In this episode of the podcast, we sit down with singer-songwriter, songwriter, guitarist, and all-around great guy, Ryan Higa. We talk about life in Los Angeles, guitar making, and what it's like to be a musician in the big city. We also talk about Ryan's new song, "When I Drive My Bronco," and how he got into the guitar making game. We hope you enjoy this episode, and don't forget to subscribe on your favorite streaming platform so you don't miss out on the next episode! If you like the show, please HIT SUBSCRIBE and leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts! The opinions stated here are our own, not those of our companies, and are not related to any of the companies mentioned in the show. We do not own any of these products mentioned in this episode. Thank you so much for your support and support of this podcast, it means a lot to us and we'll keep bringing you quality interviews like this into the future episodes! XOXOXO. Cheers! -Jon Sorrentino Jon & Matt - Timestamps: 5:00 - What's your favorite guitar? 6:30 - What is your favorite instrument you've ever built? 7:15 - How do you build? 8:00 9:20 - What do you like about a guitar you've built or made? 10:00- What are you looking forward to making? 11:40 - What guitar do you want to make? 12:30 15:40 16: What guitar you're going to build next? 17: What kind of guitar you like? 18:00 What instrument would you like to hear me make the most of your next project? 19:30- What instrument you're most excited about? 21:15 22:00 | What instrument do you need? 26:40 | How much money do you have? 27: What instrument are you working on? 28:30 | Can I build an acoustic guitar I like to play? 29:10: How do I build a better one? 30: What do I need to make an acoustic? 32:00 / 33:00 & 35:00 // 36:00 + 35:10 36:30 // 35:20
00:00:20.000When I moved to Colorado for just a few months and then came back here, it was instantaneous, like the recognition of what effect it has on me.
00:03:25.000And maybe even build an instrument that is more comfortable to play because you're building to the exact specifics that maybe somebody doesn't mass manufacture.
00:03:34.000Well, I guess if you know guitars as well as you know them and you've been around them your whole life, that totally makes sense.
00:03:48.000So the rest of it is just electronics and the pickups have a lot.
00:03:51.000And anything outside of that is just your fingers and who's actually holding the thing.
00:03:55.000But to build one is not that complicated.
00:03:57.000No, Les Paul or a Martin acoustic guitar, that's literally like a hand-shaped piece of work that has to be made from start to finish, whereas the guitars I'm talking about building, you're just assembling.
00:06:51.000I don't know if it's discipline so much as...
00:06:55.000I think everybody that plays music and that really gets into it that heavily, it's an OCD. You have to have a level of spectrum or to sit and just do the same thing over and over repetitively 8-10 hours a day.
00:07:10.000Especially as a kid, when you're really learning, when it gets you and you hook into it, it's like this other thing that nobody else can be a part of.
00:09:03.000And also, I just don't think it's a healthy thing.
00:09:06.000I think travel on occasion is okay, but I think once you start getting into every weekend flying, I've heard of people doing that, and I'm like, you're beating your body up.
00:09:15.000There's no ifs, ands, or buts about it.
00:09:18.000Well, it's one of the best things about certainly my job and your job.
00:09:25.000You get to go out and perform and entertain, but since things sort of took off, For me, I realized very early on, I get paid to travel.
00:09:38.000We're out there doing what we love to do, but it's all the in-between and the beat down your body takes and being out of any kind of routine and away from your family.
00:10:04.000The travel, you know, it's a different kind of exhaustion you can't really articulate, I think.
00:10:09.000There's the travel, there's the sleeping, because usually you got to get, if you're doing every day too, are you bussing it or are you flying?
00:10:15.000We're on buses mostly, unless it's like, the logistics is just crazy, but you know, you still got to be there, so you might bus part of it, and then one night you're flying everybody, or a red hour the next morning, do that thing and then get back to the bus or meet up with the bus.
00:10:57.000But if I don't do that, if I don't do that every couple of days at least, I just feel worn out.
00:11:02.000I think it's also an endorphin imbalance.
00:11:06.000My buddy Bobby that plays organ, he works out like a madman.
00:11:10.000It's kind of insane you guys would get along.
00:11:13.000I think a lot of it is to balance out You know, just energy.
00:11:17.000Because every night we get two hours of cardio on stage and just massive adrenaline blast, especially when it really locks in and there's all this energy just slamming you in the face.
00:11:28.000And then you walk off stage and it takes like four or five hours to come down from that every night.
00:11:33.000And then so, you know, the next day now you're...
00:11:36.000Shit has to be off balance naturally, you know what I mean?
00:11:39.000Just like you just had this massive blast of all these chemicals that your brain's pumping out, endorphins, and now the next day you're just like waking up trying to figure out where to take a shit and get a cup of coffee and is there a shower today?
00:11:52.000And it gets weird when you do a bunch of them in a row, right?
00:11:56.000Like how often you wake up and stare at the ceiling not exactly remembering what town you're in.
00:13:27.000That's probably way better for you psychologically when you go on stage than if you're staying in some giant suite when you're walking around the suite and you get grapes on a plate.
00:13:38.000When you start out and you start going on, you play festivals or shows with your heroes and they're on buses before you are and you go on and you talk to these guys and you realize they live in this thing.
00:13:49.000They're institutionalized in the back of this bus and they never get off the bus.
00:15:15.000Because they're just spacing out because they're high.
00:15:18.000I think it should be legal just because I'm from Kentucky, and if they gave all those farmers and ex-coal industry employees an industry that would really thrive, since it grows extremely well in Kentucky, instead of soybeans and tobacco,
00:15:34.000those guys could actually generate an income.
00:15:41.000Mitch McConnell, or somebody, some really staunch right-wing guy in Kentucky came out and was even pushing for legislation towards at least the hemp industry, which would be incredible.
