Gentlemen, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having us.
It's an honor, man.
How long have you guys been playing together as a band?
I've been in the band for 24 years.
And it was a local band two years before that, so 26 years.
Yeah. We've been playing together for 24 years, though.
Have you got any idea how many shows you've done?
No. I don't. Do you?
2 ,500, maybe? Where'd you get that number from?
24 years, 100 shows a year, something like that.
There's been years where we've done 06, though.
Probably more. I got married the first time in 06.
And we did, that year, we did over 300 shows.
Holy fuck. Because I remember I got married in Salt Lake City and no honeymoon, anything.
72 hours later, you know.
Back on the road. Back on the road with Taking Back Sunday.
I remember that tour specifically.
So, it was us, Taking Back Sunday, and a band called Armor for Sleep.
I remember Armor for Sleep.
They were the opener, yeah.
So, we started that tour three days after I got married.
So, I bet you it's more than a hundred a year.
Yeah. We played over a hundred last year.
So at least 2 ,000, maybe 3 ,000, maybe - I'd say 3 ,000 to 4 ,000 shows.
Yeah. I'd say 30 - You realize that's insane?
It is. I mean, I think it's weird to think about doing something for a quarter of a century.
Like you hear people like, oh, I've been married for 30 years.
You're like, wow, that's impressive.
And then it's like, yeah, we've been in a band for 25 years, like the same band.
Yeah. Playing some of the same songs.
I was going to say, how many times have you played Their Only Chasing Safety?
I mean, literally - literally every single show probably boy brush read like those like the bigger quotation finger songs off that record yep like something i think about a lot as you were just saying that i think about this so much is the people i love the most in the world like my wife and children i have spent more time with him than them do you know what i mean and i don't know why it does it does a number on my head sometimes if i really if i really like if i get introspective about it it fucks me up for and i don't know why i and i think there's a piece of like there's a piece of guilt or something
about that to me and i i never really talked about that but it's and i don't know if guilt is the right word but there's like a thing like if i think about the fact that like i love you and i love spending time with you but like if i think if i think about it it's strange and i don't know you know what do you think the emotion is when you feel it the one that keeps coming into my mouth right now just looking at you is guilt because you spend x amount of time all the time away from your wife and children with someone else and what we do is fun and I and I I'm cognizant enough to know that I shouldn't
be guilty that doesn't make any sense like technically but for some reason I feel that sometimes yeah it's it's an interesting emotion when you love what you do so it's kind of it's I think if we were oil riggers and we had to leave for seven or eight months and we were in like the middle of the ocean like eating shit it'd be different because there's a sense of nobility and sacrifice yeah that doesn't happen when you're fuck like there's a type of intimacy i have with my bandmates that i'm never gonna have with my wife like there's a type of intimacy that you have like if if you're dating a musician there's
a type of intimacy that that person has with a fucking random keyboardist playing in an airport that you as a non -musician will never ever know a non -spoken synergy yeah yeah and it's like yeah doing something you love it it can almost creep in personally on both sides like the wife you know our partner side and ours it's like oh we have you know we've got to go to austin and do all these things and it's like oh you know it's very easy to go oh it must be so difficult hanging out with like chris or hanging out with your friends and going to the comedy mothership and all this stuff and it's like
it's weird that this is our job you know it's weird that talking to you is something that i would do for fun because i'm a big fan of you and what you've done and the kind of journey you've been on and then for that to be a priority because we happen to be in this weird public figure business thing is just yeah it's not work it's like a it's like a velvet prison in a way it's a very strange kind of sort of like golden handcuffs type thing and uh i got I got sent this the other day.
I wanted to read you guys this and get your thoughts on this.
It's an essay called The Raw Truth About Touring and Mental Health.
Touring breaks people in ways that most don't talk about and the industry rarely admits.
At its core, touring is chronic displacement.
You're always somewhere else.
No routine, no grounding, no permanence.
Your nervous system never lands.
You live in fight or flight, travel delays, high press of shows, interpersonal tension, constant overstimulation.
There's no decompression and no off switch. And emotionally, traditionally touring swings between extremes.
One night, it's 1500 people screaming.
The next is a silent hotel room.
You go from deep connection to total isolation over and over again.
That kind of cycle burns out even the most resilient people.
But the culture of touring rewards stoicism and punishes vulnerability.
You're expected to power through, joke about it, drink through it, avoid it.
And the deeper you go, the harder it becomes to admit you're unraveling because your whole identity is tied to the road.
Your worth becomes about being needed, useful reliable so when your body screams I can't your mind says you have to there's no roadmap for recovery no built -in support no decompression protocol and when you finally make it home you don't feel home you feel disoriented and numb out of place no one around you quite understands what you've been through and honestly you don't either the truth is touring is beautiful but it can also dismantle you and pretending it doesn't is why so many are suffering in silence admitting the toll doesn't make you weak it makes you honest and that honesty is where real
change begins yeah yeah did you that's did you write that no that that is on instagram i got it sent to me yeah i mean i think all of that rings true to me in a lot of ways i think there's an arrested development that happens in touring where it you have to make a conscious decision to grow up because it's very feasible and almost encouraged to not what does not growing up look look like um i mean we've all done it uh we grew up in public unfortunately unfortunately for us um i think having a tour manager having an agent having the riders tells you what to do every day your food's brought to you
having shoppers runners you need anything drop of a hat it's taken care of you lose uh value of substances you lose value of money and value of time because because it's just excess all the time and it it's not like this massive toxic thing all the time it could just be we always get a loaf of bread and five things of deli meat and nobody touches them and we just throw it out like things that in a normal construct it would be like what are you doing but in touring it's like how are you not doing that you know um and then that's the very baseline all the way up to love commitment how like relationships
are really hard um i mean we know a lot of people in the industry that don't know themselves and don't know how to coexist with a partner why what does it do to relationships and intimacy well i don't know because i've been with the same woman my whole life um but my perception is that it displaces purpose and replaces that idea with other things like instant gratification like the same way we were just talking about this earlier but the same way like pornography is not positive for anyone the people doing it the people consuming it it kind of just stretches out something that should be this one
way into something that it never should have been and I think that happens a lot on tour I'll take one of those as well mine's lost its flavor that's when you know that you need another one take some of those suckers thank you for the people that are listening we're powering ourselves with nicotine via wood wood delivery system dude sucking on a cricket bat I think I think a big yeah like a big answer to the thing is the obvious thing with love is is absence but the biggest piece of it I know in my own life and we could talk about this for three hours cause that just fucked me up in ways that I
can't understand to you and I want to talk about something we'll go back into it I want to talk about something specifically but I want to get to this we can go back through it we've got all the time in the world I want to get to this love bit for a second we go to work and we play in front of thousands of people and like you said everything is disposable in a sense you know what I mean like you can have whatever you want truly like I can if I wanted to I could ask a tour manager to get me cocaine I can do that I want a new Game Boy at every show literally on my tech rider bro i'm not joking whatever
you want like whatever you want whatever you want and when you and when you get home you're it changes through various stages of life obviously but where i'm at in my life now i'm 42 i'll be 42 next month and i have two children and i get home and my wife has said this to me in colorful words sometimes is we haven't stopped living like we haven't so i get get home and expect like time time time give me time give me time give me time and not only give me time but give me this deep bright level of intimacy intimacy that i need and crave and feel like i have been out here working so i don't get that and it's
impossible i've been hunched parched it's in it and it feels impossible to get on the road you know in a certain way like well there's no physical as long as you're being faithful we are we and we all are so yeah so you you get home and she always says to me, she goes, Aaron, give me a couple of days to like get used to having you here even to like hear your footsteps in the house, you know, and to like, to see you with our daughter.
And it's emotional for me because it's my reality.
You know what I mean?
And it hurts. I, cause I want her to just be like, you know, in not so many words, like, come here, let me fuck you and love you.
And like, let's do the whole thing.
And that's not not reality for anybody.
Well, it's too intermittent for that.
You know, you do a normal nine to five.
You leave on the morning, you come back in, maybe wife runs up and jumps and gives you a hug when you walk through the door.
Hooray. Yeah. You're away for six weeks at a time.
What's like an average medium length tour?
Like a six weeks? Six weeks.
Six weeks, something like that?
We did one last year that was 12 weeks.
Motherfucker. It was...
And that's across time zones, that's the intermittent contact, that's all the rest of this stuff.
and um if you have been away for that long that's not i missed you today that's i got used to life without you i got used to a type of life that you were not in and i'm aware that you went away from one peak experience of deep connection with your family to another peak experience of deep connection with your art form but i kind of went through this insane acceleration deceleration acceleration process yes I've had to develop all of these coping mechanisms emotionally to work out how to like split or like compartmentalize my heart so that I can open it up when you're here but so that I'm able
to silo it off when you're not because if I still have it open when you're not here then it fucking tears me up and you're up until three in the morning four in the morning on the tour bus and I don't know what you're doing and I don't know who you're with and there's all of these screaming fans and you've got this like crazy set but but but but but but like yeah yeah yeah it's i used to come home and we just you know you end tours on weekends like you know your last show's sunday or monday or whatever it is and i just come home on a tuesday and i'd get off the plane uber home and the house would just
be empty and it's like you know the kids are at school you know and that's welcome back dot but to your point like your kids are at school your Your kids have, you know, extracurricular activities.
Your wife has a doctor's appointment.
And it was that. It was like, yo, I'm home.
And you expect, like, this big parade very selfishly.
Like, I'm back from war.
Also, like, the tour continues.
Because you start the tour, and I imagine opening show.
You know, like, let's have a beer.
Let's do the whatever.
It's like, hey, where's the fanfare and the banners?
And it's like, no, you're not.
You don't get the special treatment no more.
You're not fucking guitarist singer fucking drummer guy You're dad Like frankly you're kind of like new dad Or like absent dad that's now come back Yeah You need to make it up to us Not us making it up to you Yeah it's a weird thing to have a 15 year old And realize I've only been physically in her life For maybe 7 years If you actually chop it up You know if I'm gone half the year Then if my 10 year old is 10 I've only seen that child grow up for five of those 10 years, which is, that's a vacuum that you can't let yourself get sucked into because it will destroy you.
And it makes you - You mean that kind of reflection, that kind of thought process?
Yeah, it's good to reflect on it.
And I think that kind of goes back to the arrest of development.
You have to see those things and look them in the eyes and not try to cope them away or forget them.
But it has to come from a place of self -reflection instruction to then inform your next step, which is how do you treat this person?
And when you're going on tour and you have all these people waiting on you, hand and foot, and then you get home after 10 weeks and it's the first time you've had to do a dish.
It's the first time you've had to take out a literal trash bag.
And so I think a lot of people, thankfully for us, we do a good job of keeping each other in check, but I've seen a lot of people almost feel like Like home is the least valuable place because it's the only place that you have responsibility.
So you go from, you know, screaming fans and girls and you can't go to a bar within two miles of the club without getting recognized.
And it's wow, wow, wow, wow, wow.
And then you come home and it's like, take out the trash, pick up.
Can you pick up those socks?
Can you fold that laundry?
And it almost feels like the domesticated home life is the least exciting.
compensating like that feels like work real real work and you work is when you're at home and it's meaningful work if you view it that way it's a it's an honor to serve my wife and kids but if i view it like a labor way it could it could tear you apart you expect it to be grounding i think that's the biggest problem is when you're on the road you are like i can say for me and i can probably speak for you but what you do you and this sounds cliche but what you do you do for with them you know i mean like you you you're making a living for your family and you work hard for your family and in in the way
that we do and then you get home and you have felt ungrounded or unmoored for however many six eight twelve whatever fuck it is and you get home and you expect to feel grounded you know what i mean you expect that you're going to feel grounded because it's the person you love it's your offspring and you expect to feel grounded but what they need to feel grounded is you'd pick up the fucking socks and you'd have whatever yeah Yeah.
You know what I mean?
And make it up to me.
Like, you've just fucking been away.
Yeah. For two months.
Totally. Yeah. Make it up to me.
I think if you can get out of your headspace and make it less about you, which is the point of life in general, is to be of service to others.
And the more you do that, the more you find the true purpose of being a human.
But it's intimately attached to your wife and kids in a way that I don't think it could be replicated.
Like, it's almost like if you've never been on tour or if you're on tour, but you just have a girlfriend, you don't understand what we're saying right now.
Like, there's something else that, like, heightens it.
It's all the same subset.
