Sturgill Simpson is a country music singer-songwriter from Nashville, Tennessee. He s been in the business for a long time and is one of the most underrated artists in country music. In this episode, Sturgill talks about how he got his start in the industry, how he s come to Nashville, and what it s like to work with some of the biggest names in Country Music. He s also got some great stories about growing up in the 60s and 70s and how he ended up working with Shooter Jennings on his first two albums, and why he thinks he s the best country singer in Nashville right now. He also talks about his new album, American Pig Robbins, which is out now! And of course, he talks about that time he met his future wife, and how that changed his approach to writing and producing music. Enjoy this episode of Fresh Off The Road! -Jeff Perla and the Creek Crew Music by Jeff Perla & the Creekbreeze Country Music by Sturgil Simpson Cover art by Haley & Ollie (feat. Stacey) Artwork by Haley and Olly (c) by Stellie ( ) Thanks for listening to Fresh Off the Road by Stacey & Olly . . . is a production of Native Creative and is a tribute to the late singer/songwriter, Stacey Simpson. Thank you for listening and supporting the cause! by . is an artist! Stacey is a proud member of the Native Sons of the Creek in Nashville, TN , and is looking forward to working with him on his next album on the next single Thank you so much to have him on the road with him in the next episode of his new EP, I hope you enjoy the next one coming out next week! and I hope that you enjoy this episode - Jeff Perlee is a great artist is a good friend of mine, and I can t wait to see you all the way he s a little bit more I love him back in Nashville thank you for being a good ol' man. -Pig Robbins is a very good guy. -- Thank you, Stavely Steeve is a real good guy! -- Jeff Perle is a friend of my homie, and he's a good dude.
00:00:29.000You know, I had heard about your music from several people online.
00:00:32.000I don't remember who made me take the plunge and download your shit.
00:00:37.000Like, a bunch of people had recommended you.
00:00:38.000I had Shooter Jennings on, and along those lines, people said, like, hey man, if you really dig Shooter Jennings, you gotta check out Sturgill Simpson.
00:02:16.000Even some of the most timeless singers that ever played the music, the records that they made got subjected to these really bad taste choices.
00:06:06.000Even like a song that's sort of a classic song with all those themes that you talked about before, like drinking, a heartache, if it's well done, I still really like it, you know?
00:06:42.000And I think that as some young people started getting into some of the other country, like getting into some Johnny Cash songs, for instance, you know, you start going, oh, this is country, too.
00:08:27.000Like, you look at that style of music, and they automatically, some people did for a while.
00:08:32.000But I think guys like Shooter, guys like you, you guys are opening up, and Honey Honey Band does a lot of country-type sound.
00:08:39.000I think a lot of people are opening up people's ideas of what that sound really is, and you hear a great song, it's like, God damn it, that's a great song.
00:08:47.000It doesn't matter if they've got a banjo playing in the background, you can't tell me that song didn't fuck you up.
00:09:35.000I think when you expand your horizon and sort of open up your ideas of musical appreciation, I've tried really hard with a lot of stuff and it just can't catch.
00:09:44.000Like every few months or so, I try with jazz.
00:09:46.000I'll throw some Coltrane on and I'll be like...
00:09:49.000I'll be in my car and then five minutes in and I fucking snap.
00:12:05.000Yeah, my mom's brother, all his friends, they had this house, and it was these two twin brothers, and both of them never married, so they turned their house into a fucking practice space, and they just had this PA and lights and shit that stayed set up all the time.
00:12:25.000Yeah, I mean, before I even really knew anything about music or songwriting, I think I was learning how to play in a band just from hanging out with those guys.
00:13:11.000We'd watch Hee Haw and shit when I was a kid and TNN and he'd kind of tell me which of the guys were actually playing and the ones that were just holding the guitar as a prop.
00:13:46.000Because I've never really played many bands.
00:13:50.000But yeah, I had an older cousin, Mike, too.
00:13:52.000He was like six or seven years older than me, so...
00:13:55.000You know, just older teenage neighbors with Chevy Novas and shit listening to Guns N' Roses, you know, when you're in fifth grade.
00:14:01.000But Mike really, I remember very vividly one weekend, we'd go up to visit, they had a farm in Ohio, and I was probably in fourth or fifth grade, and I remember he knew I was really into music, and I was playing guitar already, and he's like, what are you listening to?
00:14:46.000I very clearly remember the transition between records and CDs.
00:14:51.000I remember the very first CDs showing up at the record store.
00:14:54.000Because kids today probably don't even appreciate it because of the last ten years of the internet has dominated digital downloads ever since...
00:15:02.000Napster came along, and then iTunes, and everybody knows how to get shit online.
00:15:46.000Well, the digital thing, I think, In a lot of ways it's great, but I blame it almost entirely for the downward spiral of, you know, the quality.
00:17:04.000You can just hear, it's almost like you're sitting at the mixing board, and you just, like some asshole decided that guitar needed to be like a hard two o'clock right there.
00:17:12.000But in a vinyl, it just kind of seems more three-dimensional, like it's coming from around you, I feel like.
00:17:31.000You weren't here when we had Russell Peters on.
00:17:34.000Russell Peters is a stand-up comic, a friend of mine, very funny guy.
00:17:38.000He's also a DJ. And we were playing some songs, and he could pick out, it was a rap song, and he could pick out what the samples were from.
00:18:10.000So, the thing about the record stores that people loved was that it was sort of like, because we didn't have the internet, you would go there and you would see these, it was on a big piece of paper.
00:18:25.000Like, holy shit, here's, you know, here's the new Bruce Springsteen album.
00:18:30.000Like, it's right there, and you see, oh, wow, it's like, this is what he made.
00:18:33.000This is what he's been doing for the past year.
00:18:35.000Bruce has been, you know, writing all these songs, and bam, here we go, we got it, wow.
00:19:09.000Do you remember when The Wall came out?
00:19:12.000No, I was born in 78. I mean, I remember watching it way too young.
00:19:17.000I was in high school when I found out about The Wall, so it was after The Wall had come out.
00:19:22.000But I remember sitting there with my friend, we had the headphone jack thing plugged in so you could have two headphones, both listening to it.
00:19:30.000And how everything ties in together, it seemed so beyond human reach.
00:19:38.000Like that these guys figured out how to do all this.
00:19:40.000They put these amazing songs and they just sort of flow into each other like some wild ride.
00:19:47.000Or like Dark Side of the Moon, very similar.
00:19:49.000You know, like the album they always link up to The Wizard of Oz.
00:20:13.000We did a little bit of it on Metamodern.
00:20:16.000Pink Floyd and some other albums were definitely referenced while we were cutting that shit towards the end.
00:20:22.000When you first decided that you were going to be a professional country music singer, did you decide slowly and gradually, or did you just fucking dive in?