00:15:49.000Yeah, the hemp industry is a no-brainer.
00:15:51.000You can look at the tax numbers alone.
00:15:54.000Well, you know, we buy hemp for Onnit, and for the longest time, we'd have to buy it in Canada.
00:16:00.000Because you couldn't get it in the United States, because until recently it wasn't legal to grow.
00:16:05.000And so to get like the best stuff that has the highest protein content, we'd have to fucking ship it in from Canada.
00:18:18.000It was 1941. 1941. So in 1941, before it was illegal, so it was made illegal right around the time where alcohol prohibition had ended, and they needed something to go after.
00:18:30.000So then they started using the same guys to go after weed.
00:20:50.000She just had some health stuff, and it's like, you know, how do I... She's pretty old school.
00:20:58.000Knowing there's this thing out there that isn't anything that these doctors are going to offer her that's just going to make her feel awful or have to go through all of that.
00:21:08.000If someone will just give you comfort or ease nausea or make you want to eat food or those kind of things, why wouldn't you want someone you love and care about to have that?
00:21:16.000But then at the same time, you want to be the person trying to feed pot to your grandmother.
00:22:38.000Some lady had drifted completely in my lane.
00:22:40.000And I looked over at her, and I saw the back of her head, like, I was on her driver's side, I was on that side, looking over at her, and all I saw was the back of her head.
00:22:50.000She literally was looking at my car, and she was just looking at her phone, and working her thumb, and occasionally, like, looking up at the screen, or looking up at the windshield.
00:27:23.000It doesn't make any sense that you mean I guess it does because then people could arbitrarily Decide to remove a leader and put a leader back in and like you would just be able to vote and change your mind with the tide like constantly But that's one more reason why we shouldn't have one person.
00:27:40.000It's stupid should have First of all, we gotta overhaul the way we teach kids.
00:29:00.000Here's one that I think is interesting.
00:29:02.000Trump recently did something about steel, about bringing steel back to the United States and steel manufacturing back to the United States.
00:29:11.000But before he did it, one of his homies...
00:29:14.000Bought a shitload of stock in steel, like one of his like super rich dudes.
00:29:19.000And so then the question is like, hey, should he have been allowed to do that?
00:30:37.000And so he would tell me about the stock and we bought into it.
00:30:41.000I don't think I bought that much, but it was like a few thousand dollars, which is not that big of a deal if you're Looking at the greater spectrum of how much money people lose in the stock market, I lost nothing.
00:30:53.000I mean, people lose their whole life savings, their fortune, what they've inherited.
00:30:59.000People can lose it like that in the stock market.
00:31:01.000So we bought in, me and my business manager, and it went up for a little while.
00:31:05.000It went up because more people were telling more people to buy it, and then it just crashed.
00:31:09.000And when I mean it crashed, it just went through the floor like it didn't exist anymore.
00:31:14.000It was like, it went from, I forget what the number was, but it was like in the many dollars down to like a fraction of a cent or a cent or three cent or something like that.
00:33:20.000I told Jason Isbell to give it a second shot, but I realized my kids were way more interesting.
00:33:25.000I'd just rather be writing a song or doing something else.
00:33:28.000But one night, we all had a group text going on, and somebody said something.
00:33:34.000There's a lot of 80s film buffs in our band, and somebody made a Jean-Claude Van Damme reference.
00:33:40.000And dude, five minutes later, I'm not in any way exaggerating this.
00:33:44.000My wife and I are sitting there watching TV, surfing Netflix, and instantly it's like my entire channel is full of Jean-Claude Van Damme selections.
00:33:52.000And I was just like, what in the fuck is going on?
00:33:54.000I've never watched a Jean-Claude Van Damme film ever on Netflix.
00:34:11.000Dude, I've heard people tell me that they were having conversations on the phone with someone, and then what they were talking about showed up in their Google Ads on their laptop.
00:35:43.000Or, you know, all cars now, automotive bills, it's all, you know, electronic systems and GPS. Yeah.
00:35:50.000I'm not a techie guy, so excuse me if this is a really ignorant question, but, like, what's to stop somebody from hacking into your car and crashing you into a fucking wall?
00:35:57.000Well, that was always the case against Michael, or the death of, against the death of Michael Hastings.
00:37:10.000Engine flew from the car like crazy, horrific shit.
00:37:14.000And then afterwards they talked to these computer experts and they said, well, is it possible?
00:37:20.000To take a modern automobile with all sorts of...
00:37:23.000There's all sorts of devices inside modern cars that make them hit the brakes if you're getting too close to something or literally move out of a lane.
00:37:32.000Some of them have automatic pilot, so you could just fucking press the destination and it just navigates there.
00:38:54.000A good buddy of mine who's a doctor was just telling me that when he was in college and he was going through all of his examinations, his friends started taking Adderall.
00:39:03.000And he recognized this giant jump in their performance.
00:39:45.000I'm not a beat aficionado, but I know that he was hopped out of his mind on speed and wrote the whole dang thing like in a scroll on a roof in Mexico while Ginsburg was probably downstairs molesting a little kid or some shit.
00:41:03.000It was invented at the same time as gluten.
00:41:05.000LAUGHTER Kerouac took so much amphetamine when he first discovered the inhaler high that he'd lost most of his hair and his legs swelled up with, what is that word, thrombophlebitis.
00:41:45.000Greg Fitzsimmons and I were going over Hunter S. Thompson's routine before he would write and he would just start off early in the morning drinking.
00:41:53.000Oh, the whole laundry list leading up until start work at midnight?
00:41:56.000Yeah, at midnight Hunter S. Thompson is ready to write.
00:43:25.000I mean, there's obviously a pretty inherent level of self-medication going on to get through the day so you don't wake up and blow your brains out.