It's all the same data sets.
They're just infused with...
Volumes louder. yeah just it turns everything up a notch and I think it's important for all of us to recognize that and then also recognize what tour is capable of doing and then avoiding those things at all costs well like like I think it's probably a rarity that I've been with my wife for 18 years and have only been with my wife for 18 years on tour you know what I mean I think that's a rarity you're an outlier it should be standard protocol but it's not what's it's also that's also it's socially accepted that somebody who is a rock star yeah i've had people be like yeah you're married but you're
in milwaukee like this is how this works because we know that marriage laws don't apply in milwaukee milwaukee is the place brother no but but literally there's like there's women that know we're married and there's women that still try to uh disrupt that functioning functioning flourishing relationship and I'm like it's so easy to fall into those traps and then what's interesting too is one of the hardest things for me is watching people fall in love theoretically with people that love what they do like there is no better feeling than having a partner who thinks you're the sickest you know what I
mean and so fucking rule so if you yeah if you bounce around with fangirls a regular woman who's her own individual person who wants different things in life almost feels boring so you're not impressed but like look at this fucking riff that i just wrote that's nice but this sock yeah that's nice but what about dinner date tonight that's nice but like let me tell you about the wheels on the bus go round and round that i did with the kids that i teach today yep and you have to lean into them them as much as they lean into you and i think for me growing up i met my wife when we were possibly at our biggest
or when we became what we are year uh 2005 yeah so right in the middle and i had seen that pattern flipping around and my friends like dude you got to meet my girlfriend's sister am i i am not interested in women right now like it's too sticky it's like i don't know why they like me.
Is it because of this?
Or is it because of who I am and vice versa?
Reverse reasoning. Yeah.
And, and my wife is like, I don't listen to your music and I don't listen to like this style at all.
And I was like, check, like, let's go get a coffee.
Like, let's go try this out.
Yeah. And then here we are Your complete on interest in my career is the most attractive thing you could have said it was attractive to me.
Yeah. But then there's, then there's other people who literally view it the complete opposite.
And that's what I mean by like the arrested development, like like literally what you just read is the path.
And you just have to read that before you go on the journey to look out for potholes.
So you don't become that.
But if you do it, if you do it the typical way, if you come up in touring in the typical way, let's say we met 20 years ago and we sat across from one another with these cricket bats filled with nicotine and you read that to me.
There's no world where that would have been anything that would have grabbed me in any way.
There's sentences I could have gleaned you know information from but i don't and that my energy sometimes goes up and down sometimes i feel lonely in a hotel room yeah but i guess at the beginning it's like we sleep on a bus or we sleep away for you know for us we we did it the old -fashioned way where you go to buffalo and there's four people and you go back a year later and there's 50 and you go back 10 years later and there's 3 000 like we did a van shitty van nicer van you know rv bus Like we did it that traditional way.
And I just wish that, I wish that there was, that somebody told me, could, could have succinctly told me that and made sense to me.
Have I, have you guys heard me do my bit about unteachable lessons?
Yeah, I have. Yeah.
So it's just, there's certain things that we can't learn through explanation, only through experience.
Yes. And, uh, I get the sense that the raw truth about touring and mental health is, is one of those things that you can warn people.
And it's the same, um, you're not in love with that girl.
She's just hot and difficult to get.
Money won't make you happy.
Fame won't fill your self worth problem.
You should probably speak to your parents more.
you shouldn't work as hard you need to spend more time in a hammock like all of these things are lessons that we we disregard because they sound either cliche or purposefully um like paradoxical it's like oh yeah being a rock star is hard like you have to say that that's like you paying your due yeah in a way we say all the time oh i gotta go work for an hour boohoo we say yeah yeah and And it's like you making the normies feel okay.
And in many ways, when people can see all of the...
Like a billionaire saying that their money made them feel empty inside.
Will Smith. Will Smith said, when I was poor and miserable, I had hope.
When I was rich and miserable, I was despondent.
Because he thought that money was going to fix his self -worth problem, but it didn't.
I heard him talk about that, yeah.
And when you have achieved the thing that you think was going to be the thing that was going to fix the problem...
You're still empty.
You're like, oh, fuck.
and now the solution's gone.
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rock star yep now what now how are you how are you navigating that i saw it firsthand when under oath broke up for a period of years i left in 2010 i quit and then under oath broke up from 2012 to 11 16 16 and in that time i played drums for paramore oh fuck hayley williams yeah so i spent almost five years or whatever on the road with her and they sell out like fucking madison squigod twice in a row yeah but what you're talking about but I saw firsthand and she used to, she had mom.
No, no, she wasn't then.
I don't think she is now.
Is she? No, but she would, she would kind of like hearing you say that.
Imagine how much harder I would see.
I got a glimpse of seeing that.
And she didn't distance herself much from us, you know, from the band, but she distanced herself a bit.
And I, at the time I was 29 or 30 or whatever.
And I would think like, why does she distance herself from us?
You know, she had her own dressing room and there's the obvious reasons why, but like, Like, I think even more so she felt a different type of isolation, a different type of like, unmooring, a different type of unsettling, you know?
Where do you think that's coming from?
I don't know. I mean, I can imagine it's hard to be a female in rock and roll music, which is a predominantly male centered and fronted thing.
But also for her, she came up in it so young.
Like when Paramore signed their first record deal, I think she was, when we met her.
She was 14? Yeah, a child.
The drummer was 11.
Like the original drummer.
When we met them, we played at a place called Blue Sky Court in Nashville.
I remember, you remember this show?
Yeah. It was hotter than the devil's butt.
And she, she was 15 years old.
Fuck. You know what I mean?
She was on Taste of Chaos tour opening and it was, it was before Paramore, it was just Hayley Williams and it was her and an acoustic.
She was like 14 or 15.
Is Paramore a like pseudo solo project?
How much is it solo?
She, she, something she says a lot and me spending time there is she always, she would always scribble.
like i probably once every 10 shows she would put a white tank top on and scribble paramore as a band on it like that's her she is vehemently like this is a band this is not the hayley well this is but i think that i think that she feels and i don't want to speak out of turn but i think she feels heavy pressure the other direction because if you were her and you look like she does and you dance like she does and you have this great talent that she does the back i can and see how the suits would be like the back to need to push yeah her the super talented guys yeah yeah yeah and she doesn't want
that they're all a band they all write the music together um but by nature yeah that's something that only in the last 12 to 6 months i've listened to this music for over 20 years now i actually spent it's a cool story about you guys so i spent when i was 21 years old i spent my final 10 pounds to drive from edinburgh where i was doing my placement year to go and see you guys playing glasgow to put fuel in the car really to drive and i came back and i had the choice between being being able to afford food that i was a uni student running a huge events company yeah what year is this this 2008 2008
in glasgow crazy i think that would have been just after define the great line i remember yeah came out it's a brick building i remember the show yeah yeah on this main strip yeah uh so i i drove to go and see you guys that's why uh and then and then went back so anyway i've been around this sort of world for a very long time and it's only within the last 6 to 12 months that I've realized how many bands that are ostensibly bands outwardly are solo projects inwardly.
We actually talked about that a while ago.
More and more now than they've ever had.
Yeah, real bands, like full on groups that all have equal contribution and or veto power are dwindling.
No, it's not even hiding though.
I mean, it is if you just look at, hey, this is called a band and a person's name, but anybody can go and work this out Wow.
And it's not to say that anything is better or worse in terms of the way that you put things together, but it's certainly a much different kind of dynamic.
But for anybody that listens to any kind of music, if it's a group, go on Spotify, go on a track and just press on the song credit.
Look at the song credits and see how many people are credited.
It's like, huh, those two people aren't, they don't seem to be in the band.
It's like, yeah, that's a producer and that's maybe some session songwriter, drummer -y type person.
but yeah that's a whole I'm like kind of like you know Ronnie Radke or something like that you go okay like I'll kind of evidently like that's a fucking insane yeah project type thing but you go the rabbit hole of that stuff goes pretty deep it's pretty interesting it does it's deeper than you even realize a lot of it is not just you're talking about the creativity of it all like the you know producer a wrote this song and songwriter b wrote this song but there's a lot lot of it wholeheartedly is a solo project like business wise like the other four guys don't get to say you know can we have this kind
of bus can we have this on the right or even like i there's more and it's uncouth to speak about and i never would but there's if i told you all of them that are that way you'd be very surprised like i can't count them on my fingers and toes is that a function of, uh, bands struggling to get coordination from a creative standpoint and power struggles happening?
Yeah. I think something I've observed is this new, it's me, I'm calling it this, and then you guys work for me kind of structure is from people who have have already been in bands.
Like it's like the, it's like the next evolution, I think.
Like when you, for us, it's like a marriage, right?
It's like, it's hard enough being married to one person.
We're actually married to five people and we have to manage everyone's mental health and physical health and who's getting sick and who's kids coming when, and you know, all of these things.
and it would be so much easier if it was just my band.
I pick when we go on tour based on my schedule.
I tell you who you're allowed to have out.
We can't go on tour at that point.
It's our anniversary.
We can't go on tour at that point.
It's the wife's birthday, the kid's birthday.
I'm playing a show on my wife's birthday this summer.
Like literally I'm going to be in Canada and I have to look at these guys and then look at my wife and go, I'm screwed here either way.
it so that's the fucked up guilt part but it's true and then i have to literally weigh like do i tell five people in our band and then all the surrounding people like our crew manager agent even though you did your job and got us this opportunity to make some money i'm gonna say nobody here gets to eat because it's my wife's birthday must be difficult to do yeah and we've done a really good job of navigating it but there was there was a time where it's like we're not doing this ever.
That doesn't work. And then there was a time we said yes to everything.
That's not sustainable.
And you only arrive at this place, I think, after, to your point, an unteachable lesson over decades.
I forget who it was, but you had someone on your podcast talking about something about falling in love and staying in love.
Really brilliant guy.
Arthur Brooks. Brilliant.
Bold dude who sat there.
Oh, cool. Yeah. And he was talking about stage one, two, three, and four.
And like stage one is where people get stuck in relationships and that's where people get stuck in a lot of things.
And then you kind of push through to stage four where it's like, that's my brother.
He's crazy. I'm crazy.
We don't do the same things at all.
But it's we're past that.
But you know how you get to stage four was eye contact and touch. It's oxytocin bonding to push you through the serotonin dump.
Yeah. You get to come out on the other side, which is precisely the thing that being apart from your partner stops you from being able to develop.
Yeah. Burns the newness off.
I have to imagine that there is a lot of sort of cyclical, I mean, it seems like not for you, but there has to be a lot of cyclical dating when someone, maybe even somebody who I really want to partner, I want a long -term relationship, I want to make this work.
And you go, you can never progress.
You're in this permanent like holiday romance thing.
Where you're back home two weeks.
It's a fling. It's not a relationship.
We have someone very close to us who's been in a fling for 20 years with, I mean, different people.
you know what I mean?
But it's rinse and repeat.
Yeah. And, and I think, I honestly think with this individual and I, not hyperbole, I really believe that he craves and needs deep, real intimacy, connection, reality, and he keeps rinsing and repeating, trying to find it because he's chasing that oxytocin feeling, you know?
Yeah. And it's, it's really interesting to like unpack unpack all of that with one person let alone five at the same time I mean Aaron's probably walked me through the hardest times of my life more than anyone in my family has like my dad died we were just on tour he saw me melt down you know passed out in the front lounge for a whole tour dad has cancer but I gotta go work and what do I do literally you reading that I'm like Oh, I am in there.
I'm not there now, but I've been everything you just read.
And I think the easiest thing to do is, well, my next project, that was so tough.
I don't want to do that again.
It's almost like if my wife left me, I wouldn't want to get married again.
because to have a good marriage is so much pain and work and it's worth every cent of it and every second of the time spent crying together fighting together working through things together to get to that other side but it's not easy and everyone's also not worth it if the end result is you falling just before the finish line or if the if the race ends up finishing yeah you know and it's like i think that's where solo projects with other guys come in it's like i was in a band for 20 years i don't want to be in another band i would never start another band i would literally start my thing but you
take all of that we've we've both been all of those things and i did do a side project i remember yeah and i brought all of this to the side project and i thought the whole time here i have i have here here i thought the whole time that might have dried out you might have started something with this um the whole time i thought I have a severe anxiety issue.
And the fight or flight thing is I've been in fight or flight in varying degrees for 25 years.