00:20:31.000I only started my career attempting to have a career about four years ago.
00:21:51.000I guess, for whatever reason, from dealing with the stress of that, I didn't realize at the time I wasn't fulfilling my fucking purpose, Joe Rogan.
00:22:02.000She kind of recognized that, and I started writing a lot as a result of dealing with the stress from my job and playing at home.
00:22:10.000She just kind of told me, you know, you don't suck at this, and you're going to wake up at 40 and know you never fucking tried, and then I'm stuck with your miserable ass.
00:23:05.000But then the musicians come and everybody, you know, the thing about musicians, we're lazy as fuck and nobody really wants to work.
00:23:11.000So you get all these guys, these side players, they're looking for songwriters to get gigs supporting or backing up and they want like half the door of what you get paid for their services because they don't want to wait tables.
00:23:22.000And there's guys that are really good and earn that money.
00:25:59.000Quite honestly, the negative aspects of anything, whether it's show business or entertainment, I don't think there's anything negative about talking about them.
00:26:10.000I think the positive effect of talking about them is that young people recognize that they're not crazy, that they sense something goofy about this, and then it becomes more clearly defined what's goofy about it.
00:26:20.000And it gives them a high standard to not set a trap for themselves.
00:26:25.000I know in comedy, there's a thing that guys do when they first start out, which really fucks you up.
00:26:41.000Similarly in music, you could just start making stuff that you think like, you know, like one of those pros that writes those pop songs, you know, those guys, those weird dudes that just know how to like make something that clicks in, but there's like no feeling to it at all.
00:26:57.000Well, they sit in cubicles in groups of four and five.
00:27:05.000There's a big goddamn difference between that and someone who's writing shit like you're writing.
00:27:09.000Someone who's writing shit that resonates.
00:27:12.000I can tell, no matter what your influences are in this life, musically, or even while you're creating a song, it's all filtering through your unique individual vision.
00:27:23.000And that's entirely missing from all these poppy things.
00:27:27.000And that's something that people connect with.
00:27:49.000And there's a uniqueness to that, that your music has, that a lot of music, that it hits a different frequency, as opposed to a poppy frequency.
00:28:00.000And these people that are coming in that are just trying to exploit it and monetize it, they probably, that doesn't register with them.
00:28:07.000Or even if it does, they don't give a shit, because that's not where they're at.
00:28:09.000They're just worried about the quarterly report.
00:28:11.000Very seldom do any of the people running labels actually know anything or give a shit about music.
00:28:18.000That's really more of a recent development.
00:28:19.000A lot of them are run by very young guys now, like in their 30s, because the old ruse kind of went out, retired, and it kind of turned over.
00:28:28.000A lot of the dudes that were in LA in the 80s making all those awful hair metal band records.
00:28:33.000Those producers and engineers, once that industry dried up, a lot of them moved to Nashville.
00:28:37.000If you turn on the radio today, you'll find that a lot of that shit sounds exactly like a Poison record.
00:28:54.000Two or three decades ago, the label still offered up the other.
00:28:58.000You had all these great bands that were making art, because they knew they were going to sell a fuckton of copies and make their money back, so they were willing to take the risk.
00:29:07.000And now there's really no risk takers.
00:29:09.000And I don't know if that's because of it, maybe there's a lack of visionaries.
00:29:14.000Is it just because the money's dried up?
00:29:16.000I think they're all sitting in their corner offices looking out the window wishing it would go back to 1996 and twiddling their thumbs and praying to a dying business model.
00:29:27.000Because they're completely dependent on radio.
00:29:51.000It is a business, but it's sad to hear.
00:29:53.000It's just like flipping real estate or something.
00:29:55.000There's no artist development anymore.
00:29:59.000Luckily, I didn't try to do this at 22 or 26 because now I've worked real jobs and I was able to understand that, the mechanical aspect of it all.
00:30:09.000That's not the only way to do it anymore.
00:30:11.000You can just kind of bypass around that.
00:30:27.000I mean, I would imagine that being stuck singing some songs that you don't believe in and that are not really good, but everybody is really responding to, and you have something inside you that you wish you could have got out.
00:34:01.000I grew up kind of all over the country.
00:34:03.000Lived in San Francisco from age 7 to 11. Lived in Florida from 11 to 13. Boston from 13 to probably 23, 24. And then New York for a couple years.
00:35:12.000I mean, it's really hard to beat Seattle in the summertime.
00:35:16.000It's just that other nine months of the most dismal...
00:35:18.000I mean, I remember hanging my towel up to dry for taking a shower, and you'd come in there two days later, and it'd be like fucking lichen growing on.
00:37:12.000We were here, we did Conan, and played at the Troubadour a month or two back, and we were here for about four days, and that's the most time I've ever spent consecutively in L.A., but I've never been able to really get the lay of the land.
00:38:41.000I think it's ridiculous that people who want to work, they should be forced to stay in this shitty patch of dirt because they just got a bad roll of the dice and they were born there.
00:38:51.000The good spots, like here, we're scared it's going to bounce out somehow and they're going to come over and fuck it up.
00:38:55.000We just gotta figure out a way to not have it fuck it up.
00:38:58.000Just gotta figure out a way to not have crime and poverty and all the different issues that we've just completely ignored in poor communities.
00:39:05.000Not have that affect everybody's, like, level of happiness that's living in these big groups.
00:39:11.000But just to imprison someone in a shit country, because they were fucked and they were born there, just seems kind of crazy and inhumane to me.
00:41:01.000You know, that place is 20 times the size of New York City, and you could pass out in the darkest alley with a $100 bill sticking out of each year, and nobody's going to fuck with you.
00:41:11.000But there's a bunch of African dudes that are moving in there from Africa, like straight from Africa, these hustler guys.
00:41:16.000There's mostly Roppongi in some of the nightlife districts.
00:42:17.000You know, I hung out with a couple of Yakuza guys once.
00:42:20.000One of them was a bookie and the other one, I guess he was just like a, you know, you're sitting in bars and you'd be drunk, you know, and they all, especially if they learn you're American or if you speak English, they all want to talk to you and just figure out what you're about.
00:42:35.000And these guys, you know, they were drunk.
00:42:36.000We just ended up kicking it for a couple hours.
00:42:38.000Then I kind of put it together and realized what they did.
00:43:08.000And there's a lot of that, but they're in one specific part of the city, mostly Shinjuku, where all the pachinko parlors and organized gambling takes place and the red light.
00:43:20.000They make it very obvious who they are, you know what I mean?
00:43:28.000The government just kind of realized we can try to fight this or we can work with them.
00:43:33.000They do a lot of things for the communities that they're in, strangely enough, you know, to kind of keep order.
00:43:39.000But then at the same time you hear stories about some guy might owe a little too much money and they just literally go and beat him the fuck to death in a train station.