00:45:11.000I'm going to spread a conspiracy theory.
00:45:13.000Johnny Depp was reasonable and calm and polite and had his shit completely together until he did too much acid with Hunter S. Thompson, and that's why he's wacky now.
00:46:31.000Well, what do you think happened with them?
00:46:33.000I think they took away their pot, they took away the acid, and they arrested a bunch of people.
00:46:37.000They definitely clamped down, and then, you know, you have a few college student massacres, and, you know, the sensationalization of the Manson murders probably didn't help.
00:46:52.000That became like a big narrative piece.
00:46:54.000Hippies, LSD, Manson, yeah, it was all tied in.
00:47:01.000But musically, since I should stick to talking about things I know about, which is music, I think that that was probably just the best shit that ever happened and ever will happen.
00:47:10.000Like that 65 to 70, it just sort of exploded in all different directions and a lot of things happened that maybe they couldn't happen now.
00:47:22.000Or even two decades ago that couldn't have happened.
00:47:25.000As a musician, what do you think was the catalyst?
00:47:26.000Like what made them go from the 50s sound to the 60s?
00:47:30.000Just experimentation and mind, whatever, you know, looking for different ways of life.
00:47:59.000Yeah, he was just a serious blues head and they wanted to stretch out and really push what the limitations of the gear at that time in the studio, you know, Well, I don't only want to have eight channels.
00:48:12.000Some of the experimentation and things that guys like him and Pink Floyd and later bands, you know, ALO, just really pushing the parameters of what you could do with a traditional style of music in terms of arrangement and how you frame that.
00:48:28.000I always assumed that because he got arrested in Toronto with heroin, That he did drugs.
00:48:34.000I feel like if you have heroin on you...
00:50:36.000They said Lennon actually, you know, when he was on heroin for a while, but that motherfucker laid in bed with like 18 cats, you know, and it didn't do anything.
00:50:44.000And then they said Paul would be like, oh, I've got some songs, we've got to make a record.
00:50:47.000And he'd be like, goddammit, wake up, I have to write five songs in a week.
00:50:51.000Because he just, they said he'd just lay around like a sloth, butt naked, and tell all the maids to pretend like he wasn't there when he walked through the kitchen butt naked to get a glass of milk.
00:51:42.000You're really not supposed to do that.
00:51:43.000Yeah, but in the old days, like a king who didn't give a fuck, he would just stroll around and let everyone look at his cock and walk right through the fucking building.
00:52:34.000I can never get into shows when they come out because I'll see a couple episodes and then we go on tour for two months and you're like, what the fuck happened?
00:54:10.000I think he was a soldier that was friends with a guy and he stayed over there to help him.
00:54:14.000Like if you have a movie today and you have a Chinese character in a movie but you have a Japanese guy play the Chinese character, you're fucked.
00:54:26.000No more pretending you're someone else.
00:54:30.000Unless you're Robert Downey Jr. Yeah, he could get away with it, but not anymore.
00:54:35.000He got away with it in that one movie.
00:54:38.000But, like, if you were an Asian guy, though, I firmly believe no one would have a problem if they took an Asian guy and gave him some sort of facial prosthetics that turned him into a European-looking guy, and then gave him lead roles in a movie where he plays a European guy, people would have to shut the fuck up.
00:54:55.000They would want to say something, But then they go...
00:55:01.000We watch a lot of movies on the bus sometimes.
00:55:04.000If I'm at home and I'm by myself, I watch weird shit.
00:55:09.000I like old films and a lot of old westerns and stuff.
00:55:12.000I watch the same movies I've seen a hundred times over and over as opposed to watching a lot of the newer shit.
00:55:19.000We do watch a lot of these old westerns from the 50s, and it's like, it's all white dudes painted up like Native American Indians with the headdress, and it just looks so cheesy, and they have these affected, horrible accents, and you're just like, how the fuck did that ever happen?
00:55:34.000But then you get to the 80s, and you watch something like 48 Hours now, and it's the most sexist, racist, misogynistic shit, and they were just pumping those things out of studios two or three decades ago.
00:55:49.000Any female characters in those films, you're either Hooker 1 or Secretary at Precinct who everybody dismisses.
00:56:32.000I really feel like if we weren't completely embedded in it, that we would look at this as like a system that's pulling us into its web and And forcing us to be more and more entangled.
00:56:49.000And this system is the system of electronics.
00:56:53.000It's like almost like it's preparing for us to give birth to artificial life.
00:56:58.000And so in the meantime, it's completely sucking us in and making us be completely embedded.
00:57:05.000Phones in your pocket, constant Alexa listening to everything you do.
00:57:08.000It's all just as deep as it can in the biological systems world until it gives birth.
00:57:14.000We're going to force it into existence just by being completely fascinated with electronics.
00:57:46.000But if someone has that kind of power, if there really is something that a person can think up that didn't exist 200 years ago.
00:57:53.000200 years ago, there wasn't even the thought of it.
00:57:55.000So in 200 years, two small amounts of measurement of time in relationship to the entire age of the universe, they could figure out a way to kill every person on the planet.
00:59:43.000The CGI shit, for me, man, it really took the magic out of everything.
00:59:47.000That with HD, because you watch Harry and the Hendersons with your kids now or something, and that looks better than a lot of the stuff coming out.
01:01:40.000The University of Chicago came down and studied it all.
01:01:43.000So now I'm going to spend the rest of my life trying to figure out how to keep my fucking kids from going in there and doing something, you know.
01:02:01.000I mean, if you went to a cave 2,000 years from now, and they uncovered some cave, and it was a bunch of dudes just drawing guys jerking off, people would be excited.
01:02:11.000They'd be like, well, this was 3,000 years later.
01:03:23.000I mean, if you were one of these bad motherfucker wrestler dudes, how much time did you have to be that guy?