And the work that I do around that is life -giving and life -altering.
And I've probably been to the ER 250 times in the last 20 years with anxiety.
anxiety. And we can get into that later if you want.
But what I'm saying is I took all that with me, all this baggage, if you want to call it baggage, whatever you want to put on it.
I just took it with me to the side project.
And it was worse. And I think that's why when we started this conversation of how many bands are actually solo project, there's a modicum of this isn't a great thing.
When you said it, I don't know exactly what you meant, but I had this feeling feeling there's some dis -earnestness or something about it when you hear about a band that, you know, whatever.
And I think that's because that individual was in a band once, like he said, and they take it to the next thing and it doesn't fix anything.
If you're broken, if you're broken and you're out of sorts and your priorities are out of whack, changing the room does what?
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Yeah, getting all of the veto voting power makes no difference.
That being said - But on paper, it feels great.
But also on the flip side of that, if you have great vision, wonderful songwriter, all of the contacts you're a healthy person in a well -regulated relationship you now get to do exactly what you want and your creative output is completely unbounded that's a dream i just wonder how many people are able to to reach that yeah didn't work for me i mean i i don't know i don't know if we've reached it i think in varying degrees we have i don't know if we ever will and maybe that's the whole point it's like you just keep trying and you're you're never going going to get it right.
You know, I'll never have a perfect show.
I will never be able to take my wife on the perfect date.
And I think that life is designed that way on purpose.
Because to your point, like when you have the perfect show and you have the perfect date and there's nowhere else to go but down from here, what's the point of doing it?
What about if you have played the perfect show 300 times, but you refuse to let yourself actually believe that?
Because if you did, then there would be this unreasonable next level so i think about it with regards to my show um every time that we hit a new uh launch velocity on plays let's say we do a million plays in in a day yeah holy fuck that's insane million plays in a day immediately two things come into my mind the first one is that's fucking great and the second one is holy shit the minimum bar for acceptable performance has just been taken up like yes double so every time that you reach a new level of performance not only is it a cause for celebration but it's a cause for anxiety because anything
less than that becomes a sense of insufficiency moving forward dude i i think oh so launch of an album i wanted i really wanted to get into this as well yeah the uh analyticalization of music yeah the fact that you guys have got spotify for artists dashboards on the back end and you know exactly track on track where we were at how many plays is what's the month these are this album we're counting down or will Waterfall release all of the singles so that we can get we can like bump the plays back up again it's gamesmanship it used to be it used to be tangible so there used to be this thing called
SoundScan so like SoundScan was literally like a big calculator that counted records sold okay still exists it still exists but it's now it's not the main the main metric now is what you're talking about it used to be you would have your merch guy or whatever had a piece of paper and however many CDs or albums you sold they would just tick a box and he would send it in and the tangibility of it for me made it easier to process i don't know how to explain why and we could get into it but like it's so weird now because people will say numbers to me about an album release or how many how many times
something is streaming and i'll be like okay is that good and i'll the number will be large and i'll think great.
And then I'll open my phone and band X or Y will have, you know, quadrillion plays first week.
And I'm like, well, fuck, like, I guess that means I'm a piece of shit.
One of the ways that behaviorism gets reinforced is the speed of the feedback loop.
Yeah. So the tie to the feedback loop.
That's one of the reasons why I have massive envy over guys that get to do stuff live, comedian friends of mine, musician friends of mine that, uh, first off you have feedback that happens in person that's very positive very reinforcing and it happens instantly you play a fucking cool riff you sing a great note the crowd reacts immediately you can feel it you put a good podcast out on the internet and it's like two weeks later some people that you never see maybe press the thumbs up button and it's this totally sterile arbitrary number that has no No emotional salience to it at all.
And in some ways, that's good because you think, okay, I'm less at the mercy of some of the emotional fluctuations.
You get your stability elsewhere.
You do. But on the flip side, you go, fuck, like, that's a lot of work to not get the requisite equivalent amount of positive reinforcement that you want.
So you have to find your motivation from elsewhere too.
yeah i mean i think i think it's to answer your first question to circle back to that i think it is i think it's really toxic um without contentment like i think it was really easy for us i'll give you an example i think it when we uh for i don't is there a more is there a better word than blew blew up when we when our band off bro when our band came out and we were whatever number two on bill we had our moment we were selling out everything and we were in theory at least in our little scene the biggest band for a few years you you have this like we're on top how do we help everyone below us and then
you fast forward and it's really easy to be a positive community focused focused person when you're at the top, you know, it's like, you're a big bank account.
It's very easy to be charitable.
Yeah. If you're a Rogan, you want to give everyone a thing because you're at the top and you're in a super position and it's almost natural.
It's not even a sacrifice.
And then you fast forward and we take out spirit box and we take out bad omens and they're opening for us three years ago.
And now they're selling out arenas and we're playing the exact same room that they opened for us we have not moved and they have gone nuclear and it's interesting because you really see the person you are if when that happens you're happy for them or if you're jealous of them you know and i think it's i i we've seen it in our small circles of like as soon as that band pops it's oh it's because they have a mask or it'll be that like you start making excuses excuses because you're feeling not validated and it's like there are bands that are 10 times bigger than us that suck and there are bands that are 10
times better than us that will never leave their small town and that's just how the universe works and you may never have 50 million but you may have five and is it worth stressing over how to get six or can you just go dude look at me I'm you know reasonably wealthy I'm in great shape I have a very successful podcast like I have nothing to to complain about but then there's always a north star as soon as you ratchet down your aim gets higher and higher and higher well this is a habituation problem right that you play a show that's your new minimum baseline yeah okay well does that mean that anything
that isn't that becomes failure yeah so um for some people yes well let me give you it does feel that way let me give you this from a different industry to yours uh books authors so mark manson good friend of mine uh his first book actually is from 2013 it's called models it's one of the best books for guys that want to learn how to be more attractive to women.
It kind of came out of the, I guess, like, elevated pickup artist world where it wasn't, like, icky.
I've seen the book.
I just want to improve myself and, you know, find a good woman.
But then he writes The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck in, like, 2018, something like that.
And this thing has been on The New York Times bestseller list for, like, 250 weeks.
Every airport has, like, 18 ,000 copies.
Atomic Habits by James Clear.
Morgan Housell, The Psychology of Money I've spoken to each of these guys individually, Mark said to me the worst thing that I could have done was have a book that went that big, because every book after that's going to feel like a failure every single book that I write will never be as big as that one how do you but we deal with that, it's like we go on tour and we have a new record out and you know it's the place after this one and it's all about that and then the songs do well and then we play a 20 -year -old song and the place explodes.
And you have a choice in that moment.
You can be grateful and be like, holy crap, we wrote this song in my mom's living room or our local church when we were 19 and now we're 40 and there's 2 ,000 people screaming every single word this song again.
Or, same data set, we peaked when we were 19.
everything we've done since then has been dog shit nobody cares about my band they just care about this one stupid record I wrote 20 years ago it's like the author those internal dialogues are all getting a drink at the same bar all the time how do you navigate that emotionally man honestly I think uh for all the shit that we give it growing up Christian really helped like having something thing whether it's real or not we debate to to this day we've shed all of it pretty much but from a young age being baked in with your life is not your life this is not the Tim or the Chris or the Aaron show
we are small pieces of sand and our job is to make the most beautiful beach out of this and we're a small part and just the almost the forceful humility and the forceful like what is life, and it's never about us, and all of those things, which can be overexposed and toxic, and they have been, but I think once you back out of that, and you balance it, and you kind of get all the levers right, and everything's kind of balancing on a very thin edge, it just turns, it's almost like how can you not just be grateful?
like there's there is no other option you know i'm proud of beartooth i'm proud of bad omens and you know it's such a drain to try to listen to bands that are bigger than you and listen to a new song and pick it apart uh it's just it's not good for anyone and it's not helping you become better it's just making you more violent in turmoil inside you know um and i yeah i don't know but for me i always go back to all i ever wanted to do was sell out the state theater in st pete which holds like 500 500 people all i ever wanted to do was play there which we did one of my first shows was opening for a band called
moss feaster with under oath and which is named after a funeral home crematory i thought about that so my first show at the band was playing state theater we played first to nobody to 40 people or whatever and i was like man how How sick would it be if we were like the last band?
We didn't know about Headliner and Direct Support.
We didn't know anything.
She's like, what if we played late when people are here?
And then we sold that out and then everything else is just kind of unfolded.
And if you can remember where you came from and why you did it in the first place, this is all a blessing.
It is not a game. I think you're really good at optimization and you have a lot of guests talking about, you know, if you want to go from here do here and then ipos and everyone's always trying to ratchet ratchet ratchet ratchet ratchet in a good way but for us i i we didn't set out for this to be our career you know and you can see the bands that do and if it's your career then it's different we happened to be here like we're here i don't know what i'm saying i have a theory how many friends do you talk to i've been thinking about this for the last 15 minutes how many friends do you talk to that say
this oh I loved their first album when you're talking about an artist you're talking about artists X, Y, Z and they go oh I loved their first album and I think Lewis Capaldi is a good example of that yeah and I think with our band we're an example of that and it hurts me to say it sometimes because I do think that we I know we work so hard on our new music and we work so hard on optimizing the way we run our business and how much stuff can we bring in house and what can we purchase versus rent all this stuff but i think that people like why is bad bigger and why is this that why is this that and the other
thing i don't know the answer but i think i know a piece of the answer and i think when you make your first thing you know like this the settler of not giving a fuck wasn't his first thing but it was like basically it was basically and i think that and i started thinking about this when you said that our first album it was it was honest and there was no reason we did it other than the fact that we wanted to we weren't following something we weren't thinking about what was next we weren't even thinking about being big or popular or cool or any of those things so now everything we do is like you
said it's hearkening back to that but i think the first album syndrome theory is because the public feels that earnestness and that honestness and a word that I hate that authenticity you know what I mean like when we wrote they're only chasing safety there was never a moment I promise I can say this with glee in my heart we never thought bunch of people are saying this I never ever for any reason had that thought I love the word earnest it's one of my favorite ones the bravery to take your emotions seriously seriously yeah honest yeah i mean you're not worrying about sucking and you're not worrying
about failing and i think that that's this whole thing that's why people start side projects that's why people chase the the rabbit the dragon whatever it is so if you will with this business with this art form yeah it's because you're you're you're you're chasing something you and this is this is a huge generalization and assumption but that you'll never get again like no matter how hard louis capaldi tries i don't think you're going to get that record again before we continue if you haven't been feeling as sharp or energized as you'd like getting your blood work done is the best place to start
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That's functionhealth .com slash modern wisdom when you mentioned about some of the challenges you've had with anxiety nervous system regulation coming back down did you see um how i'm feeling now the documentary about lewis uh -uh dude it's on netflix it's no it is like i know he's had struggles it is fucking canon if you're a musician watch this thing so i must i must talk about this like every every month he uh writes his first album i mean he blows up from a song video that that was him playing in some random pub in the arse end of Scotland, singing this song that he'd written when he was 16, and then
he sort of slowly builds up this album.
I think he releases it maybe when he's 19, something like that.
And then it's billions, billions of streams. Everything, every single everything.
And he's got this really interesting way of presenting.
He's very self -deprecating.
He's very sort of British in that way.
He doesn't take himself too seriously.
He's not glamorous.
glamorous you know yeah he like very self -facing in the way that he shows up and then covid happens and the documentary starts in covid and it's him in his mom and dad's old house in scotland and he's in this back shed thing which is very nice right recording studio and it's like the wall is just platinum record platinum record gold record platinum record platinum record award award award like and his day -to -day life is him having had his entire childhood adolescence and early adulthood to write his first album and then the pressure of the biggest record labels on the planet saying hey how are we
going with uh anything we need to follow up yeah how's anything And he develops a twitch. He develops this nervous twitch over time that it turns out is Tourette's.
So he's got this predisposition for Tourette's, but it's 100 % brought on by this.
And then what you want is for there to be some wonderful conclusion, some sort of victorious hero moment at the end.
and one of the final shows of the entire uh documentary he steps out on stage and he's so nervous he can't sing the songs and his dad and his mom are in the crowd and his dad sprints from the seat to like be backstage to like hold his son yeah and it like tears them up and he went out and did glastonbury i think he might have done glastonbury two years in a row and not being able able to perform like got to stage and then shut down wow like multiple times and uh that's that was that's like it's still it's one of the most formative things i've ever watched and it taught me two lessons first one
there's this bit part way through and uh he's explaining about this sort of you know wild trajectory of what's happened he turns straight to the camera and he goes people People think that fame changes you.