00:43:48.000With baseball bats or whatever in front of people and they don't do shit about it.
00:45:15.000He was more of a philosopher, really, than a martial artist?
00:45:19.000Well, he was absolutely a martial artist, but a lot of his writings I always found more interesting, more so than the actual art.
00:45:29.000Well, that was really a strange part of samurai culture.
00:45:32.000I shouldn't say strange, but unexpected.
00:45:34.000When I started investigating it, or reading about it rather, was that they were required to be balanced, and it was encouraged to be a very balanced person.
00:45:44.000Balanced like in your discipline, balanced in your artistic expression.
00:45:49.000Balanced in your understanding of emotions and fears.
00:45:52.000It was very different than what we think of as, like, a warrior.
00:45:55.000We think of, like, Stone Cold Murderer, Conan the Barbarian motherfucker, just...
00:46:00.000I think it was just, at its essence, pure, absolute Buddhism.
00:46:04.000Like, they just live completely in that moment all the time.
00:46:08.000Whatever they do, they're so intensely focused and, you know, in anything.
00:46:59.000And then with any kind of society like that, Ido or Kendo, whatever, there's a lot of mutual respect, I would imagine.
00:47:06.000Back in the day, if a peasant or somebody going to the fucking market, taking their fruit to sell, if they pass the samurai on the street and they didn't bow accordingly or just basically say good morning...
00:47:38.000I do think that when people are scared of other people in that way, or when they respect...
00:47:52.000I don't necessarily think that's the way to go, but I do think there is an element of people that need to know that they get punched in their fucking face.
00:48:00.000Like, there's a bunch of people that say rude shit to people, and they say it Only because they think they can, because they're protected by society, and because of that, they're oftentimes less respectful than someone who would be like a physically dominant person in the conversation.
00:48:16.000Like, I've seen martial artists have conversations with people where, you know, they're way, way...
00:48:25.000Way more kind or way more considerate in the way they've voiced their concerns or opinions about something versus people that have never been in a fight in their life that will get in people's face and scream and yell, and you motherfucker, and it's like, you're only doing that because this guy's not going to punch you.
00:48:42.000You know, you're having this conversation because you're out in public and you know this guy's not just going to pick you up and drop you on your head.
00:48:55.000The repercussions are only verbal, and they feel like if they keep it on that ground, they can bully the bully, even.
00:49:04.000They can go after them if they keep it completely verbal.
00:49:07.000If they know the guy's not going to do anything, you big fucking stupid piece of shit, and they know he's not going to smash your head like a zit.
00:49:15.000As long as you're protected by society, you can get away with being pretty shitty to some people.
00:49:22.000So I don't think it's good to chop people in half with swords, but I do think it might have something to do with the reason why they're considerate.
00:49:32.000You know, it's weird how cultures develop in these unusual ways when they're just separated.
00:49:40.000You know, they're separated from other people, so they've developed it.
00:49:44.000I mean, there's similarities to other Eastern cultures and their approach to things, but they're different.
00:49:50.000You know, they have their own thing going on.
00:49:52.000I think every place has its own thing going on.
00:49:55.000I was in D.C., I guess, back in April.
00:50:01.000I was trying to catch a train to go to a show.
00:50:03.000I can't remember if it was New York or Boston.
00:50:05.000I was at the Amtrak station in D.C. Something happened where there was a downed power line way up north that had taken out a lot of routes.
00:50:12.000They basically canceled or delayed all the trains going out of the station.
00:50:18.000When they put the announcement up, It just...
00:50:24.000I've never witnessed such a self-important display of human behavior in all my life as in Washington, D.C. that day at the Amtrak station.
00:50:34.000There's this line of suited, briefcased...
00:50:39.000You know, they all just got right in the Amtrak employees' faces one at a time, like, trying to explain to them how much more important their life was than everyone else's who had just been inconvenienced, you know, sitting in this place.
00:51:20.000Is that just the uber-successful, hyper-focused, shithead thing that we have that other countries just don't have?
00:51:28.000Like, they have the discipline, but they don't have this...
00:51:31.000Marauding focus thing that a lot of like American businessmen sort of embody this ideas go get you know it's Wall Street fucking Gordon Gekko greed is good now that kind of shit I was I would say you know Wall Street and DC places like this yeah tend to cultivate a bit more intense version of that I was just there Saturday night I had a great fucking time yeah it's a great party town but uh yeah I don't know what I mean I don't know what happened I just couldn't believe what I was seeing It seems like a weird place.
00:52:16.000There's the penthouse, which is just outside of there, and then there's the White House, which is this weird fucking building in a park where the commander-in-chief of the number one conquering army the world has ever known, that's where he sleeps.
00:52:29.000And everybody passes by the castle, some sort of strange formation, a big circle you drive around, everybody points at it.
00:52:53.000It's all very specific in its geometry.
00:52:56.000This may not be true, but I think I read somewhere that part of it, like why the streets are all one way and why it's so fucking confusing to drive around in D.C. is that in case it was ever invaded, they wanted to make it difficult...
00:53:08.000For whoever was coming to get from the shore into the capital.
00:54:25.000Yeah, the pine cone supposedly represents the pineal gland, which is the seed of the soul in ancient Egypt, which is where now they've actually proven that DMT is made.
00:54:36.000It's pretty speculative until real recently.
00:54:43.000Rick Strassman and that group that he's involved with, the Cottonwood Research Foundation, they put it together.
00:54:49.000And just getting in a live rodent, being able to prove that this third eye in the middle of your head actually is producing psychedelic chemicals.
00:56:10.000Well, what's fucked up is that there's hundreds of thousands of different plants.
00:56:14.000They found not just the right two, but they found out how to do it in this weird way where you have to mash up the vines and you add in the leaves and you boil it down.
00:56:25.000It's a very involved process that takes hours to make true ayahuasca.
00:57:19.000But that Rupert Sheldrake guy who was on before...
00:57:23.000Rupert, who was on a couple weeks ago, he thinks that everything has a memory.
00:57:27.000He thinks that objects contain a memory.
00:57:29.000And that's why people don't want to live in a house where someone's been killed.
00:57:33.000Like you walk in, you have a weird feeling.
00:57:35.000I'd say one of the more common side effects of high-dose psilocybin is inanimate objects tend to develop personalities or you kind of perceive them as much more characterized than normally.
00:57:50.000It's all condensed matter, you know, so who fuck knows, man.
00:58:58.000I'm definitely a hobbyist, but I'm fascinated by, like, string theory and the concept of independent, freestanding, dimensional realms of energy that all kind of hold one another together.
00:59:10.000I'm fascinated that someone's mind is not just so tuned in to how the nature of the universe works, but so tuned in that they've taken this theoretical particle and made it the subject of this gigantic science project that involves hundreds of different fucking countries.