01:03:27.000I'd go grab some dick and roll around in the dirt and then I'd go eat some grapes and have a giant orgy and watch a lion eat my friend later on today.
01:04:10.000Did I? When I used to live out west a long time ago, my buddy and mine were driving up to this little town called Leavenworth, Washington to go check out this weird little Aspen Swedish ski town in fucking northern Washington where you go get your potato soup.
01:05:09.000We're stopping and we're getting coffee from this lady.
01:05:12.000And I'm like, you know, whatever, trying to talk about the statue from the movie.
01:05:15.000She's like, yeah, they stopped and filmed here.
01:05:17.000And then she pulls out these, she had these old photo books, like family photo albums, like huge photo albums, two or three of them at least, full of Polaroids.
01:05:27.000Of Sasquatch that her family had taken in this house, supposedly.
01:05:32.000It's the greatest idea to sell coffee ever.
01:06:43.000Yeah, Yeti, Neanderthal, I mean Sasquatch, there's like a bunch of different names for them, but it was a real animal that lived, I think they found bones that were as recent as 100,000 years.
01:06:57.000So anatomically modern humans definitely lived in the presence of this thing.
01:07:03.000So what do you attribute all the sightings to in the last five years?
01:07:12.000The reason I say that is because there's no real compelling evidence other than like a couple of footprints that you think someone could have faked.
01:07:32.000And the problem, the real problem with people's memory, especially in some situation that freaks you out, like you think you might have saw a Sasquatch, your brain starts fucking with you.
01:07:42.000It starts filling in the blanks with a bunch of shit.
01:07:44.000And then you start repeating that shit as if it's the actual...
01:09:42.000And she could have filled in the blanks in her mind with all these false memories that are attributing, like, oh, I saw its face, it looked at me, it made a noise.
01:09:51.000All that stuff, like, people get wacky.
01:09:53.000Like, you think you saw something, and you didn't.
01:10:56.000They were just like fucking mountain men who just blocked out the light when they walked through the door and had these long gray hair and beards and shit.
01:11:03.000And they're like, you should come up and play in Stornoway.
01:11:18.000Like the most manly way to work out ever.
01:11:22.000You're basically picking up these enormous balls of stone.
01:11:26.000And these dudes lift them and they get them on their chest and they hoist them onto these blocks.
01:11:30.000They have contests to see who can, like when they do the strongman contests, they pick those Atlas Stones up and put them on progressively higher and higher shelves.
01:12:02.000I got some really good buddies now in Glasgow, all musicians you meet over the years touring, and a couple guys particularly that if I go over sometimes I'll do a little pickup band with these guys, and they're both like hard Glaswegians,
01:12:17.000and my friend Lloyd went to the last time I was over there, he took me up on a proper car trip up to the Highlands and back down, and one day I think we got as far as like...
01:13:26.000Well, you know, another weird thing about it is you always appear, Americans especially, like where you're from, your ancestry and this and that.
01:13:33.000I grew up in eastern Kentucky and then moved to central Kentucky, but most of the early settlers in the Appalachian region was predominantly Scotch-Irish and some German.
01:14:03.000And I realized, I was like, yep, I might as well be in Hazard, Kentucky right now.
01:14:08.000It's the same stoic, very guarded, you know, disposition, but then, like, once you get to know them, and especially once you become friends, it's just like they would do anything for you.
01:14:20.000It's a very regal, stoic, working-class city.
01:14:23.000There's something really special in magic about Glasgow.
01:15:06.000We played somewhere in Ireland in this little town and across the street from the hotel was this guard tower that had been there for 1300 fucking years and there was like Viking boats they had on display around.
01:15:16.000I'm just thinking, yeah, somebody a thousand years ago was up in that window with a bow and arrow.
01:15:30.000It gives you perspective, though, especially Europe in terms of old world isn't that old when you think about China or a lot of Southeast Asian cultures.
01:15:43.000Every time I go, it gives me perspective because you think about everything happening in our country and everybody's like, oh, it's fucking going to hell.
01:15:52.000You know, there's churches over there that are five times older than the United States, and it's still working somehow.
01:16:00.000Yeah, the oldest shit we have is like, when I was living in Boston, there was a cemetery that you could go to where you could see tombstones from like the 1700s.
01:19:35.000He saw Van Halen at the the little coliseum in nashville like down on the north side of town back in i think he said 77 so it was before the first album had come out and they were opening for black sabbath and you know but this time deep purple and all these like riff rock bands were just sort of the thing wow and he said these guys come out and he said it was like a bomb exploded in that fucking place man look eddie's like doing backflips off his amp and all that crazy shit nobody ever heard that stuff you know wow and he said
01:20:05.000then Sabbath came out and everybody basically walked out after the third song because they realized they had just seen what was next.
01:23:48.000I know Robert Plant wasn't choice number one.
01:23:51.000And they had to talk Bonneman to take the gig.
01:23:54.000Paige and John Paul Jones had known each other through session work in the mid-60s, and when the Yardbirds broke up, Jimmy somehow thought he had rights to the name, and he wanted to put together a super band of all his favorite musicians he played with.
01:24:09.000And Bonham was recommended by the bass player, John Paul Jones, but they had to go and talk him into it, because he was playing with bands at the time that paid him a lot more money.
01:24:19.000And Jimmy had to explain what they were trying to accomplish and sell him on the idea.
01:24:24.000But that was sort of like bands that are put together by labels.
01:24:30.000Jimmy Page was a genius and a very visionary kind of guy, so he knew he needed to build this band to take over the world, and that's what he did.
01:26:36.000I'm not glued into pop culture, but somehow you just can't not know what Justin Bieber's up to once a month just walking around the world anymore.