Fame doesn't change you.
It just changes everybody around you.
I was like, holy fuck, that's deep.
And then the second thing it made me realize is that there are some people who have the skill set to be unbelievably famous and successful, but a disposition that is not very comfortable with it.
Or you could say there are some people that are built to be so talented that they would be famous, but they can't deal with the fame.
maybe an introvert or whatever i mean i think i think fame in general is not healthy i mean i think with technology and everything being everywhere like now i can hear about a girl who was kidnapped and beaten up in iowa and now i'm wearing that and it's like the world got so short and so small in our lifetime like we used to tour with sam's club payphone cards to to call home no cell phones we had an atlas no gps an atlas it's a tom tom oh no a company called rand mcnally in the 90s and early 2000s would make this like binder book right okay yeah yeah entire united states highways and roads we've
got we've got that in the uk too and then every there's like 65 pages so then you get into like per state and we would navigate literally by Buy map.
Fucking orienteering your way to the next show.
I don't know how we did.
And then when we got lost. Just an additional fucking burden.
Yeah. Then you get lost, so you have to go find a payphone.
You type in your minutes.
It says you have 120 minutes left, and I'm calling this promoter being like, I think we're close.
And then fast forward and we have Instagram.
And your podcast is being listened to in probably 75 countries.
That was not possible.
And I think that acceleration of information has just accelerated the kind of the fame engine a bit.
And I don't think anyone knows how to deal with it.
I think we were meant to be in a community, you know, of 100 people.
We were meant to be in our neighborhood.
I should know my neighbor's name and he shouldn't have to buy a lawnmower because he could borrow mine.
Like that is what we have done literally until about 20 years ago as people.
And the ones that did it before us were like these mythical outliers.
The Beatles, obviously, yeah, worldwide successes, of course.
But on a day to day life, our kids are the first generation just being born into this is the way life is.
I think probably everyone that's listening to this podcast right now will have one friend that they know personally from earlier in their life or that they've spent some sort of a time with that's got a million followers on some platform.
Yep. For probably more than that, a variety of like justified and unjustified reasons.
You know what I mean?
Like, someone might know Bonnie Blue, someone might know like a great fucking poet or some shit.
yeah um and not that bonnie blue's not a poet that speed of ascendancy yeah feedback loop like how fast and you know you mentioned about sort of tribe ancestral setup what's typical yeah the problem that we have is our previous comparison group would have been so you got your dunbar number of about 150 yeah but within the 150 tribe that wasn't one big tribe it was little pods typically of about 30 within that break off yeah they'd sort of be like moderately tightly affiliated but not totally totally tight together and then you would have this this sort of wider group you didn't have that many
people to compare yourself to correct it's out of 150 75 a male fucking like of the 75 maybe 15 or 20 or under the age of 14 right because everybody fucking dies early he's like well i'm kind of not competing with a 14 year old yeah so you know there's such a small group of people that you end up actually competing with and the issue is that in the modern world we don't know where the boundary of what our competition comparison group is you can compare yourself to everybody yes in a different it's like you guys in some way are comparable with sabrina carpenter despite having you could not find
a person that's more different than you other than the fact that she makes notes come out of her face Yeah.
Right. Yeah. Yeah. I think.
I think with that, knowing that.
I'm not surprised by that documentary.
And honestly, if we were filming our lives the whole time, we would have those moments, too.
I have a version of that.
Even like I intentionally don't go on Instagram and I intentionally don't look at other bands, Spotify numbers.
I don't look at that because all it does is lead to comparison.
And, you know, even if I'm looking at it and looking at smaller bands to make myself feel better.
It's still comparison.
It's the binary still there.
I'm I need a dopamine hit.
I need to feel valid.
I don't. so let me find something to be like at least I'm not as bad as that guy which is never the way anything progresses you know and I think fame is just an unfortunate an unfortunate thing to be honest would you tell me that story your Lewis Capaldi equivalent yeah I in 2004 we I think we I guess we probably wrote Chasing Safety in 03 right we did so in 2004 we started touring on it And we were still touring as a pre there was MySpace.
So there was some evidence of how things, big things were getting or not.
But that year we did the Warped Tour and we were playing on a stage called the Smart Punk Stage, which was like.
Out of the seven stages, it was the worst one.
Like, like literally like a truck with a flat surface.
Like the opening band from the stage had to build it every day to.
Sick. To gain their access to play it.
Yeah. Okay. um some of those guys we're still friends with one of those guys plays in paramour now it's like undermined it joey mullin yeah so um we started out playing that summer in front of 100 and 150 people people that were niche enough to know the underground hardcore scene that would come see us in warp tour and by the end of that summer it had blown up i never forget it we played in boston and we played during the used there was a lot of crossover during a warp tour so there's this big blow -up thing in the middle of the stage and you you didn't know when you what time you we were playing
until that morning every day 10 30 in the morning there was no set set times on warp tour jesus christ so if you're in milwaukee like you might play at 8 p .m and the next day you're in chicago and you play it in 11 45 a .m so we were woken up a lot going year on in 40 and we're like a lot so that particular day was the final day of the tour and we get told when we're playing and then we go look at the blow up the blow up thing and the used is playing during us well there's that you know we're fucked like no one's gonna watch us play and we got on stage and there was two or three thousand people
like in front of the flat truck in front of the flat truck to see us play because chasing safety unbeknownst to us had had i hate this word and you said it now i hate it worse like blown up right but no one had a phone to be able to keep no there was no way there was no there was no way to know and then that that and then that that fall um we toured with a band called stretch armstrong um and we had to play twice every day so many people showed up to the shows so you did a matinee to try and keep up no no no we didn't we wouldn't know because again the metrics were so messed up and there was no phones
so we'd show up at a 800 capacity club and we'd play and there'd be 900 people outside still and so we would just go run it back i don't even know if we got paid for it half the time yeah it was just we would just do it again and in the middle of that i started having um i started having chest pains like and i had experienced them a little before like searing sharp like chest pains and my hand would go numb and my jaw hurt and i'd get real nauseous and there was days on that tour i don't know if i can i don't know if i can and i would always muscle through it and just play meanwhile i'm going
to the hospital every third day i'm having a heart attack i'm having a heart attack i would go up walk in crying and saying that i'm having a heart attack and they would go you're 21 years old you're not having a heart attack you got to find i got to find out you got to do the work you know i need blood work and the metroponin levels and i know the jargon because i've done it to me i probably had 300 ekgs in my lifetime you know i need an ekg i need a metroponin you know and there was days where i remember the opening band one day particularly particularly this guy, Chris, telling me like, this is just
in your head. And I'm like, how?
I feel it, it's real.
I feel it, it's real.
And it got progressively worse through the years.
The band got more popular.
And in 2010, I quit.
And I put it under the guise of like, at the time, we were all pretty religious.
And I put it under the guise of like, I gotta, you know, I gotta do something else for God.
not i gotta you know and the reality was i just didn't deal with my nervous system and my anxiety and if you ask me today gun to head like what caused it you know what caused the the onset of it i have a bunch of theories but i don't really have any uh what are the theories i grew up a super super christian home like he said a little bit ago and my family talked like this like i grew up in the you know my family's from georgia and they talk like this and um all i ever heard growing up was about medical things to this day like my mother to this day if i call my mom right now right now and i love
my mother and i'm not i don't i don't want this to come off if she hears this like mom you fucked me we love you mom yeah but she she would yeah so and so you know sister they in the churches they call you sister whoever sister gina whatever you know sister gina's got like a they had to do something to her aorta Can you believe that?
Can you believe that?
And growing up the whole time, it was like that.
It was like that the whole time.
And my parents, my dad had a mistress.
And I caught him with his mistress and kicked him out of my house when I was 18.
I think that probably aids and abets to it.
And both of my parents had this anxious disposition as well.
This health anxiety.
This health anxiety disposition.
Fed into you. My whole life.
My whole life. To this day.
If I call my mom right now, I promise, Chris, she would tell me something about her physical body.
I promise. Like I know my name.
Like she would say.
So it was put into me that way.
And then the pressures of, oh, there's not only one show that sold out.
There's another one that sold out.
Are we getting paid?
I don't know. And Tim and I are very different and we're very alike in some ways, but we're very different.
And Tim is the most punk rock person I know.
I mean, like we'll do anything.
Like if there was 500 people out in the street and you were like, can you guys play?
like he'd be like yeah for sure and i'm just i have a hard time with that i'm getting better with that you know by being able to be more you know spontaneous and but at the time i wasn't um and it aided me and aided me and aided me and if i'm honest with you which i think this format doesn't work and our conversation doesn't work um i deal with it today not to the extent that i did then but um something i deal with every day and it's really difficult and to be honest like Like, it's scary sometimes.
You know, the fact that I have to say this to you, I hate a lot because I'm a fan of your show and I'm a fan of a lot of the people on your show.
So to come here and say what I'm saying about my own life and my struggles, it feels like a little bit like those Spotify numbers where I'm like, I'm on Modern Wisdom and I'm talking about this.
Don't forget, I mean, I appreciate you saying that.
And that must have been hard to deal with.
That's tough to be a young kid thrust into the limelight and to be, fuck, like this is my dream.
It's my artistic outlet.
And like my fucking nervous system is betraying me.
Like this is my shot.
This is my thing. And my fucking, that must be what it feels like to be Lewis Capaldi.
It's like this is what everything I've ever dreamed of.
I'm on Glastonbury, the biggest festival in the world.
All the flags. Yeah, man.
Yeah. And my fucking body is betraying me.
So I'm sorry that you went through that, man.
Yeah. That's really.
No, thank you for saying that.
Really tough. It's something that, and on the flip side, I was thinking about this the whole time talking talking about lewis too is all the struggles that i've been through with my mental health and my nervous system and the whole thing it directly has affected him like indirectly and directly and that is something that i feel actual guilt for heavy guilt because if i really think about it like when i left i've never said this when i left there was a large decline in their they did a record without me when i left yeah there was a large decline in their career And I know that was directly correlated
to me leaving. And I left because I couldn't, in layman's terms, get my shit together, you know.
I'm sorry that happened.
Thank you. Yeah. But that kind of goes back to like, how do you do that for 23 years?
And then like, feel like you can be close with like your mom, you know?
Let me pick the kids up.
Yeah, that exact thing is like there, and I'm grateful for it.
I'm glad that me and my wife will never have stuff like what we've been through.
But once you go through it or still deal with it, it does do something to a bond in your brain that it is, is not better or worse or closer or more distant.
It is just an, it's a unique bond.
it's not that's what I meant about it it's not a different type of intimacy yeah it's not brotherhood and then other ones through tour yeah it's like not brotherhood it's not family it's not best friends it's not business partners it's like all of it all the time which is interesting and that way and I mean yeah I talked to him a lot about his stuff like I mean the last fight we got into was in Europe we were having like the oldest beer or something and you were you You were going to the hospital like three times that tour.
And I told him straight up.
I don't know what the ailment was.
I just told him like, dude, you're going to have a lot of regrets at the end of this whole thing.
Because you're either choosing to or being captured by, I don't know which because I'm not in your head.
And sometimes it feels like it swings different ways as we all do.
but to have this beautiful kind of thing happen in this random career that none of us asked for and for you to just be sitting in it in misery rather than going to the pub and grabbing pints with the boys or we were drinking the oldest beer ever made popping out recipe ever made somewhere in munich yeah and but he was in a he was in a state um and i would and we were all in A manic spiral.
And we were all drinking.
So when I drink, I'm a very direct talker anyway.
Unlike him, I'm from New York.
And my New York family is like, say what the fuck you on about.
Like, say what you need to say.
Very loving, but just very direct.
And so I just like - And it's done through argumentation.
Yeah. And I was just like, you're just going to, you're going to, you're going to have a lot of regrets when all this is over because you're wasting this thing.
You know, and he got really mad.
We all disbanded. You said it differently.
And he came. What did I say?
I have to say that I'm sorry, Chris.
I'm sorry. You said, when you die, you say at the end of this thing, which is very podcast -edicated, you say, when you die, you will regret so many things.
There, I said it. On your deathbed.
Yes, on your deathbed.