00:59:31.000I think it's like 100 different countries, over 10,000 different scientists, something like that.
00:59:35.000The photo gallery of the actual facility is one of the most insane things I've ever seen.
00:59:41.000The amount of time and years it took them to build this thing is just...
01:00:51.000I think it's so heavy that if you had a piece of it that you could look at, like a marble, it would probably sink through the center of the universe.
01:00:59.000I mean, just go right through your fucking...
01:01:54.000The origin, like the first point of all complex consciousness, or the source of the universe that emanated everything that we know and that ever has been into existence.
01:02:07.000He was basically trying to establish a symbiotic relationship between science and religion and evolution and spirituality, which wasn't a very popular opinion in the Vatican in the 1920s.
01:02:22.000He had this theory that it all emanated from this one point, the omega point, and that eventually consciousness will reach a state of complexity that's so advanced that it will no longer require a physical vessel or a human body or anything to inhabit itself.
01:02:37.000And then it will keep evolving until it returns.
01:02:51.000Well, once it goes back Basically, the reality as we perceive it, and this is according to a lot of modern quantum physics, it's just this manifestation that we sort of project out to convince ourself that we're not actually consciousness experiencing itself.
01:05:33.000If there was a Big Bang, why wouldn't we think that there could be an infinite number of Big Bangs?
01:05:38.000An infinite number of expansions and contractions, and maybe what we are currently, and we like to think of as the highest state of life available, what we are is just this is what exists when you have this state of the universe.
01:05:51.000And there's a type of consciousness that exists when the universe becomes no longer physical.
01:05:56.000And that might be what you're experiencing when you smoke DMT. You might be experiencing these other forms of reality that are there.
01:06:04.000You just don't tune into them while you're in this state.
01:06:06.000You can access them through these chemical doorways while you're sleeping, while you're meditating, when you reach these different tunes of mind that people have been exercising and having these...
01:06:54.000Well, the first time, I didn't know what I was doing.
01:06:57.000And the bubbling, it was just weird...
01:07:00.000Everything was just some weird associations that kind of freaked me out.
01:07:02.000And I was like, there's no way this is going to be healthy.
01:07:04.000But then the second time, I got this extreme...
01:07:08.000I don't know how to describe it other than say it was an intense downward shift in what felt like gravity.
01:07:13.000You know that crest at the top of the first hill on a roller coaster where everything just kind of...
01:07:17.000I felt like something was pushing me down.
01:07:23.000And then I'd read so much and researched so much.
01:07:26.000Most of my understanding came from reading and how that tied together with other experiences that I've had or how that related to things that I've always been fascinated with or...
01:07:38.000Subscribe to, maybe, on a personal notion.
01:07:42.000It felt like something putting you almost in a trance.
01:07:49.000I don't think I got a very strong dose.
01:07:52.000Were you taking regular DMT or 5-MeO DMT? The NN. So you didn't have any visuals?
01:07:59.000No, I had some visuals, but I wouldn't say that it was probably as intense as the strongest psilocybin trip I've ever had, but I was still very much...
01:08:14.000Almost like these Easter Island head sort of things, sort of just kind of coming out of the void with chasers, and it felt like something, it was like the cusp of something, and it was kind of over.
01:08:29.000The room definitely looked, there was a weird energy, like everything had this crystalline sort of melty effect, but it wasn't overwhelming.
01:08:38.000Certainly not anything like what they've described, like some of the research volunteers talked about.
01:08:42.000The volunteers are doing it slightly differently because they were doing...
01:09:11.000Yeah, there's no resisting it at that point.
01:09:14.000Yeah, my knowledge is from a purely amateur academia and incorporating that into certain other things.
01:09:22.000How it may or may not resemble elements of Tibetan Buddhism and what people describe, like the bardos and independent realms of energy, where your soul is faced with these entities that test you in ways and how you react to those determine how you might transmigrate or reincarnate into another life.
01:09:40.000I didn't even know about it until a year ago.
01:09:42.000I was visiting a buddy of mine that was in town.
01:09:47.000Which is really strange, because I've listened to your podcast off and on for a while, and I used to listen to a lot of Terrence lectures, and for whatever reason, I never heard about it.
01:09:56.000Or maybe it passed in front of me when I was younger, and I didn't know what it was, and just said no, because it's related, it's like a PCP or something.
01:10:04.000But yeah, I was sitting at a friend of mine's house, and his father, I can't remember if his father had already passed, or if he was just, he'd gotten very ill with terminal cancer, and...
01:10:14.000He was pretty distraught about it, and we were just hanging out, and he was kind of telling me everything he'd been dealing with, and, you know, I didn't know what to really say, or to comfort him, you know, because he's obviously, you know, you find out your dad's dying.
01:10:28.000And, you know, I just was like, well, you know, man, some people think that there's no such thing as death, and...
01:10:35.000You know, you live to die and we die so we can really live and you know like the Buddhists think that there's this other realm you go to It's just the most pure bliss and like this ocean of love and you and you feel that joy and euphoria and either go on to Nirvana or you go back into another life depending how you live this one and he's like man that sounds a lot like DMT I was like what the fuck is DMT and uh He's like,
01:11:06.000He played an excerpt right there on the porch from one of your podcasts where you kind of got on this rant about it.
01:11:12.000I'm like, alright, I need to dig in here because I'm seeing a lot of similarities and symbiotic Touchstones and I went home.
01:11:20.000Man, I probably spent the next three months just reading everything I could find and scouring forums and then going back and reading metaphysical publications and a lot of theology and bouncing the shit around.
01:11:34.000And then I found out my wife was going to have a child.
01:11:36.000And it just was like my last great existentialistic dilemma, you know what I mean?
01:11:40.000So I was like, I want to write a record about all this shit.
01:11:43.000And record it like it was in outer space.
01:11:46.000And then Dave and I just kind of wanted to tackle it from a standpoint in terms of the mix.
01:11:50.000I wanted it to sound like a lot of my favorite records did that I used to listen to when I was high out of my fucking mind on Mushrooms or Dextromethorphan or anything else, you know.
01:11:59.000And you can do all that with tape, I think.
01:12:03.000Like we were talking about vinyl earlier, it's settled.
01:12:05.000So when you put the headphones on, you want it to kind of just figure eight around your head, you know.
01:12:11.000And you can do that with tape better than you can digitally?
01:12:14.000A lot of people will say no, but I think the end result is a much better texture, for lack of a better term.
01:12:38.000And then you lose that human fingerprint.
01:12:41.000The quality of the actual sound of the instrument itself.
01:12:44.000Everything, I think, to a certain degree has to be understated.
01:12:47.000Isn't there like there's something really cool about hearing the pick moving across the guitar when you know that that's what you're hearing?