01:26:45.000I would say that kid, for most people to be handed that type of existence and all of that scrutiny and all the shit that comes along with that, that does things to people, you know?
01:27:01.000Like, I'm so grateful I got into this business at 35. Yeah.
01:27:05.000And not 21. I was talking to my friend John this weekend about this.
01:27:09.000And I was saying that it's almost like if you made an epoxy, right?
01:27:12.000You know, if you have epoxy, you just put a couple ingredients in.
01:27:15.000Like, there's one thing and you mix it with another thing and then it hardens.
01:27:19.000But if you add some shit in that that's not supposed to be there, and it's fully developed, you're not going to take that shit out.
01:27:25.000Like, if you added oil, you threw some oil in the epoxy, like, ah, now you fucked that whole thing up.
01:27:30.000That's kind of what you're doing to a person when you raise a person famous.
01:27:34.000If you take some reality star from the time they're five, and then they're in a sitcom and a movie, and then you've gone through your whole...
01:27:42.000I don't know why I said reality star, but you've gone through your whole life If you're that person, if you're Justin Bieber, you've gone through your whole life.
01:28:39.000But now he lives a different life where people like Rihanna, they're like literally citizens of the world and any day of the week they could be in some five-star hotel and God knows where, you know.
01:29:00.000I couldn't do it, man, because there's no way.
01:29:02.000I don't ever want to wake up and have that kind of career because it takes so many people around you on a daily basis just to maintain and keep a machine that large rolling, logistically speaking, that you become enslaved to the job.
01:32:28.000You just have to fight and sift through so much shit, most of it mediocrity, to get to something that really hits you or that you connect with.
01:32:37.000Well, I think that you're also saying this out of your own personal experiences, where you realize you could have not been you.
01:32:50.000You and most people that are successful.
01:32:54.000My first record, we did shop to a few labels in town, but I was a little bit ahead of the whole neo-trad curve that sort of kicked off in the last few years.
01:33:06.000I made this really traditional country record.
01:34:14.000Now I was in this, all of a sudden, in this position of going out and playing all these festivals and looking at these kids and stuff, doing it and all.
01:35:50.000But then, talented guys, and I was kind of a taskmaster, so it was such a young band because they wanted to play loud, and you've got to pull things back, or like...
01:36:46.000So, like, every time we do it now, it's always different.
01:36:49.000Like, the record I did after that was...
01:36:51.000Recorded that one a totally different way.
01:36:53.000Still going fast, but, you know, I always wanted to make a big kind of lush orchestral soul record.
01:37:02.000And then what I've learned is that I don't want to be in the music business because...
01:37:07.000I'm just going to be in the Sturgill business because there's this mechanical timeline of it all.
01:37:15.000By the time we go in and make that record, you're so, you've been processing and thinking about it so much for months.
01:37:23.000And you get in and you have that release and it's like, I equate it to driving in a really heavy downpour rainstorm for like an extended period of time, which is like there's a mental exhaustion that comes forward, but you have to just kind of like keep going.
01:37:36.000And by the time it's finished and mixed, you've heard this thing like a thousand times.
01:37:42.000But now you've got to go out and play it on the road every night for a year and a half.
01:37:46.000So we're constantly trying to reinvent every night how to keep that fresh and exciting while holding the pause button on going over here and recording what creatively you may already be onto.
01:37:58.000So I realized this year I'm going to take the reins and I'm going to play 30 festivals because those things are always so fun just to go out and get all the energy in your face and then we're going to do probably a double album and another record and record it all so that when I do turn around I want to go do a really big long two year tour we have all this new material and the old stuff to pull from.
01:38:19.000I like how you're approaching it so you're approaching it like a plan.
01:38:41.00030 or 60 shows and know that every one of those was 110% as opposed to, you know, you got the Tuesday and Wednesday shows to get you to this weekend market where everybody's counting their checks already and shit and you're exhausted and then the shows suffer and these people pay money or maybe they don't realize that like you can't hear anything for 40 minutes because you don't ever want to project negativity.
01:39:02.000from the stage if you can help it but there's you know the bad nights i just want every night to be great and then but most importantly right now for me the fun is is the studio and the the process of trying to push it and get to what's next yeah you do totally different albums every time you put an album out it's a completely different i'm a music listener and lover first and foremost probably a musicologist more than a musician at this point is that a word Yeah,
01:39:31.000Yeah, if I had to say that I have obsessed over one subject enough to where somebody should probably give me a fucking piece of paper that says I know what I'm talking about, it's probably music.
01:40:23.000He was so young and passionate and talented.
01:40:27.000There's one particular record he did with a guy named John Mayle.
01:40:30.000It was like kind of the birth of like rock and roll guitar tone.
01:40:32.000It's the first time everybody plugged a Les Paul into a Marshall and just cranked the fucking thing.
01:40:36.000And that record, that sound, everybody's like, whoa, that was a thing that happened.
01:40:41.000But you can look at his career, and he was such a chameleon going through all these phases, and a lot of it was emulation or reinterpretation because he got into substance abuse.
01:40:52.000How much his career shaped him more so than all the people he'd been around and his friends wasn't exposed to and him rubbing off on them and vice versa.
01:41:28.000I mean, even though you have a whole sort of entity behind you in terms of people carrying your stuff and all the jazz that's going on, all the equipment that's involved in doing one of your shows...
01:42:12.000I would keep it there as long as possible, no matter what happens.
01:42:17.000Just because I've never been a big lights guy or any of that stuff.
01:42:22.000The guys in my band are all pretty amazing players we try to go out and put a show on.
01:42:26.000If you were doing something else, though, like say if you were a part of a band, that band was being promoted very heavily by some record company that had put the band together, you know, they do like those manufactured bands or something like that, you'd be in a situation where you're basically required to do commercially successful and viable music.