Yeah. Because that's when you get full perspective and reflection.
reflection and the goal is not to look at like steve jobs last 10 things he wrote money doesn't matter i wish i would have spent more time with my family to your point these unteachable lessons it's like we're being taught these lessons now man like we've had this we've lost it you left you're back like we all have done the good the bad the biggest the smallest biggest man in the world this tour is eating shit and we're making no money we've done all of it now so it's like how many more more lessons are there left to learn and to his point he's like i don't choose it just happens and kind of like
you know the dude with the tick like can is it just do you just live here now and is there anything you can or can't do um and yeah as far as that goes like i think his his stuff specifically does directly affect us but i think if i'm being honest it's more like i can tune him out if he's going to the hospital like if for this period or episode i just need to reduce you to a co -worker as long as you get on stage for the hour i need you and we make our money and we can have enough gas in the tank to get to the next show you can melt down for the other 23 hours by yourself in your bunk you know
and that's not a loving or true but you you have to, in those States, figure out a way to cope.
He can't cope. I can't cope.
What are we going to do?
Blow up the whole tour?
No. So you then start putting in these protections and sometimes they're not healthy.
And so we've been through again, so much that it's, it, it's kind of like you go home and somebody is having a bad day and it's like, what do you want about?
Like, you haven't had a bad day in your life.
You know, you've, you've never been through through certain things that we have. Therefore, I can't expect you to have the same perspective, but it's hard when your perspective gets shifted so much. I imagine you've used a couple of times sort of soldiers coming back from war as an example.
Which is a terrible example.
I'm not trying to church up.
Fucking people. I had Jocko Willink, Jocko Willink went out today.
Like that was the guy that did the battle of Ramadi.
Oh yeah. So he's a Navy SEAL.
Saw that go up today.
Yeah. Who is maybe one of the scariest men I've ever seen in my entire life.
but is it comparable in terms of kinetic danger no is it comparable in terms of emotional intensive intensity yeah probably and i would like i really appreciate you opening up like that one slight perspective that might be useful here a quick aside you've probably heard me talk about element before and that's because i'm frankly dependent on it.
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Most of the things I think that you're, the shames that you have in your life, the ones that are the worst that you have about yourself, if you look at them, they're usually the dark side of the stuff that you're the most proud of as well.
well so i have to assume that when it comes to writing a record or mastering a track or like dialing in a particular sound or working on the the new melody the new lead the new drums fill whatever it might be that that is an area where your obsessiveness gets deployed in a really productive manner because you're able to go like no it's not there it's not that i'm gonna play it again i'm gonna play it again i'm gonna play it again you look at the fucking timeline it's just Just like 60 takes, 100 takes, 200 takes, all the way down.
Yeah. Oh yeah. So if you want that, like, do you appreciate that about yourself?
The fact that you have this level of precision in your art form?
Okay. Well, guess what the price is that you have to pay for that?
The price that you have to pay in order to have that level of precision in your art form is that you don't get to switch it off in other areas.
You don't get to turn that off.
You don't get to turn it off.
You're not going to turn it off with your partner.
If your partner makes you feel unsafe, like your nervous system is going to go like, okay, what did they say?
why did they say that thing there was no kiss at the end of that text that's what that meant ruminate think obsess okay you don't want it then you do want it when you're writing a record choose oh you don't get to choose you don't so what do i love about this well i love my attention to detail i love the fact that and this is something as well that you can sort of find i think between each other where you go fuck like dude the way that aaron shows up like he's the the first person in the studio in the morning, he's the last person out at night, he will not give up it or whatever it is, right?
Whatever, however it is that you like that obsessiveness sort of shows up in the process.
I can't really fucking love that about him.
And would it be cool if he didn't have this like, like demon that he's got to battle in other areas, but would it be fucking total dog shit if we didn't get this level of performance out of him when the rubber meets the road, you know, it scares me the most. Sorry.
what scares me the most and what i i've seen a lot of therapists for this stuff and i've uh taken a bunch of pills for it and i've talked to a million people about it and nobody nobody has ever said that it's always been um so thank you number one but number two it's always been um you'll get better if If like you'll stop being obsessive about your health symptoms or whatever.
If, if you do X, if you do Y, if you do Z, if you change this habit, you have no one's ever just said it like that.
And that, my friend, is the essence of what it is to pump your tires up as high as they'll go.
Let me do that because you're absolutely right.
And it's scary to hear, to know that like that pill, that conversation, that thing isn't going to fix it because it's connected in that other way.
You know what I'm saying?
Yeah, well, it's who you are, dude.
I think so much of it is in the resistance.
You know, if you ever have something that you're really struggling with, and I've had a rough 12 months.
Jesus Christ, I've been kicked in the nuts so many times over the last 12 months.
And maybe 20 % of it, 30 % of it is like what you're dealing with.
And the vast majority of it is the resistance to the thing happening.
It shouldn't be this way.
I don't want it to be this way.
This isn't what, like, if only it could be different.
This is my fault. This is someone else's fault.
What caused it? What did it?
Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
How can I change it?
What can I do moving forward?
I'm wasting my life.
I'm killing myself.
I'm doing this thing.
I can't do this thing.
Like all of that, right?
You have the first emotion, anxiety.
Then you have resentment at your anxiety.
Then you have bitterness about your resentment about your anxiety.
And then you have frustration about your bitterness about your resentment about your anxiety.
You have this infinite regress of second order emotions, Mark Manson calls them meta emotions.
It's like you don't get to control the first one, but you do have choice over the second one.
And the problem with that is, oh, I have choice over it.
That means that I am bad if I don't control my meta emotions.
And if someone says you'll get better when, that's a denial of you.
That's them saying, you are not enough as who you are.
And when you're that way, you're less you and you need to fix the thing that's happening because your behavior makes me feel uncomfortable.
You being that makes me feel uncomfortable.
You not being okay makes me not okay.
So I need you to make yourself okay so that I can be okay now too.
and that's just a denial of whatever it is that you're going through and that's rough man so again I'm sorry that you've had to no thanks for saying that I think that I've never heard it put that way and I've always felt that way and I've never heard it put like that because but that is it it's more we talk about that a lot as a band like even like with people are like how do you stay faithful on the road or how do you stay diligent or not diligent and it's just that it's like We're all sexual beings.
I can't change the first thought.
If there's a really pretty girl somewhere, I'm not going to not notice.
And then it's like, great, I'm not looking for it.
I have no interest, but I can't change that first spark.
And I'm going to throw sand on it or I'm going to throw gasoline on it.
There's a really cool story.
David Buss, grandfather of evolutionary psychology, is here at the University of Texas.
And he wrote a book called The Evolution of Design.
and in it he explains how men have an area of our brains which uh give us reward if we look at something that's sexual like guys will happily look at a pair of rocks that look like boobs and be like like kind of fucking hot uh and this guy wrote in and he said uh dr bus i just want to thank you for saving my marriage because i was finding i'm happily married i love my wife i love my kids i was happily married but i found myself like finding other women attractive and i thought i was unhappy with my partner and i thought there was something wrong with me i thought there was something broken and your
book told me that no like it's fine for me to see a hot woman and be like that's a hot woman in the same way it's like huh those clouds look you know gray or what it's a thing and i mean is it the thing that you tell your wife probably not it's like hey honey there's beautiful cloud outside like yes hey honey there's like a hot latina walking past no but yeah the The inside voice.
Yeah. But the sense that you have with that and that same dynamic there, I think, is a good part of what we're talking about here, which is like, huh, I have this thing.
There's some good in it.
There's some bad in it.
It is me. What happens if I'm just okay with that?
What happens if I'm not trying to fix it?
Just put it on a shelf and let it be there.
It's just a part of it.
It's just like here it is.
We're not going to deny it.
We're also not going to exacerbate it.
It just is. The question I've been the most fascinated with over the last few years, one of them has been the price that people pay to be someone that you admire.
And Elon Musk, he does this episode with Lex Friedman a couple of years ago.
And Lex asks him some question along the lines of like, how are you really or something.
Oh, yeah. And Elon says, my mind is a storm.
People think they want to be me.
They don't want to be me.
they don't know they don't understand like this is the richest guy in the world read the uh read the biography that was done on him and it's like there was this day where his coo found him laid down in his office just like staring at the ceiling unable to sleep next to his desk yeah no like you need to come and do this shareholder meeting he's like i'm not doing it i can't i can't i can't stand up he's like no you need to come and do this meeting like it was one of those tesla's about to go under and we need to raise more money or fix the shareholders or do whatever he's like I can't I can't stand him
he's like no you need to it took 15 minutes like coaxing coaxing coaxing coaxing coaxing finally get him up it's like alright do you want to be Elon Musk no do you want to fucking be that guy because that's the price that you need to pay to be Elon Musk and unfortunately man that's the price that you need to pay to be Aaron Gillespie like to be you yeah that's the price that you need to pay you want to fucking do the you want to do that like you got to deal with the other thing too it's just so So it's staggering.
It's staggering to hear an acknowledgement of that.
You just don't, you don't hear that.
You don't hear that when you're rehabbing through it, not from your friends, not from professionals.
You hear, like I said before, 20 minutes ago, if you do X, you'll get Y.
You know what I mean?
I don't have any incentive.
And I think that that's one of the problems that even the best meaning guys, even the guys in your band, they want you to get better because I understand it.
I'm not, I'm not, I'm not sour grapes about it.
No, it's, it's, it's, it comes from a really well -meaning place, but, um, yeah, this is an area Joe Hudson who does the art of accomplishment has taught me so fucking much about this.
And he has a, a framework of, uh, view, uh, vulnerability, impartiality, empathy, and wonder.
And that's like, uh, heart opening, heart opening communication, especially.
And, uh, impartiality is a really interesting one, which is, um, uh, sitting with somebody without wanting to change them.
impartiality. And I think a lot of the time when we see somebody going through something difficult, we want to help them.
Of course you want to help them.
Is that not the good thing to do?
Is that not the empathetic, caring thing to do?
Of course it is. Care about your friend.
You see them in pain.
You want to fix it.
It's like, but in that fixing is a denial of what they're experiencing.
You aren't right as you are.
You're not good enough as you are.
This isn't okay. You need to change.
And a lot of the time that is a transference of you saying your discomfort is making me uncomfortable stop your discomfort so that i can feel okay again and that's where codependency comes from you know if if you see somebody and you think i'm not okay if you're not okay and roll that forward and all of you guys have got this which is i'm not what's the uh the jimmy carism which is uh as he's talking about comedians relationships with audiences he says if you don't love me i don't love me yeah yeah i don't i i i think it's maybe more complicated than that but yeah at its essence yeah for sure
i mean i think it's significantly more complicated than that yeah um i i would argue not even just nuance but yeah it's deep but yeah it's like i think i think overall it's just a matter of trying Trying to find common ground where you can't and just being okay with things, not being okay.
Yes. And that's, that's hard, but it's not as hard as we're not leaving this room until you're fixed.
You know, Tim, you're doing this.
We're not leaving this room until you stop doing this.
Like that, those ultimatums, which don't happen, but I'm saying that's the other side of that.
If it's not this, then it's on its way to be that.
and i think there's a lot of like i don't even know like everything's so bite -sized now it's like hard to even know what like truth is anymore you know good point like music same thing like music and stoicism i think are like the same thing in the sense that like you have these stoics quote unquote that just put up like like a little blurb, like a Bible verse a day tearaway calendar, and you're missing the context.
You know, there's like 14 hours of Marcus Aurelius on Audible, and then you pick out like your favorite scripture and just pop it out, and everyone's like, this, you don't know how much I needed this, and it's like something like, if it doesn't bring you peace, be confident enough to walk away.
That, without the surrounding context, results in friendships dissolving, people walking away from relationships because this just isn't bringing me peace and it's like music all of those things are just kind of going in that way where it's like tiktok moments nobody listens to albums anymore we used to write albums that were like 1 through 12 we don't listen to songs anymore we would literally put this song as the fifth song on purpose in a linear sense and now it's waterfall singles it's waterfall stoicism it's pop pop pop pop waterfall stoicism is a funny way to put it Yeah.
And I don't think it's all net positive, I'd say.
I don't know if it does more bad than good, but I think it does a lot more confusing than it does helping.
Because even to your point with Aaron, it's like, if you really zoom out, everything you said, I agree with.
And a lot of the talks we've had, I agree with.
But it's so much more complicated than that.
Everything is. And I think, yeah, just the, the 10 sided die of life.