01:12:55.000It gives you this certain strange connection and then instead if that was like cleaned up and this perfect sound, this perfect synthesized sound, it's still a cool thing, but it's missing out on whatever Whatever makes...
01:13:11.000Whatever that unique feeling that you get from someone's art is.
01:15:38.000Even though, I mean, I got a wife that I love and a four-month-old son that I've seen exactly like 12 days of his life, and I spend all the time in a van with three or four stinky other dudes going out and playing to a bunch of drunk strangers, and it's still the greatest fucking job on the planet.
01:15:56.000And if it never went anywhere beyond where it is right now for me, I feel like I've just basically clawed my way to the beginning, as it were.
01:16:04.000And if we're playing clubs to 300 or 500 people, I mean, I can make a living at some point doing that.
01:16:14.000I don't have to wake up and report to anybody.
01:16:16.000I'm not sitting in fucking meetings for a week about what my haircut should look like.
01:16:21.000I just feel like there's a lot of people you used to see back in club dates and you can tell the blatant, blinding narcissism that permeates this industry where people literally almost come to fucking fistfights over who's going to play what set spot at this rinky-dink club that nobody gives a shit about just because they think There's gonna be somebody there that's gonna recognize my genius and that's gonna change everything.
01:16:47.000And I think you get a lot of entitlement because of that.
01:16:52.000And that's, to me, probably the worst aspect of working in the music business is entitled musicians.
01:17:01.000Yeah, well, everybody comes at it from a different place, and everybody, I'm talking about sort of all aspects of show business, and everybody handles their own needs in a different way.
01:17:13.000Some people go in less needy, some people are just completely obsessed with the idea of success, and it just permeates every cell of their body.
01:17:21.000It's the end goal, as opposed to the actual art.
01:18:10.000And I've been very fortunate in that regard where I was found sort of by maybe the handful of actually trustworthy folks in town.
01:18:20.000I mean, my manager never took a dollar from me for the first three years.
01:18:23.000He was just kind of like a friend that gave me solid advice and told me what not to do because he'd watch guys like me get chewed up and spit out for 20 years, you know?
01:18:32.000He was almost retired, basically, and he just said, I'll help you, and if it turns into a gig, I want the gig.
01:18:37.000He was like, all right, man, you got a deal.
01:18:41.000Just kind of like put this wall up between a lot of that shit that happens to a lot of people and they get taken advantage of and you end up bitter as a result and your creativity suffers.
01:18:52.000So I just decided, well, if I just don't have anything to do with any of that, then that can't ever happen.
01:18:57.000So now, four years later, you know, I have a great booking agent, I have a manager, and these people that kind of help facilitate us getting out and playing shows on the road.
01:19:08.000I mean, I could start a tour from anywhere.
01:19:10.000So my wife and I talked about that, and I was like, why do we even still live here?
01:20:15.000Typically I don't like to play songs I haven't recorded.
01:20:18.000So I get in the studio, formulate it, and then get it down and committed, and then they kind of tend to come to life all on their own over the course of a year and a half.
01:20:27.000You know, you end up at the end of a tour, that song sounds nothing like the one you put down on tape.
01:20:45.000Obviously, eight months later, from the time you recorded that song, If you've been playing every night for two hours, if you haven't become a better musician by that time, then you're doing this for the wrong reasons.
01:20:56.000So now when you go in to make your next record, ideally, you've trained harder.
01:21:48.000And I was only traveling for two days.
01:21:50.000You know, just the flying back and forth from Philly to D.C., L.A. to Philly, Philly to D.C., D.C. to L.A. Do that in two days, and you're just like, ugh.
01:21:59.000If you could just stay put, if they could all come to you.
01:22:22.000Truthfully for me, man, it's really bittersweet, everything that's happening right now, because I've been, like I said, off and on for a lot of different reasons that I've put it down over the years, but I've been doing this a long time at a very thankless capacity,
01:22:38.000so it's all just been very passion-driven.
01:22:43.000I've got a newborn son and everything's happening and I'm just slammed so much that I'm exhausted a lot of times.
01:22:51.000It's really weird because I'm out here and all this stuff we've worked so hard for has finally happened, but a lot of days I just really want to be at home.
01:23:46.000Because album sales are a real issue now, right?
01:23:48.000It's so funny, because people back home that I haven't talked to since I was in high school, and all of a sudden you start getting texts from unknown numbers and shit, and people you haven't talked to, and they're like, man, you fucking made it, man.
01:25:04.000And then about a year later, once we're coming back off tour, we're about five grand in the black.
01:25:09.000And I just spent all this time on the road with this young band I'd put together working out all these songs and just decided, all right, well, let's just go make a record.
01:25:35.000And so I think the whole thing cost about $4,500.
01:25:40.000And it was just very, very inexpensive to make an album.
01:25:46.000And now this record that sort of started, I guess, what we'll call the beginning of a career...
01:25:53.000If I'd have taken that in and tried to shop it to anybody, you know, any major label or music row entity or even a lot of indie labels and had laid that down, one, it's a country record.
01:26:05.000Two, I'm talking about reptile aliens and fucking turtles and shit, man.
01:26:09.000You know exactly as well as I do how that would have gone.
01:26:19.000It's like an old comedic reference to the infinite regress problem in cosmology, which, you know...
01:26:31.000Basically all the shit we were talking about earlier and there's a story I guess there was some professor at Oxford or somewhere giving a speech and explaining how the universe works and everything else and some little lady stood up and said you know that's really clever I know you think you're smart but you're wrong and he's like oh yeah well what's the truth and she's like well the earth sits on the back of this giant cosmic turtle and he carries it through space and he said well what's carrying the turtle and she's like oh that's very clever but it's another turtle And
01:27:07.000And so Hawking referenced this in Brief History of Time.
01:27:11.000And it's weird because you can look back, um, Hindu cosmology and a lot of, uh, Some Native American tribes, they all held these, like, earthly turtles in high reverence and the symbology of it all.
01:27:24.000And you find that story in different cultures throughout, you know, space, but thousands of years with this weird reference to this cosmic turtle.
01:27:33.000And I know the Indians or the Hindus thought there were these four elephants standing on the back of the turtle and the earth was a flat disc resting on its back.
01:27:45.000That it was really, the record at its core is about love, you know, being like this one universal truth.
01:27:53.000A lot of people look to religion, a lot of people look to drugs, and I'm not saying you can't get really spiritual experiences from all those things, but I think love at the end of the day is the one thing that really I've ever found forced me to want to wake up and really try to be a better human being every day,
01:28:11.000So that was the main point of the album.
01:28:13.000The Turtles thing was just kind of, it's a way of saying, if you get into an argument with somebody and you realize it's just pointless and you're going back and forth, it's Turtles all the way down.
01:31:57.000We used to throw marshmallows into this place called Lake Alice and they would come up and snatch up the marshmallows and And I never would have thought that they would get so plentiful that they would start hunting them.
