receive forgiveness means
you have to admit having wronged somebody and you received
the forgiveness as a gift, but you first have to
repent and you have to do your best to make

(02:05:25):
the thing right. And it's not a skill that a
whole lot of people possess today. People don't like to
admit they've been wrong. They don't like to admit they've
done wrong or said something wrong, or you know, maybe
betrayed a friendship, behaved in some way that wasn't appropriate

(02:05:47):
or very friendly, and we don't like to be called
out on our bullshit, and I guess that's coming and going.
So what I'm learning is we're supposed to forgive as

(02:06:08):
we're forgiven, and it's hard. It's hard to forgive, just outright,
especially to forgive somebody who's never issued an apology for
what they did. It's hard, but it's not impossible. And
it was a lot of that kind of pin up

(02:06:28):
frustration that I just carried with me for so many
years and allowed it to eat me up from the inside.
You know that holding a grudge poisons the vessel in
which it's kept. That's what I was. I was a
poisoned vessel for a while. It gets better every day.

Speaker 1 (02:06:53):
Well, that's good to hear, and I think, on that
note of insight, we're going to leave it at that. Jamie,
been fascinating speaking with you. I want to thank you
for taking this time with my audience.

Speaker 2 (02:07:12):
You wrote such a wonderful column about my show out
in Los Angeles one year, and I want you to
know you put a smile on my face and made
my heart beat a little bit prouder. And I appreciate
all of the words of encouragement I've gotten from you,
Bob over the years. Thank you.

Speaker 1 (02:07:32):
Well, you know, I remember it was at the Wilter,
and I remember exactly where I was standing. I was
a big fan and it was a great show, and
it's great to finally pluck your feast to face.

Speaker 2 (02:07:47):
Thank you so much that it was the biggest pat
on the back for me. It meant so much to
me and I still wear that like a badge of honor.
Thank you.

Speaker 1 (02:07:57):
While you're leaving me speechless with a smile, my thieves
and I think we're going to leave it at that
till next time. This is Bob leftstis