It's, it's not just, oh, women are complicated.
Men are complicated.
It's the whole fucking ride is so complex that it could have been walking in on your dad.
It could be when my girlfriend left me.
It's a trauma response.
It could be anything.
It's like so deep, like the cavern is like, you know, you could throw a flashlight into it and it just disappears.
years i've been thinking a lot lately about is is he who wins the one that uncomplicates it enough and what i mean by that is for an example um one of my favorite episodes of your show is is dry creek dry creek duane yes yeah i was texting him this week and what i love about that episode is his story is crazy my favorite part of the episode is at the very end and i think you asked him this question or for somehow i i gathered that you asked him this question what's a good good day to you Dwayne and he said well you know like yesterday I woke up and I'm upset with my friend's wife and then he came
home and I had a cigar and then I had another one and I'm like if I could I'm not and I'm not trying to make him sound like Forrest Gump that's not what I'm saying but like that is that is pure peace to me when he's when he outlines that day when you ask Ask him, what kind of day, what's a good day to you, Dwayne?
And he says all that.
And then we're talking about all this.
And you're saying that, and all I can think of is the one who wins is the one who can decouple.
I'm not saying to become ignorant of the complications of things and to become ignorant of the feelings of things and to become ignorant of the idioms of grief or whatever, but is the one who wins the one who can decouple the two.
And I had two cigars and talked to my friend's wife and we ate some supper at Longhorn or whatever the fuck he says.
Do you know what I mean?
Simple life is highly underrated and I would argue more valuable than most things.
And it's becoming harder and harder to do.
But this is one of the curses, I think, of being an introspective, deep person.
If you're someone that's sensitive, if you like to do the reflecting thing, if you like to ask the question, why?
Why do I feel that way?
It's like, well, I mean, this is an endless portal that you can tumble into of thinking about yourself.
self and it's it's very interesting I take an awful lot of pleasure from asking the why question like the entire reason for this podcast is understand the world and understand yourself and the world around you that was that was what I wanted to do I didn't understand myself and I didn't understand the world so I wanted to speak to 900 and fucking 50 people or whatever that maybe that would that would maybe be able to tell me but the problem with that is that as you alluded to earlier on there's like a sort of beauty and simplicity like the guy that's just like yeah yeah, fucking 500 person show,
pull it. Yeah, let's go.
Like that don't overthink it thing.
Yeah. When arrived at, I have to assume more naturally as opposed to curate, that must be part of your nature that you've maybe sort of enhanced a little bit as opposed to Aaron with you in order to get yourself to that stage.
It's like 10 ,000 hours of meditation.
But to think, okay, well, what if it's not about unpacking more of my stuff?
What if it's trying to like, Like just be okay with whatever's going on and just like the letting go.
And that's one of the things, again, to give some props to the guys that are in bands.
And also I think this show is the kind of thing that's listened to by people who are in a lonely chapter.
They're people who are struggling to find conversations, stimulus, support in their immediate surroundings.
So they find it in other people who they can listen to.
they have this this sense of community yeah like fuck like that's that that guy went through that stuff and that's real harm like i went through something like that holy shit i thought i was broken by having health anxiety and that's the first time i've ever heard anybody talk about it online i'm not broken like this is part of the human condition this isn't a personal curse that's been fired at me from above yeah and you know the problem with that is that the lonely chapter by design is lonely right you're so developed that you don't resonate with your old set of friends but you're not yet sufficiently
developed that you've got your new set of friends and you're trying to do all of these things and you're developing your life and you're changing the way that you think and the stuff that you're into and you're like i don't know anyone that i can talk to about this and i have two choices i can either regress back and go to like this old version of me which i know that i can't shouldn't do this but where is the net i haven't found my next tribe yet in that regard and uh the problem that you have there and again this what i mean around the band the one thing that you guys have is that there is always
someone with you and i imagine that if you want some introversion time the fact that there is 16 people on a fucking tour bus double -decker tour bus and the support band's upstairs and the front lounge is full and the back lounge is full and someone's partying and someone's not yeah and you're like fuck like all i do is pack and unpack and get into go to airport whatever it is yeah but being around other people is a really lovely way to pull yourself out of that and i think it's at least least for me now uh just yesterday we uh signed i bought my first office studio space here in austin oh sick
dude congrats thank you that's gonna be real special that for me is because i have exhausted i've close to exhausted my solo sigma male like dgen work energy tank like that fuel i'm on fucking fumes yeah from that i like kovid happened i started working from home and i just just never grow out i never graduated out of it because i'm like classic introvert all i want to do is get my head down and crack on and i just never stopped i was like oh well this is good so more of it must be better so i'll just keep going and keep going and keep going this thing's growing growing growing yeah are you like
oh well this is this is and then after a while you go i kind of like yeah i kind of like miss people i think yeah so that's the solution that i've had to have and must be tough when you want to have your own space and you can't but on the flip side the fact that you've got this camaraderie this sort of brotherhood this group of people that know everything that you've been through yeah i mean imagine how much again imagine how hard it is for male artists make them female imagine how hard it is for bands make it a fucking solo artist holy fuck you are on the road and you don't even have your boys
with you you don't have anyone that you can turn around and go dude when we did that thing on stage it's like who the fuck is session musician guitarist number three yeah like who the fuck is that guy like he wasn't here last week or last year you see it eat people up like amy winehouse michael jackson these i mean these these stories are not they're not almost not even documentary worthy anymore because they're just so normal it's almost like yeah we were talking about this earlier but it's like back in the day like the guys with tattoos were like the wild ones and now it's just everywhere that if you
You don't have tattoos.
You're like the weird kind of oblong out of, out of a sync with the culture kind of vibe.
And I think it's just, it's a story that keeps telling the truth every time.
And I think as humans, we have a really interesting knack to go.
Yeah, but not me, you know?
And that makes, that gives you juice too.
I literally, I literally, I literally talk about like being rich and it's like, if you win the lottery and you have a hundred million dollars, I don't care if you worked your ass off and built a company, blood, sweat and tears and come from poor family and you know, the cycle stops with me and that whole thing, or you just find a winning lottery ticket.
There's a certain amount of money that will destroy you and everyone goes, yeah, but I think I would do it different.
I'd buy all my friends' houses.
I wouldn't, And I wouldn't do this.
I wouldn't do that.
And even for me, it's like I know that it would destroy me.
And then if you said, well, here's the lottery ticket.
It's worth $100 million.
Tear it up. I'd literally probably not tear it up and think that I can do it better.
Do you know that is the Unteachable Lessons essay?
Like, that's a part of it.
No. And it's watch me dance through this minefield and avoid all of the other tripwires that everybody else kicked.
Absolutely. some solipsistic narcissistic version of that might be true for them but not for me and I think I think that that's it like you you're we are attracted to a dry creek dry creek Dwayne type guy fucking impossible to say that motherfucker honestly dude I feel so insane my Dwayne Dwayne I had to practice before on the way in you're like dry creek Dwayne because I start every episode typically by going like dry creek Dwayne welcome to say drain rain dry creek fucking dry creek gawain welcome the show and i was like practicing it on the way in got all of these things to think about i'm
trying yeah i'm trying to work out the motherfucker's name yeah but i think the reason why he's inspiring is because he's just like it's it's not about telling you what to do and how to get better he almost solves his problems by just saying i just get up every day and try not to break something yeah a day i don't break something is a good day Yeah.
And it's so simple.
Yeah. It's more powerful than being like, well, you're monochromatic antibodies when you're when you're tired after you get seven hours of sleep versus seven and a half at the wrong bed with UV light and like all that's so overwhelming.
And then you just see a guy come up.
He's like, man, just get up and don't break.
No, I didn't break anything today.
I mean, that was my favorite story from him where he was saying, you know, I got up, I looked at this horse.
He was trying to ride it or discipline it in some way.
And he just looked at it for an hour.
He said he sat down, had a cigar.
Then I sat down and had another one.
Yep. And he's like, I went home.
That's a good day. I didn't break anything.
Yeah. What'd you do today?
Not much. You have a good day?
Yeah, I didn't break nothing.
Like, that is more powerful than how do I scale 10x here and there and there.
And then when you get there to your point, your ratchet changes, your happiness doesn't.
And I think there's, I don't know what study it was, but there's like a psychological study that came out that talked about gratification and then satisfaction and the temporary stay of said satisfaction.
action. Meaning I make a hundred thousand dollars a year.
You call me in and say, Tim, you've been such a good job.
I'm going to give you 140 ,000 a year.
My happiness meter goes up about 15 % for about 30 to 60 days.
And then it recalibrates back to, I need a 180.
And it's not, and it's not even about, oh, now I'm spending 40 ,000 more and not living below my means.
That's a whole whole financial question that i think is adjacent but not the point it's it's that we keep thinking more stuff and more achievements are going to fill a hole that only contentment and peace that you find on your own can fill oh it's not the clubs it's the theaters it's not the theaters it's the arenas it's not the arenas it's the stadiums it's not the stadiums it's the global tour it's yeah it's crazy it's crazy that you're even saying those words because if you skinny it way down for us before you were here it started like this it started let's go real micro for just two minutes
it started with me at 15 going i just want to be in a band i play drums in my parents church i just want to be in a band literally i just want to play music with other people that aren't like the nerdy church people right and then i just want to i just want us to write one song allong right and then i just want us to play one show i just want us to play one show where people are at it i just want to play one show where people are i didn't know the words and now you just said stadium and that's that's the most interesting thing to me about the whole thing is we never talk about how micro it is before
it gets to this macro play oh me me and chris talk our keyboard player we talk all the time oh i know you two do but i like that is that this is this This podcast, by the way, I'm not trying to be a fan boy like this is my shit like I love digging in and like yeah Chris and I are keyboard player talk a lot about it and to your point like how do you know you're grounded you know is it natural is it my predisposition or is it work and I think it's probably all of it but like a really interesting way to stress test like your priorities and where your head's at is like the band breaks up today.
How do you feel? aaron quits i die of a heart attack whatever make up anything under oath is no longer the best years of my life are over i'll never do anything as meaningful as that again now i just work at fedex as if that's some like prison sentence i have to get a real job god forbid all these things or same exact data set i can't believe you made it 23 years what a blessing all we wanted to do was write one song like which one is it because both are true it just tells you who you are inside you know like if if this doesn't work or we break up in a week or 10 years or 100 years I don't need
this again it's it's not part of me it's informed who I am obviously and afforded me amazing experiences like the one we're doing right now.
But if all of this goes away and you're just a quote unquote regular person with a regular job, like, are you okay with that?
Or do you need this?
What part of this is you?
And have you become the thing that you just did?
You know, we would just do music.
And now have I become Tim from Under Oath?
I think he said at the very beginning, do people love me for who I am or for what I do?
And do I love me for who I am or just what I do?
Yeah, 100%. You have to ask your question.
You've been talking like this.
And I think in the early days, especially when it blew up, I keep saying that.
There's got to be another way to say the band got popular.
I think it's the way that everybody knows.
yeah yeah but what you he has talked like this i'm not telling you anything you don't know you've talked like this since you were 21 years old like there was a time when the when the band first fuck here it is again when the band first blew up where he would ride and i don't think you mind me talking about this no he would ride with like the opening bands in vans like he would was this like your stoic hair shirt equivalent like you purposefully putting Putting the fucking uncomfortable clothing on just to remind yourself of where you came from.
Honestly, it was, it was, I think at the time it was immature looking back like, would I do that now?
No. But I think it was a response to exactly what we've been talking about.
But it came, that's the point I'm making.
It came from the same place.
It came from fame and money and me going, this is all gross.
And it scared us to death.
The reason I brought it up, the reason I brought it up, because I think it's pertinent to say, is.
that self -actualization and that realization of FedEx isn't a prison.
Let's switch this dataset to the same dataset.
Let's switch the perspective to say we had 23 beautiful years.
It scared us to death, some of us, some of the rest of us, hearing that reflection.
Or it sounds like the person's less bought in, or it sounds like they would be okay with a thing happening that you wouldn't be okay with happening.
It's like, holy fuck, is Tim half out?
Yeah. Like maybe he's not, maybe he's just going to pull the fucking pin one day, but especially in, and I thought that, and if you hold things open handed, it's not about making sure I never let it go or intentionally throwing it.
You just hold it like this and it doesn't matter.
Like when you realize it doesn't actually matter and not to say that under oath doesn't matter.