01:32:07.000But now, they're trying to kill as many alligators as they can.
01:32:15.000Where you go out with, like, some dude with three teeth and jumps on the lily pond and starts smacking these alligators in the head and shit.
01:32:23.000But at the end of it, he had this little baby alligator in a cooler on the boat just torturing the shit out of this poor animal, you know, at a...
01:33:31.000Yeah, this guy, he jumps out on this little grass pond and you just see like eight of them in succession come out of nowhere and start swimming towards him.
01:33:39.000You know, he understands the behaviorism and the sight line, but I'm just, and this guy had this massive scar on his bald head and literally three teeth in his head.
01:33:47.000He's like, you know, and then I'm like, I'm going to watch this guy die.
01:35:59.000I bet alligators are probably similar in that way.
01:36:03.000I worked with a guy in the yard, Corey was a big hunter, and he would bow hunt, and he moved up to Wyoming because he could get like four or six more tags a year than he could in Utah, and he'd drive that hour and a half every day.
01:36:18.000Blizzards to come to this job just so the kid would just eat up with it, man.
01:36:22.000But apparently he set, I think, the longest distance shot in Wyoming at 23, and then he'd hunt moose and elk and everything else with a bow.
01:36:30.000But he would cut in, he'd bring in these venison, like, filet cutlet medallions of elk meat, and we had a grill down at the Swiss Shack, and he'd cook that shit.
01:36:37.000It was the best fucking thing I've ever tasted in my life.
01:41:07.000People have these big giant game preserves and they have buffalo on them that you can hunt and they have buffalo in these livestock places where you buy like farm-raised buffalo.
01:41:31.000Apparently, there's a guy that I'm going to have on the podcast that Steve Rinella recommended to me that can explain in great detail what actually happened to the Buffalo, but that there's a lot of misconceptions about why the Buffalo population was so high.
01:41:48.000And he says there's a direct correlation between smallpox that when the French and the Spaniards, when they brought over smallpox or whoever brought it, I guess it was the French, it wiped out like 90% of the Native American population.
01:42:01.000And during that time, the buffalo population just exploded.
01:42:05.000So when we came along and started slaughtering These buffalo in mass, when I say we, white people, obviously it wasn't you and me, it was a long time ago.
01:42:20.000The reason why those guys were able to find these animals in such giant numbers was because the Native Americans had experienced this massive loss of casualty.
01:42:29.000I mean, massive 90% casualty rate because of smallpox.
01:42:33.000Because they were apparently, at least in this guy's book, he's going to come on the podcast soon, we're working out the dates, they were on the verge of, I guess extirpation is what they call it, when it's local extinction, because the Native Americans had figured out horseback riding.
01:42:51.000And once they figured out horseback riding, over the course of a couple hundred years, whatever it was, they had almost completely abandoned agriculture, and they were just chasing down the bison and killing them like fucking crazy.
01:43:00.000Yeah, so the idea was that they were on the verge of killing off the buffalo even before those crazy assholes came in and did it later on, hundreds of years later.
01:43:10.000It's just the smallpox got them and then just...
01:45:01.000I keep wondering if that's possible again.
01:45:03.000If somewhere in the future, because of the transparency that we're experiencing now with social media, with the internet, with the access to information that we have today, I wonder if eventually the bullshit artists will all be exposed to the point where they won't be viable anymore.
01:49:59.000I mean, when you see this new door opening up for you, you know, when you see, like, all of a sudden your career, like you said, you've clawed your way to the beginning, you're obviously, there's some shit going on, man.
01:50:10.000I mean, I told you my friend Justin told me about you right when I, like, he goes, man, he goes, there's this dude, Sturgill Simpson.
01:50:17.000And as soon as he said that, I go, dude, I've been listening to nothing but him for two fucking weeks.
01:50:21.000And we were laughing and joking around.
01:51:43.000A lot of artists keep recording in order to maintain some sense of relevancy or just because, well, it's been a year's time to make a record.
01:51:51.000I just don't ever want to find myself in that position where I'm...
01:53:56.000Like expanding your horizons in some sort of great and unforeseen way?
01:54:00.000I mean, by not doing this when I was younger, I was out doing a lot of other things that kind of culminated into whoever the hell I think I'm trying to be today.
01:54:09.000So incorporating those experiences and a lot of those stories and people I've known and characters I've met, and then maybe even embellishing upon that in a somewhat autobiographical sense, but still telling these stories in a way that other people say, yeah, I feel that way too.
01:54:45.000Is this a rigid idea that you have, or do you think that it's possible that you can get to that three albums from now and then go, you know what, I'm enjoying the fucking shit out of this.
01:55:11.000Well, I mean, outside of that, I think...
01:55:13.000Well, I say that just because I have those albums pretty clearly in my head, and I do what they'll sound like and what they'll be about.
01:55:20.000And, you know, someday you're dead, and everybody that ever knew you is dead, and it's like you were never here.
01:55:27.000But that little thing, I don't know what else I would really have to say about...
01:55:34.000My version of the human experience past a certain point unless I go turn it off and do another 30 or 40 years of living and then make five more albums.
01:55:43.000Any real artist, their best work is always in their pinnacle peak and then right before they die.
01:55:48.000And then you get this ocean of mediocrity of just kind of fumbling through existence there.
01:55:59.000That's an interesting perspective, because you really think that when a guy puts out an album, or these parallels to authors, to a lot of different art forms, you spend your entire life thinking, and then you express yourself like the culmination of this life.
01:56:18.000Well, there's a really interesting thing of somebody, I think my buddy Jason Isbell put up there and retweeted, talks about it takes 20 years to write your first record, you get a year to write your second record.
01:56:31.000And it really doesn't matter what you do, because music's the devil's work, and you're fucked anyway.
01:56:37.000But yeah, it's like, you know, you squeeze all this...
01:56:40.000I had a good 30 years of fucking up and mistakes and lessons and, you know, a lot of personal...
01:56:49.000You know, development and certain experiences that I had that led me to kind of recognize and look at things that caused me to live that way.
01:56:57.000And then to come out of the other side of that, like, really supported and understood by someone that met me at my absolute worst and then helped me to get right here.
01:57:06.000It's just like I have all this clarity now.
01:57:08.000And, you know, I think the only way...
01:58:30.000When I got out of the Navy, living in Seattle, those were some darker days.
01:58:34.000You were saying that earlier about Seattle not just being the weather, but what the weather does to people.
01:58:40.000Yeah, at some point I just became very disenchanted, disillusioned with the military, so I got out and stuck around there for like a year.
01:58:49.000So there's that disenchantment, disillusionment, and then there's living in Seattle where you're dealing with the dreariness at the same time.