01:43:11.000Yeah, I never had any interest in it whatsoever.
01:43:15.000When things kind of took off, all of them came knocking.
01:43:21.000But it was working fine by ourselves, just sort of subcontracting my team and...
01:43:27.000The only reason any artist should ever sign with a record label is for larger recording budgets, you know, a larger toolbox in which to use to make your product, let's call it, for lack of a better term.
01:43:42.000So they have serious places where you can go to.
01:44:50.000We don't want to pull the curtain back too much here.
01:44:53.000I looked at it as like Going into business with a bank for at least two records, I'll take out a loan that I'm pretty sure I'll never pay back.
01:45:04.000Because the recoup, you know, it's in there.
01:45:10.000It all comes down to the bean counters eventually.
01:45:13.000My records sell two, 300,000 copies and at some point they'll have to decide whether that's fiscally viable to them anymore because they don't make any money off me unless I sell records.
01:46:12.000And that can make you feel, like, jaded against it all, or you can be like, okay, well, you know, Wiz Khalifa, they probably spend more money marketing one single for Wiz Khalifa than my entire project costs.
01:46:36.000It's a trickle-down Right, and it's all based on the money that they made from a long time ago, really, and then maintaining some sort of grip on the community now.
01:48:21.000If you were being pushed to constantly produce new stuff and I could imagine that wears on artists.
01:48:29.000I just spent so much of my early life working for other people.
01:48:31.000I just made a point one day before I moved to Nashville, I'm not going to do that ever again.
01:48:36.000I don't want to work for anybody else.
01:48:38.000Unless it's somebody I really admire or is a really exciting, creative thing that I feel like I could benefit from or learn from being involved with.
01:51:35.000He's like the babysitter and the mother of the whole family.
01:51:39.000But like sometimes if we've been on the bus for a while or rolling, more than anything to give everybody else a break and do them a favor, I'll go off on my own and like stay at a different hotel or I'll go to a different city for two days.
01:51:51.000And he's always like, you know, he's from New Zealand.
01:52:38.000But for me, it's almost like I know what makes me feel like shit, and I know what makes me feel good.
01:52:44.000What makes me feel good is when I get shit done.
01:52:46.000What makes me feel like shit is when I'm lazy, then I get anxiety, I feel weird, I don't feel good, I don't feel like I'm getting anything done.
01:52:53.000And people think that, oh, because I work hard and I'm constantly doing something, then I never feel like that.
01:54:10.000And I'm going to draw a dog that has a wing and also has a tail, and has a tail that grows out of its forehead, and just makes wacky shit up.
01:54:17.000And she thinks it's fucking hilarious.
01:54:19.000Like, look, he's got a tail on his head.
01:54:30.000And little kids gravitate towards that, man.
01:54:32.000When little kids start drawing, they gravitate towards this expansion of the creative aspects of your mind, like whatever it is in your mind that causes you to have these ideas.
01:54:41.000Whatever in your mind that causes you to think of a story that you want to write down or a drawing that you want to try to accomplish and try to put down, those little things to a kid are magical.
01:54:52.000Because they didn't have any of that before.
01:54:54.000I mean, they just learned how to talk.
01:56:24.000Like I was saying earlier, I had this train job, and the first year I was there, I was just, like, out on the ground, like, throwing the switches and disconnecting the trains and hooking them back up and that kind of thing, and then I got promoted to what they call,
01:56:39.000like, a yard master, or, like, well, you know, a yard boss, and you're in the truck, and you're sort of in charge of The inbound and outbound manifest and everything that comes in and how it gets blocked apart and switched over to this track and you're building other trains and you've got to get them out on time.
01:56:54.000And as soon as they put me in that job, it was like the greatest job I've ever had because I was playing Tetris.
01:56:59.000I was just like fucking Baron von Mutchhausen in my little fucking truck with my 8,000 radios, like tearing trains apart and just watching it all happen and get it out the gate on time.
01:57:14.000There's only three guys out there making all this shit happen.
01:57:16.000You've got the guy driving the engineer, the dude breaking them apart, and then whoever's on the back, like, sort of playing the chessboard.
01:57:30.000Yeah, there's some good jobs, for sure.
01:57:33.000But if somebody came up to you in the middle of that good job and said, you don't have to do this ever again, you can do whatever the fuck you want, you would leave.
01:57:46.000And these offices, totally out of my element, getting screamed out on a conference call when some other asshole didn't get the train out on time.
01:57:53.000Because you went from having this cool, high-pressure job that makes you feel good to making more money, but you don't want to get that juice anymore.
01:58:00.000Yeah, I was like, man, this is way too stable.
01:58:26.000Those men that have fallen into some salary position where they're not happy and they want to get out and they don't know how to.
01:58:33.000Well, they have the downfall of being highly efficient individuals and other CEOs recognize that and be like, I can put you on salary and work you 90 hours a week and you're going to get it done because you won't let yourself fail, but you'll probably fucking drink five pots of coffee a day and Well,
01:58:49.000listen, Sturgill, if you keep going, you've got a good position in this company.
01:58:52.000I'm telling you, you've got a bright future.
02:02:50.000More of a funny way to put what is originally a concept, as far as I know, that was first described in detail by a Jesuit priest named Pierre de Chardin.
02:03:04.000All about the omega point in the universe and how all consciousness emits from this one central point of origin where the whole thing banged out from And it's all just expanding and reciprocating back to itself and like absorbing everything going on.
02:03:19.000But it's this one point where all things spiritual, scientific, metaphysical, all matter in the universe, all fucking knowledge emits from.
02:03:27.000And he got blackballed from the Vatican for preaching that.
02:03:30.000Because he was like, you don't necessarily need to stand in a building to talk to God because God is everywhere and all around you and inside you all the time.
02:03:38.000Whatever you want God to be or, you know.