I think we, I mean, we know we've saved people's lives and they have tattoos and this got me through brain surgery and whatever.
We've heard all the stories and And the impact that we've had on life and culture is noticeable and palpable.
But outside of that, if it wasn't us, it would have been someone else.
And it's more about it really doesn't matter.
Like, I'm always thinking about deathbed, always.
Like, and then everything that comes out, Steve Jobs' last things, I've already mentioned that.
all these people's last things uh we asked it's 85 people in a nursing home their top 10 things they change you see it all day long and and it's all the same shit so why wait until we're dying question for you on that to deploy that question for you on that the top five regrets of the dying the deathbed thing that was a very famous uh survey that was done what do you think are the the top five deathbed regrets of ex -rockstars what do you think they would have in there oh i think it all depends on where they end up or why they're why they're exit i think is my question i think that the first time
you have an actual relationship with a woman you probably regret wasting 20 years just having sex with random women uh i think when your kids kids grow up and we'll see, and me and Chris talk about this, our keyboard player a lot, like I know I'm doing my best. And I also know I'm breaking something.
I just don't know yet which, what it is.
You know, my kids could turn on me and say, you were never there.
And they're technically correct.
Um, I FaceTime them.
We have a great relationship.
You know, my daughter's in a band, but she comes to all the shows.
She loves it. And I check in with my kids.
Like, do you you guys is this okay um so for me it's hard it's hard to hard to tell but then you have people like dying like drugs the whole thing like it's almost like what's good about being in a band i think that's a lot easier to quantify you can count those way quicker than what's bad and you do feel like like the other night um i was dead asleep like two weeks ago on monday like very sleep.
Like I've been so busy and I, I work like a nine to five in Nashville as a song is a staffing songwriter.
I've heard. Yeah. And I, so I just, I'm, so when I get home, you're at the cold face of songwriting at the moment.
Yes. So just tired, tired, tired.
And this is something that I regrets the wrong word, but I, my daughter wakes up and vomits, has to vomit, sorry, sick stomach virus you know kids whatever she's four and you know what the first thing she said was she's scared to throw up you know that feeling when you're trying to fight vomiting she goes somebody please take me to the doctor and my brain went oh fuck because for years with the healthy anxiety thing I've always that's the first thing I do oh this hurts or this I gotta go get a scan you know what I mean and my brain went I've passed the curse.
I've passed the curse.
And that, to me, is the biggest regrets of 50 Dying Rock Stars is, like, will I pass on the habits that I picked up touring and doing this?
Will I pass that on to my offspring?
And you will. And I will.
And I think that's kind of the thing of, like, we're all breaking something.
And I think to make your top five list regrets or top five best things, like it has to be in the construct of like, we're not there yet.
The story is still being written, but we have, I have a pretty good idea, but I won't know until I'm 60.
And I look back and go, huh?
When you're triple D and you can say, well, that's a good day.
I quit the band in my head probably four times a year.
And it's like, and it's, it is palpable.
And it's always on a plane, always during turbulence.
And it's not real, but I'm like, what if I were to die?
Oh, I see. And it's all about me going to play in front of 3 ,500 people in Australia.
hell yeah. How selfish was I to think that this was the only way that I can make money.
I'm the only thing that's going to make me happy.
And now my kids don't have a dad, you know, which is absurd. But like when you have these moments of like full clarity and peace and you see what really matters, like none, nothing matters more than a very few people that you've committed to To raise and provide for and protect.
Well, also on top of that, obviously, it certainly seems like you guys have been through some like a tumultuous past. People coming and going, challenges.
We really haven't. I mean, 23 years with the same lineup for the most part.
Except for the I mean, emotionally turbulent.
Oh, yeah. Between you, everybody.
Absolutely. Fucking five, six people.
Five people. It was six.
It was six. Now five to your heart.
The gamut. You're right.
Addiction. This thing.
people people's lost parents people have had kids people have been in marriages people have got divorced people have you know fucking been tempted to cheat on why people have a vote you fucking dude you're coming home you've had too much to do with all that stuff yeah the full works of that i think about i mean this is the most like maybe it was the friends we made along the way like it is the most fucking that thing ever yeah but um i'm interested to just dig into the art form thing for a second because i think you know audience capture is something that's talked about a lot in my world yeah
um you know allowing the uh you create an avatar of what you think your audience wants and then you continue to throw red meat to them in an attempt to appease what it is that they want interesting as opposed to doing what to you feels tasteful earnest uh artistically pure um being led by curiosity and wonder and awe and intrigue and and sort of genuine bravery to say the thing that you mean and feel the thing that you do and not rush through the stuff like sit with the awkward whatever it is yeah and um i have to assume as well that looking back on a body of work uh you guys will have had i don't
know but i have to assume that there was periods where you would have been like fuck okay so what do we need to write to be popular what do we what do we need to write to be able to get like they're only chasing safety numbers again end and do we need to do that or do we need to do what we and fuck like how do i even separate that out in my mind because there is this analyticalization yeah of the music industry immediately so what's my metric for success is it how hard the fucking crowd goes when we play it live well what if the crowd's a little bit smaller well is it how much i love the song
well what if somebody else in the band doesn't love the song quite so much maybe i'm wrong you have all of this self doubt that starts to come through and uh i i have to assume that looking back on a a library of work that you feel proud in has got to be one of the most dividend paying ways to spend a career that is in an artistic outlet because it's the it's one of the things that you can always feel proud about you're like dude i fucking love that that song yeah i fucking adore that that track like that was really really fucking meaningful to me and i know that we shouldn't have made it and i
know that the label fucking hated it and i know that and it really fucking meant a lot to me and like that's something that i feel really fucking proud of it's been cyclical for me and i i think i'm there's been times in our career where I've been like if we do this we will we will and I've believed it if we do this if we make this type of song in this key with this type of vocal arrangement it will become Chasing Safety like I thought that I thought that like 15 times and then there's this other side of me where it's like let's write a seven minute song about his father's death that I think is one
of the most beautiful pieces of music I've ever written that no one listens to.
Which tracks that? It's called Pneumonia.
It's on our second to last record. So not our newest one, but one before.
It's a final. So is it the last song?
Yeah. Like I think about that song and I'm like, oh, that's everything I've ever wanted to do in this band.
You know, and then you have, and I have been cyclical like this the whole time, looking back at that, going, that's what I wanted then.
And I think you are probably the person in the band who has been the most steady eddy with what with how you want it to be meaning yeah you're the first one you're the first person you're the first person i ever heard refer to music as art yeah when we were young you know yeah never for me personally um and it did it built a lot of tension in the band i think Well, looking back, I didn't know.
Yeah, always. Uncompromising.
Fuck the label. Like literally.
Sorry, Columbia. Our manager's not allowed in the studio.
Nobody's allowed in the studio.
To this day, he's. Ever.
You are not. You are not allowed in the studio because you are an outside influence.
It's just us. And your eyes will light up or your eyes won't.
Yep. And then, dude, Chris told me he came over for beers.
He's like, dude, the third track.
Like, maybe we should do.
All of it. And maybe that's like a protective coping mechanism because I am impressionable.
I don't know why it's so sacred or maybe so hard line, but it's never, ever what's successful.
Like to the point where I've literally hit them and I'm like, I want to, our last record, the one we just did, I was like, I want to go to the cabin and I don't even want anyone want to be on itunes i don't want to hear what beartooth or bad omens or rob zombie or i don't want to hear anything about anything i don't want any outside influence i want it to be two ingredients us and inspiration that's it and if you let the song drive it will drive you know um and i've I've always, I've always been that way.
Like chasing safety.
They're like, dude, if you do this again, we're going to get you on K -Rock and you're going to be the next fallout boy.
And so we wrote to Find the Right Line instead.
Just the heaviest things ever done.
I fucking love that album.
And that was in direct response, in my opinion, to you guys trying to make me do this thing.
Go fuck yourself. I love the album too.
But at the time, just to be frank, I was, I was like, what?
But why? Why? You know what I mean?
Because I am the polar opposite of him and where I have now learned with Under Oath that I want it to be just us.
And I think it's correct.
I think it's the correct, but on a day to day basis.
Like I want to work with somebody different every day.
well you do i do and this that you've found yourself in your fucking batman bruce wayne new lifestyle you've found yourself yeah yeah i mean can you explain for the people who don't understand what the sort of velocity of nashville songwriting uh at the moment please for me i so i do i write five songs a week up to seven so like i get up i go to the gym i go to studio someone shows up i've ever met them before and written with them before or not and you spend about an hour like this you know a lot of this stuff does come up same stuff we've talked about today because and the artists now are so different
than they used to be because they're dealing with like algorithmic issues like we kind of talked about earlier and they're dealing with like like a couple months ago i saw a girl's 250 000 album get shelved because she hadn't had a viral moment and she cried on my couch about what am i going to do you know because so yeah it's it's a a it's a different song every day and it's usually written and demo tracked in four hours right and the under oath machine is it's a slog for me and i don't mean that in a derogatory way but sometimes like what i've learned to do with under oath this is what i do
tim and i typically begin every song and sometimes chris will bring something but we typically begin every song and for me songs begin begin with like a thought sometimes a title but most of the time a thought like i want this to be like uh like like fast and double time and in the end it'll really sprawl out and do this thing like really edge theory like that's how it works in my brain and tim and i have such a close relationship that we can do that together very quickly and then i like to leave and then he will brood and ruminate for days over that three minutes that i shit out with him 72 hours
prior and then i'll come back at the end and go oh he was right and then i'll deal we'll do the lyric thing and then we'll do the vocal thing but that's that's the way that i but nashville is dash like the fucking ford production line when you start to spread it out i've only recently begun to understand first off I've only recently begun to understand how many ex scene kids are running the country scene crazy what the fuck all of them what the fuck our very first tour manager a guy that we met in Virginia it was in a shitty club called Alleycats his Jelly Rolls tour manager Anzal guy yeah yeah
yeah and scene kids run everything Dan and Shay yeah I'm good I'm good friends seeing kids they do i mean the guitar player for 18 visions is zed's tour manager like and i think i really think it's an attractive quality to come from like the diy hardcore scene because we're the only genre i think that i can think of at scale that has to do everything themselves has to book your first show yourself you have to carrying around a diary a freaking atlas a notebook full of addresses who's getting what like in rap in country and everything and national jazz jazz musicians it's built in a machine it's
built at edm it's built in a vacuum on soundcloud until your first shows in front of 10 ,000 people and then you're like what the hell how do i get how do i get t -shirts made like oh we we all own merch companies bro like we got you like it's literally just a skill set that that maybe is not even virtuous it's just what you have to do but once you've done it that's valuable you realize how rare it is and yeah you're a dime a dozen here and you realize our scene literally is baby and everyone else in the major world that's who knew who knew that the fucking sad emo kids from school are going to
grow up and dude I work with artists on a regular basis I don't have sick I don't know on a regular basis I work with artists that have a label deal fucking brand deals an agent a lawyer a merch deal and they've never played a show and then they come to aaron to write their songs for him that's not art that's a business yeah i mean we're seeing this a lot at the moment right uh benson boone copying a lot of fucking stick at the moment for yeah and i think talk to me about that last night everybody is and it's not too dissimilar in uh in the world of content creation hey how much truth is this person saying
like how much yeah how much is how much is this person saying what they believe and how much is this person saying something which is uh politically or culturally popular or expedient or useful or strategic molested perverted in order to be able to get the outcome that they want to align themselves with a particular person how much are they causing causing it's sucking up to this or that or the other yeah and uh how much authenticity is in here i i love your use of the word molested i've heard you use that a couple times and it's so jarring because that only triggers in at least in the states
is like weird stuff with kids and you're right it's like taking something and just distorting it and fucking with it and yeah i don't know i I think I try, I really try, and this is, I'm earnestly saying this, like with all these people that get sent to me, I really try to like inject, and I learned that from him.
I try to inject that art into song in a box.
You know what I mean?
And that's why - We've got four hours.
Let's try and come up with something that's not totally meaningless.
Yeah, because you know - But he's so good at it.
Like he's good at it.