01:59:01.000You know, I was excited, this young relationship, and I was going to all these parties and meeting people and exposed to things I probably never would have been otherwise, and just kind of, you know, took it at face value for experience and jumped in, and then there was a lot of, you know, there was a lot of hard narcotics in that area,
01:59:18.000and I realized that those weren't very well for me, and Like heroin?
02:00:07.000It was more exploratory just because I knew there was something else beyond whatever this is.
02:00:14.000Maybe that's what I was trying to find, but...
02:00:17.000Now, how did you get involved with Rick Strassman?
02:00:20.000How did you find out about him and how did you meet him?
02:00:22.000Well, like I said, my buddy played when we were talking on the porch last year and then he played your little excerpt.
02:00:28.000I went home that night and just kind of started scouring the internet on the subject and a lot of things related to it and I found Dr. Strassman's book.
02:00:36.000Downloaded it and read it probably three times and it just absolutely blew my mind.
02:00:42.000All the correlating aspects of that conversation.
02:00:46.000And I think what might have ultimately led him to it or what he was looking for in terms of its relation to...
02:01:58.000So yeah, once I finished the record and had it mixed and mastered, I'm sort of like looking back through everything that sort of led to this happening.
02:02:19.000That Dr. Strassman did, and I guess the bravery it took on his part to open that conversation back up in a field, especially in the professional medical world, was so stigmatized.
02:02:30.000I can't imagine the balls that must have taken after spending years of your life following this profession and all the school you underwent.
02:03:10.000But he's got some really fascinating stories of his explorations in this realm, not just physically, but just dealing with the red tape that was required to do a real FDA study.
02:03:22.000Two years of bureaucratic nightmare, man.
02:03:24.000Yeah, to do one of the first psychedelic studies that, you know, have a real scholar involved in testing people on some serious Schedule I hallucinogens.
02:03:36.000The Army Research Lab, they were aware of that shit in the 60s.
02:03:41.000That's how McKenna found out about it.
02:03:43.000Terrence McKenna got a hold of DMT through a friend who was a chemist at the Army Research Lab, and apparently this guy had a barrel of it.
02:04:35.000It's what Terrence McKenna would call a heroic dose, five dried grams.
02:04:41.000And I was like, who's this McKenna guy?
02:04:43.000And so I started looking into McKenna and reading some of the things that I could find about him online and then listening to some audio recordings.
02:04:52.000But he was already dead by the time I had found out about him, unfortunately.
02:04:58.000But his, you know, his discovery of DMT and the way he described it in one of his audio recordings was just one of the most amazing things I've ever heard.
02:05:07.000Because this is a guy who had already done like LSD and Morning Glory Seeds and he had experienced psilocybin and he thought he had really traveled.
02:05:15.000He kind of knew what was available and out there.
02:05:18.000I mean, in dentists they did a lot of traveling, I guess, but Man, like the iboga and, like I said, DMT, I don't really have any experience to speak of firsthand, so I try not to talk about it.
02:05:33.000Well, you know, Dr. Strassman said that, and I'm inclined to agree, although at this point, like, I should have a fucking PhD in this shit.
02:05:43.000I've read about it, and I don't even know what the firsthand aspect is, but...
02:05:46.000He said at this point in my life now that all these things are formulating and my career is budding and I have a newborn son that there's a high potential it could make for a pretty unsettling experience because it's all this stuff that's finally happening in my life that's so positive.
02:05:59.000Like the idea of thinking you're dying and having to let go of that could make for an unsettling experience.
02:06:38.000LSD, the few times I tried LSD, though, I didn't really enjoy it because every time it seemed like on the tail end of the trip, it takes this turn and there's almost a sinister underlying energy about it.
02:06:52.000I don't know that I've never experienced with psilocybin.
02:07:00.000It's the starting gate for psychedelics and to that I say go eat 12 or 15 grams and tell me that you're Yeah, the starting gate is only if you have a small...
02:07:57.000I was trying to still have conversations with him, but he was just this...
02:08:00.000Sea of patterns, you know, that like blurrily represented what his physical form was, but it was all just like really tiny flower of loves, you know, that little flower of life thing.
02:08:12.000I mean, his entire body was made out of those, as was all the walls around us.
02:08:18.000I mean, it's almost identical to dimethyltryptamine, the molecular footprint, right?
02:08:57.000Well, yeah, I mean, demethyltryptamine, for sure, we know that.
02:09:01.000We know that it's created in the liver, it's created in the lungs, it's not just created in the pineal gland, it's created in other parts of your body.
02:09:08.000They also know that it's in like, you know, who knows how many fucking plants, like a shitload of plants.
02:09:30.000I mean, it really forces you to look at a lot of things maybe you don't want to or you're unable to and just kind of pulls apart the defense mechanism, you know.
02:11:05.000Well, I mean, they're trying to crack down now on the prescriptions, on pain medication prescriptions, because there are so many people that are addicted to them, and they've realized, look, we've made a nation of junkies.
02:11:15.000I mean, I'll tell you, the part of the country you're from, man, I mean, that is fucking, that is prescription drug central, right?
02:11:45.000And then, but all the major industry was based on coal, which slowly evolved from strip mining, or from deep mining, I'm sorry, into strip mining once they figured out they could get the coal with less bodies.
02:11:56.000And so that just kind of leveled the topography.
02:11:59.000But then even when that industry sort of dried up and they moved on, well, the coal pulled out and then Walmart and Oxycontin moved in.
02:12:07.000And it, I mean, within a matter of years, it just completely changed the entire face of the region.
02:12:13.000And now it's just, you know, people say poor.
02:14:13.000I hope really that's what becomes the next savior.
02:14:16.000And it will change the consciousness, too.
02:14:19.000You know how that's going to go when DuPont and all the petroleum industries and everybody else start throwing more money and making it not happen.
02:15:48.000You can make the kind of weed that these botanist motherfuckers in California and Colorado and Washington State are making.
02:15:57.000You know, like everything else, at some point it is going to go mainstream, and then they're going to commodify the hell out of it and commercialize it, and everywhere you go is going to look like a 14-year-old's bedroom.
02:16:57.000They're going to grow neighborhood growing weed operations.
02:17:01.000And if they do allow small businesses to grow it, I think The law as it stated today is that you have to grow the marijuana and then sell it.
02:17:10.000You couldn't grow it and then sell it to me and then I buy it and sell it.
02:18:39.000And then you're showing these drops in crime, drops in DUIs, drops in murder.
02:18:45.000Like, there's nothing you can say other than, let's try this somewhere else.
02:18:50.000Any state that's struggling, any state that doesn't have some sort of a massive resource pool, like natural oil or gas or something like that that it's relying on, if they are in need of an industry, boy, that's a fucking pretty easy one.
02:19:51.000I think they all kind of moved out to the outskirts, so now you've got this little hotbed of rebellion right there in the middle of it all, you know?