02:03:42.000So I got it from a Stephen Hawking book where, and it's weird, you can go around the world and there's all these ancient civilizations, whether it be some Native American tribes or parts of Far Eastern Asia where they find like these adherence to turtles and elephants and old culture and Hindu mythology.
02:03:58.000There's even a Hindu illustration representing sort of a similar figure or myth that it all sat on the back of this great turtle flying around in space because they held those animals in such regard as old and wise creatures.
02:04:12.000Actually, turtles are the oldest living species on the planet.
02:04:19.000And the symmetry of their shell designs, no matter what species, it's always 13 pieces, which a lot of the old tribes thought had something to do with the lunar phases of the sun and how it was all tied in together with, you know.
02:04:57.000But it's all these things I sort of found or symbiotically were connected.
02:05:01.000I was reading at the time and I was about to have my first child and I was just like, man, I want to make a country record about all this shit or like you know write a song about the book of the dead and but as a traditional country record and then incorporate some classic rock psychedelia so that was all that was That's how I found you.
02:05:22.000People online, like, yo, dude, this guy making psychedelic country music, gotta have him on your podcast.
02:05:27.000But then, like, then everywhere you go, people are making, like, handing you, like, hand bone glass third eyes and shit, you know what I mean?
02:05:32.000Like, you get some real interesting characters, man.
02:07:09.000And I remember this voice saying, get up, you stupid junkie fuck, before somebody comes out here and sees you, you know, sitting in the hallway like a dumbass.
02:07:18.000And I managed to, like, pop out of it.
02:07:20.000And as soon as I got back to my place and sat down on the couch, everything was fine.
02:07:25.000But it was just so initial in the rush.
02:07:28.000I was just like, nobody needs to be that stone, you know?
02:09:01.000No, like heavy medical issues, health issues, and we got him some edibles, and he's like the only thing that made it okay, that discomfort.
02:09:11.000So when I had to have a sinus surgery, We talked about this.
02:09:16.000When we played the Grammys out here last year, I was sick as fuck, man.
02:09:21.000Like, I was getting all year, for like the last year and a half on the road, I was getting these horrible sinus infections all the time.
02:09:45.000So when we flew out and did the Grammys, I was all plugged up, couldn't sing.
02:09:50.000Obviously, biggest gig in my life, kind of stressing it.
02:09:52.000So the label guy sent me to this doctor who looked up in there and realized, you know, I probably had my nose broken at some point or just a really deviated septum when I was younger.
02:10:23.000So the next day, the whole band, they flew home.
02:10:25.000I had to stay out here for like nine days, I think, and go in every morning twice a day for IVs for him to clean that shit out so I could fly home.
02:10:49.000While I was recuperating, long story short, I didn't want to take any of the opioid or the fucking pills that they gave me to deal with the pain.
02:11:18.000It's kind of awesome because you feel like when you're actually in pain or when you need that heavy type of alleviation, what it is actually doing and offering you in terms of relief.
02:11:31.000And it gave me a whole new understanding and respect for the medical side of that shit.
02:12:02.000But it didn't affect me in an overdose-y, nauseous sort of way, like if you're eating too many edibles, because your body actually needs it.
02:12:11.000I laid there listening to headphones and came up with the record I'm working on now, which is great for me because it was like, that's what I want to do next, you know?
02:12:20.000Yeah, it's a crazy ride, those edibles, but if you can take that ride, you get something out of it.
02:12:25.000And sometimes people take the ride and the feeling is just too self-examinatory, too paranoia-inducing.
02:12:33.000Sometimes people just can't handle it.
02:12:35.000On a mass legality issue, I mean, if anything, I know it's just going to fuck pot up, you know, but from a medical stance, I can't see any reason why we're still even talking about this.
02:12:50.000We're being fucked over by giant pharmaceutical companies that are making billions of dollars and they would realize how much more money they would be losing every year if marijuana becomes fully legal.
02:13:55.000When I had to get a life insurance policy, like they showed up, they'd read all the interviews and like, wow, you've been really open about this and that.
02:15:22.000This guy who's on Adderall because he's got a prescription for ADD and you don't have a problem with that, that guy's fucked.
02:15:29.000There's a lot of people that are fucked out there, and these insurance companies that think that a guy who smokes pot is more likely to die, there's no statistics to back that up.
02:15:38.000There's no statistics that say that people who smoke pot are more likely to get diseases or die of some sort of a fucking debilitating syndrome that came about because of overuse of THC. It doesn't exist.
02:15:50.000But they're not even testing you for alcohol.
02:15:52.000They ask you how much you drink, but they're not testing you.
02:15:58.000It's really strange because in the Navy and the Railroad, there were very stringent, obviously highly stringent drug policies, but drinking your ass off every night is completely fine.
02:18:10.000Yeah, there's a weird contradiction we have in the society.
02:18:13.000We were constantly drinking drugs in the form of caffeine, constantly getting drugs in the form of whatever your doctor prescribes you for depression or anxiety or ADHD or whatever that is, constantly going out and having drinks, taking drugs,
02:18:29.000the drugs being alcohol, taking a whiskey drug and a vodka drug, and no one thinks anything of it.
02:18:36.000And they're like, well, I don't do drugs.
02:19:49.000I ended up going up to Malibu to Rick Rubin's house and was playing him some of this record I'm working on just to get some feedback and it's one of those moments when you realize you're sitting like Rick Rubin's like all Indian style on his couch head banging like a fucking caveman and he had literally the best sounding stereo system I've ever heard in my life.
02:23:12.000Much like Austin, I mean, five years from now, there may not be any music in Nashville, because I don't know how many musicians are going to afford to live there.
02:23:43.000I moved there 2011. And I think it was like in the last two or three years, though.