02:20:00.000Wise Guys Comedy Club, that place is the shit.
02:20:03.000And it's right in Salt Lake, and all my friends who work there, they all come back and go, Dude, have you been to Salt Lake?
02:20:09.000It's the best kept secret in the United States.
02:22:29.000We were out here months ago for this, played with Greg Allman down at the Annenberg Center, and some guy came, or somebody gave us these little, man, they were tiny.
02:22:39.000They were like these little, tiny little cupcakes with like a peace sign on the top of it.
02:23:08.000Yeah, they're saying that Bruce Lee's brain had been swollen when they checked his autopsy.
02:23:15.000They said there was no visible external injury.
02:23:18.000However, according to autopsy reports, his brain had swollen considerably from 1,400 to 1,575 grams, which is a 13% increase, which is pretty big.
02:23:28.000He was only 32. The only substance found during his autopsy was equagesic.
02:23:40.000The doctor said in an interview that he died from an allergic reaction to the muscle relaxant in equagesic, whatever it is, which is described as a common ingredient in painkillers.
02:23:52.000Doctors announced Lee's death officially.
02:24:09.000You know, if you're doing the kind of shit that he was doing, he was experimenting a lot with various martial arts and had a, most likely, he got hit.
02:24:17.000I mean, that's just a part of the game.
02:24:19.000And if he was doing really experimental, wild stuff like I know he was, I mean, he's involved in a lot of different, sort of assimilating a lot of different martial arts styles.
02:24:29.000I'm sure Don Inosanto got a shot or two in there somewhere, you know, I mean, come on.
02:26:43.000And then the edibles, you're right, it's an entirely different feeling.
02:26:47.000It's more of an anti-anxiety, almost like an overall body high.
02:26:50.000Whereas if you try to go out on stage, I can't smoke and perform because you get so internalized, I feel like I can't connect with the crowd at all.
02:27:35.000Well, in the sensory deprivation tank, it's very psychedelic when you eat it because you're in that experience which is so bizarre as it is.
02:27:46.000Yeah, you don't even really need drugs in those things, do you?
02:29:14.000I think what I would classify as the most psychedelic experience I've ever had was from a drug that's not even normally associated with the psychedelic family, which is dextromethorphan.
02:30:01.000My buddy Brian, he's like, you know, Sturgill, you need to hear music on this.
02:30:06.000He's like, it's as good as it fucking gets.
02:30:07.000So, first off, the weirdest part of the whole experience is we're out in this KOA campground in North Carolina, and we're just surrounded by hippies, and there's tanks going off and shit, and that ain't my thing.
02:30:44.000He's like, just close your eyes, trust me.
02:30:45.000And I closed my eyes, and I swear as I'm sitting here, it was all of a sudden, like, I could see the trail, plainest day, directly in front of me, and almost like the entire canopy had this moon lamp just turned on and flooded it with light, and everything was so clear.
02:31:00.000And we walked all the way back down to his truck.
02:31:14.000I've never even met anybody that's even heard of it or knew where to find it since, but Brian used to get tons of this shit, and he'd just lay with his headphones on for like eight hours in his living room and listen to music, and you're completely...
02:31:54.000It's the same feeling, except instead of an inner two, I was laying in my own little personal cloud.
02:31:58.000Just as I'm sitting here talking to you, I was in this cloud, cruising through this golden, sienna, purple sunrise sky, just like the most booming...
02:32:09.000It's the most blissful euphoria I've ever felt listening to Jimi Hendrix.
02:32:50.000Well, that's one of the most important resources Arrowhead is for people understanding what they're getting into.
02:32:56.000There's a lot of really educated, very well-thought-out reviews of the various compounds and different...
02:33:04.000Different effects they have in people's trip reports.
02:33:07.000I didn't know anything about it until then, and I've never seen it since, but I do remember the guy saying that the difference in three or four or two hundred milligrams is, you know, a thousand times stronger trip.
02:33:18.000So, you know, nobody's ever really documented the ladder, so to speak.
02:33:32.000The only thing I remember is I might have had a slight allergic reaction, because I remember feeling like I had sun poisoning, and I was really scratching my back, kind of tripping out on this for a second.
02:33:44.000This was on the early onset, and the guys were like, what are you doing?
02:34:08.000You always wonder if it was easy for people to do research on psychedelics and it was respected and it was something that people pursued as opposed to being like, you know, if you do research on certain things,
02:35:11.000Well, like, kind of ridiculous approaches to dealing with heroin and methadone addiction, and I know they did some psychedelic studies, I'm sure, back there, but, you know, the hospital still stands there, and it's just the most ominous, creepy building.
02:36:20.000They were these dudes that came over from the methadone clinic, and they'd come over and play pool, and they were just zombified, just dead in the eyes.
02:38:46.000I saw a really sensationalist piece about this on some national news program the other night because children were getting a hold of them and having overdoses.
02:39:44.000Well, when I say overdose, all it means is I'm going to go lay in bed and have a really good time instead of walking around and having a really good time.
02:40:59.000It also says that the cookie he ate didn't give him the recommended immediate effect that he wanted, so then he ate six times the recommended dose.
02:44:36.000I think really drunk guys are the worst because they're more violent than the really drunk girls.
02:44:40.000You know, it's sad that the shows, they're the only ones that ever want to talk to me.
02:44:44.000Like, the other guys in the band are young, and they get hit on by the girls.
02:44:47.000The girls never want to talk to Sturgill, man.
02:44:48.000It's always, like, the really big, like, large, drunk guy.
02:44:54.000And they all, like, give me the bear hug, and I get the whaling thing.
02:44:59.000And then they're just, like, hugging me, and I'm levitating off the ground, and they're giving me, like, this thing, like, fucking man, you're the shit, dude.
02:45:06.000Yeah, like, one song, man, damn, dude.
02:47:14.000But yeah, traditional Irish music and a lot of Scottish fiddle tunes, like the mandolins tune in D, just like a bagpipe, because when the pipes got outlawed, they started playing a lot of those songs on stringed instruments.
02:49:32.000But I've just had a lot of friends that are musicians that said if you make the effort and you go over and they see you taking the trouble and the time to come over, they're loyal, they're just fans for life.
02:49:43.000I'll probably still be touring over there long after any career I have here has dried up.
02:53:58.000Tell people, your website, SturgillSimpson.com, your two albums, you can get them on iTunes, and I listed them off while you were taking a leak.
02:54:10.000If anybody's interested, you gotta, I mean, my favorite songs, there's a bunch of them.
02:54:15.000You Can Have the Crown, I fucking love that.
02:54:17.000Off your first one, that's a great fucking...
02:55:38.000They're both very different, which I thought was really fascinating, too, before I got to meet you and understand what it's from, what caused it.