02:23:50.000All the gentrification started around then.
02:23:53.000They were building these, you know, what used to be the blown out, dilapidated parts of town.
02:23:57.000The high rises started going up and shopping centers and that sort of thing.
02:24:01.000And And there's still very much the old Nashville.
02:24:05.000It's almost like two or three different cities in some cases in terms of personality.
02:24:09.000But the influx and all this change has sort of changed what it is.
02:24:16.000But Austin used to be a thriving music scene, but now it's like all the tech industry moved in and the cost of living and property is just...
02:25:20.000My wife watched it one night and I just was like, no.
02:25:27.000I've been there a bunch of times playing Zanies.
02:25:30.000Okay, now that little street where you're talking about, that corner on 8th Avenue, there's Zaney's, you got Douglas Corner, then there's a lot of shops that I go to on Sundays.
02:25:42.000They're auctioneers, they do all these old estate sales and really cool furniture.
02:25:46.000But that little pocket, that intersection, is probably one of the few remaining bastions of funk.
02:28:03.000One night, I think I came to watch your show at the store, and this was like a year ago, and you had to jet right after the set and go to Pasadena for another set.
02:28:12.000My buddy that I brought with me, we're going to hang here, see who comes out, and Jeff Ross or somebody comes out, and he's doing his bit, and right in the fucking middle of it, The back curtain opens and Chappelle walks out and just kind of like taps Ross on the corner on the shoulder like, fuck off,
02:28:27.000I got this, you know, and just jacks the mic and pretty much everybody else's set who was supposed to perform that night and stands there for like three hours, man.
02:28:55.000And he was working things out, and then later on, those Netflix specials land, and I realized I've already heard like 90% of these jokes, because the guy was just like, I'm going to go hijack the main room, work my shit out, because I got it like that.
02:30:39.000And the little subtle things that I noticed, like, probably ten times throughout the night, at really awkward moments, he would call the waitress to get him another drink.
02:30:53.000And every time he'd say it, it'd get a little more awkward, like a little less appropriate each and every fucking time.
02:30:59.000Eventually, everybody in the room was like, that's not really cool.
02:31:03.000And then at the end of the night, the last thing he said was like, I'm really sorry, I called you bar whore, I just don't have any fucking jokes.
02:31:09.000And he walked off the stage and was like...
02:34:03.000So if I have an idea, and I don't want to hear my voice, so I don't want to say it into a microphone, I want to just figure out what the beats are of things.
02:35:25.000If there's a song I want to learn and you've got to remember all the words, I'm never going to remember them until I just sit down and write that song down on paper.
02:35:34.000Once I write it on paper and see it, it's like it's there.
02:35:51.000Like 8,000 old country and bluegrass songs, I just pull out of my ass on a dime and remember all that shit, but it's always the ones I wrote.
02:37:19.000I don't really like to smoke weed anymore.
02:37:22.000It's something about the way it hits me when I inhale it high it becomes more heady And internalizing, like, any anxiety or the paranoia people talk about.
02:37:30.000The only time I've ever experienced that is when I've smoked weed.
02:37:33.000But my problem is I don't like going on stage stoned anymore because...
02:37:53.000But if I'm up there singing and looking at an audience, if I'm stoned, I know enough about myself to know I'll get internalized and just only start listening to the band and the music.
02:38:03.000And you sort of forget that there's all these people there.
02:38:08.000And again, maybe that is the show when we get lost in the music.
02:38:11.000And then I've also played some of the best gigs I've ever played in my life on edibles.
02:38:19.000Because, you know, it's sort of like an anti-anxiety and just like very free and you feel everything much more delicately in terms of response.
02:38:29.000But it's not something I was like, oh, we got to get high.
02:39:52.000I hit the wall the other day in my house.
02:39:54.000I don't know what the hell I ate, but I literally had to put my hand on a railing so I could squeeze my butt cheeks together harder so I couldn't shit myself.
02:40:03.000It broke through some weird barrier where I thought, I knew I had to take a shit, but I was thinking maybe I could let a fart out first when I'm on my way to the bathroom.
02:42:06.000I spent the whole night throwing up and shitting myself.
02:42:09.000And then the next day, I was just dead.
02:42:11.000I drank like five or six cups of coffee because we had to film this thing where they were putting the engine in the car and they were going over the design.
02:42:18.000I was like barely able to stay awake while I was doing that.
02:42:23.000I had it one time from this Chinese buffet, and it hit me hours later, seven hours later that night, and all of a sudden it was just in this bathroom for four or five hours, and it was those things like...
02:42:39.000It was the worst shape I've ever been in.
02:42:41.000But in the back of your mind, you're like, it's okay.
02:42:45.000I know this is food poisoning, but it's okay.
02:45:30.000I don't know if that helps, but I'm hoping that that helps and that when I eat something funky, all the good stuff that I eat, like I eat kimchi almost every day.
02:46:13.000When I was out in Utah, I worked with this kid who was a big hunter, and he would bring in elk, like, fillet medallions or, like, hamburger.
02:46:20.000He lived in Wyoming, so he could pull, like, two or three extra tags here.
02:47:43.000It used to be flooded with it back, you know, 1800. They hunted them out and they repopulated, I want to say in the 90s, maybe early 2000s, and now there's so many that they're opening it up again.
02:47:53.000Yeah, shout out to the Rocky Mountain Elk Federation.
02:48:54.000The only thing, I tell you what, man, we got all the snakes and spiders and all that shit.
02:48:58.000See, I grew up around playing with, like, baby copperheads in the creek, and my mom spanking the shit out of me when she caught me, because I don't worry about this stuff.
02:49:07.000My wife found, she was sweeping, we get ladybugs that come, like, in this time of year, they try to come in on this, like, sun porch, and she's sweeping a pile up and found a scorpion.