And when I say that's not art, that's a business, everything about that is about trying to find the right product to sell the most units but in in that vacuum there are actual artists doing the work you know yeah so i mean also let's i don't think what he's doing is factory work let's not forget with the fucking scene kids whatever you say renaissance uh revolution perhaps uh the level of talent that you have to be able to play those sort of riffs and to be able to play those particular drum pieces like that's got to be be one of the contributing factors that it's technically quite a difficult
music and then you go up and you go like hey man like you're fucking cadc but it's back it's back to what it's back to what he was saying though like when people come to me and they can't believe and i'm not pumping my own tires but they can't believe that i'll just do it all right now they're like what do you mean you don't have to hire someone i'm like for what because we had to do it all ourselves that's the scene that's the scene kid renaissance and why the scene kids are running Nashville.
He can record, he can sing, he could play bass, play guitar and drums and get you a full song.
Oh, by the way, I'll, I'll give it like a little bit of a master as well.
I'll be able to like, just bounce it.
It'll, it'll sound like it's demo, but like, it'll be, it'll be fucking throw some samples on there.
The label, the label will sound good.
They'll like, you could fucking, you can say, I got a job.
I got, I, I got gainful employment in Nashville and I'm successful in Nashville because of what you just said, because Nashville was became such a song shop in the sense where you go to a songwriter, then you go to a producer, the producer would hire a band.
i'll write the song with you and i'll give you a demo that slaps and then you'll call me in two weeks and say can i have that demo and i'll go for this number you can have do you know what i'm saying like but that's but that's how that's how we that's how i'm interested i'm interested you know this this very much is like kind of the whatever batman to your bruce wayne thing uh that you've got a lot of pressure uh creative tension working at a pace that sometimes can be artistically challenging sure for you but you've got now this other part of your life what sort of fulfillment do you get out
of this other bit is the how much ick versus fulfillment versus artistic expression are you ever conflicted about that stuff unrothed to me is like um if it's gonna sound so cheesy it's a feeling of musical home to me um i can suck so bad in front of tim and just say i have this idea like and i i like for instance um dangerous business walking out your front door you know the time is running i had this the original idea for that song was insane i wanted to be about different languages and people groups i wanted to say they say they're french they do this it was ridiculous ridiculous like the most
ridiculous like but to me like that's free that's the purest form of home in music is where you can go and dare to suck in front of someone like really anything like really dare to suck i can say anything to him and he won't be surprised i could promise you if there's a studio over here and you're like guys write a song i go to tim and i go i've been listening to this one rap artist he's got he'll go i got these samples you want to try them and we would try to to make a rap song and it would come out as an under oath song somehow in the end, but that it's the true freedom that, and I wouldn't
trade it for the world.
Yeah. The freedom to be able to suck is because without it, I would implode.
Yeah. I mean, even going back to the question you just asked about like the, the authenticity and who's, who's spinning things and who's in a position of like, this is hot right now.
Let's cover that. Like we were talking about this earlier, but like Like, rock music specifically to me is very uninspired.
Right? And, yeah. And, you know, to Aaron's point, to use his words, he's like, it all sounds the same.
It's all made by the same five people.
And somebody's just waiting for the next Nirvana.
You know? And there is the turnstiles, and there are all these.
And then you zoom out, and you're like, oh, but those are the biggest bands.
But they've all been bands for, like, 10 years, 15 years.
They're not. They're more our peers than, like, oh, the new crop are going to do it right.
And then I think about the comedy scene here.
And I think that's the most punk thing happening in culture is like Dave Chappelle, Tony, all those guys, Gillis, like they are unhinged.
And you can feel that they're not pulling punches.
And I think people gravitate towards that even if it's like, yikes, like, whoa.
oh, he said that, you believe them.
And I think that goes back to what Aaron was talking about.
Where you hear - Everyone believes our first three albums because they're true.
Well, how hard is it to get back there after you've spent such a long two and a half decades not knowing what real life is like?
Oh, I don't think you do.
I think that's the beauty.
Like that's the beauty of the ride is like you can ride a roller coaster once and have your mind blown.
Tell me you can recreate that if you got a free pass you could just write it ten times.
You only get the ride once.
We did Matt Edgar's podcast this morning and it's in this like a little studio room but it's on the back of a I guess it looks underground comedy club literally underground black cement dirty as fuck called like black sheep.
There was spew in the bathroom when I went to pee.
It feels like the places we grew up playing.
yeah and matt is like yeah i i uh i do a set here once a month i was like damn it's pretty sick what's that like because at this point like and then he's going on warp tour it's like i i saw like i literally thought about it today because we were talking about music and i literally saw myself in that guy i was like oh you get to like you get to become like a nirvana right now you're at the front of the scene yeah yeah in the basement of some some shit -ass building over here and it's like that's the that's the that's the coolest part is like just seeing people go and go and go and I think a big
part of it too is like success I think not that we were ever starving or we needed to make it because that was never the point but there is something that's different about being our age now and being married and having kids kids and having other commitments where, I mean, I remember writing, writing on the walls, we all lived in a, like a commune apartment.
Uh, not all of us, but I lived in a two bedroom house with seven people and we had three people in per room.
And one person in the living room is the best, but like, if we weren't just hanging out, it was just all music.
I had no girlfriend, had no mom.
Our friends weren't fucking dying all the time.
Like they are now. Like Like, we didn't have any of the...
It was just excitement and limitless ceilings.
I remember writing on the walls.
I still have the computer because I'm trying to get the hard drive out of it.
In GarageBand, programming all of the drums. You know, bam, bam, bam.
Like, the worst. But, like, I had everything, DI modelers, all of it.
And I just wrote the song.
It wasn't like, yeah, we're in the studio.
we have all this gear and it was just me just sitting everyone's downstairs playing halo and i'm just upstairs like where's where's this go how's this go and like we don't have that anymore we have to literally like check with five people's spouses to see if these three weeks work for everyone and then consciously go away from our homes and then go somewhere and try to to simulate the isolation and the freedom that you had.
When you weren't isolated, you just didn't have anything to do.
So now we need isolation to try to mimic the freedom that we have. And the synthesized isolation is so different than...
Yeah. It's, yeah. Well, it's because you know, do you ever remember when Tim Kennedy got waterboarded?
Do you ever remember that?
No. You know Tim Kennedy?
Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Okay, so Tim Kennedy wanted to show...
On purpose. Yes. Okay.
So he, I can't remember, this is a while ago now, he I think was making a point about enhanced interrogation techniques yeah and uh basically said I'm gonna let someone waterboard me and they can waterboard me for as long as you want so towel over face pouring whole things I'm pretty sure the whole thing's video it's on the internet somewhere and a lot of people gave him stick for the fact well yeah you know you're getting waterboarded but you know that at some point it's going to stop you're in control yes so there's this degree of I'm sure that it was still fucking awful and uncomfortable and I'm
pretty sure Tim him said like go for as long as you want keep going like do it again again hit me again but there is something about the lack of authenticity that i think was the reason that people tried to poke holes in it and said hey like fucking you like let's be honest here like this is these two things you're laughing you're laughing is enhanced interrogation as opposed to that who's to say that the fake version of it that he went through didn't last longer than some of the real versions of whatever whatever but the emotional yeah of like oh these people don't have my best interests at heart
is kind of the same as what you guys are trying to create when you go to the cabin in the woods you went like three times yeah right for this last one yeah went up it went back up and then went different producers second time etc yeah yeah i know you did your research i like it um so i think it's an odd realization that the start of something the liberation that you have there but you know if people are to look back on any whatever career it is that they've got now go back to university or go back to college or whatever and think about what was like when was it really really good dude you know
we had to hand that project in and it was like midnight on the sunday and we slept and slept we ordered dominoes and everyone slept under their desks and then we got up the next day and we did it we fucking made it man like that was what was cool and um again this is an unteachable lesson that luxury becomes as much of a prison as it is an enabler absolutely like you know you guys on a fucking double -decker tour but like dan and shay I went to go and hang with them after they played in Austin and they've got like two and I'm sure you know like the most fucking in five star oh well you know the way
that we've actually done this bed is if you put it at the very back because no one has to walk past it you can have like a additional queen size thing and it's over the back wheel which means that there's more dampening and whatever whatever like all of this stuff and uh you know it's cool as fuck to see it but there's a something about the like rough and ready story having to get the fucking orienteering out and we say it all the time yep we say it all the time the shit you remember the shit that impresses upon you and the shit that makes you you is like bro in the last six months we've played
the forum crazy arenas all these places i remember like i can tell you the way that a place in 2003 smelled you know i mean like yeah sleeping in the van in the gully well i think you dive into this a lot but i know it's like kind of um very i would i don't know if like rogan -esque is a good thing and you can edit that out but like the idea of like the goggins and these kinds of people where they're like similar to tim kennedy like suffering is where growth comes from so choose suffering choose something whether it be a cold plunge or a run or anything sauna like do things that are uncomfortable
intentionally to then allow everything else to kind of feel a bit normal um and and i think that's what that's the difference with your tim kennedy analogy is like me going in to a cold plunge is me setting a timer for four three to to five minutes i'm in control it's 33 degrees i want to die and it's not the same as me falling through ice as me being in the titan fully clothed in 33 degree weather and maybe i'm only in there for two minutes that two minutes would scar me compared to the five minutes that i willingly do upon myself although the environment's exactly the same as far as physically
and i think I think in a weird way, like we try to recreate stuff like that, but like when it actually happens naturally by life, like that's what forms you, you know, you can try to heat up metal and try to distill it and try to purify it and do this.
and like, yeah, like let's, let's go do something hard again.
Let's go to a cabin and, and act like we're single and alone and maybe even try to go crazy a little bit to see what comes out.
Like we're doing an experiment on ourselves, but we're really just attempting to set ourselves up in the closest form that resembles something that came natural so that we can receive transmission.
You're laughing as an older version of you.
Yeah. Or a younger version.
Yeah. Yeah. of course you know what i mean having fucking uh elon's fucking skynet global inc of course yeah yeah hot bbn winkle whiskey the whole thing yeah yeah like yeah now it's the same as when we were doing it in an old storage space except for there's a movie theater a hot tub a grill and he brings 15 bottles of whiskey and we make old fashions every night and by the way and by the way and by today and we have a car and we have three cars actually like i bought my first car when I was 24.
I drove the band van around as my person because we were just Like literally, I did not own a vehicle or pay car insurance until 24 years old.
One guy had a cell phone until we were all 22.
So one guy had a college fund that we depleted.
We spent all of his fucking money.
Yeah. And we used his phone.
Thank you, Dave and Karen Brandel.
Thank you so much. But yeah, and you want to recreate it, but you can't.
And I think I've heard you talk about this or someone was talking to you about it but talking about slumps and like almost how you know years three four or five of doing this podcast or whenever it was something in that realm it's like that's where it started to get stale and like how how do i excite it and like that's that seems to be everyone's real question and possibly the most important answer that nobody can answer i mean Even today, I forget who it was that asked it, but they're like, you've been with the same woman for 18 years.
Like, yeah, I'm actually, I've only ever been with my wife.
I've only seen one human being naked ever in the physical, obviously.
And he's like kind of dumbfounded and then goes, so what do you, how do you make that like special?
And just kind of like, how do you spice it up?
I think was the bigger question.
Or what is it like over time?
And yeah. And because I think we all think about things in like a, it's constantly degrading and the first six months of a relationship, step one is always the best. The infatuation, the romances there, there were flowers and fresh cooked meals and the sex was great.
And now 10 years in, you got a couple of kids like, and that's how everyone views it.
And in a weird way, like I'd rather just age gracefully than try to recreate being a horny teenager.
But that's a really interesting question that I've thought about a lot that there isn't, I don't think there's a particularly healthy conversation around how to age gracefully as a man.
There's not, and I mean, not for anyone.
I know that would be true.
I think the reason that it's particularly interesting, it's tiny, a little bit like maybe novel, is just that um the conversation around women aging because the world places an awful lot of value on women's youth yeah the way that they look in terms of youth and that's why cosmetic surgery and makeup and and facelifts all this stuff exists in order to hold on to that right to not to not grow into it to to go back and that has to be tough for chicks to deal with but i don't think that there is a i simply don't think there's a conversation around what it's like to age as a guy physically mentally
emotionally like what does that mean to transcend it's like yeah you know we understand what it's like to have the super arrested development of like the adult man child you know like the 35 year old infant yeah um there's a movie about it where some so a couple hires some woman to break their son out of that it's 40 year old guy living in his house and i can't remember what it's called okay it's gonna drive me crazy but yeah so go on though i I think I know where you're going next.
It's just not a particularly well -trodden path, and I don't think that there are very good archetypes.
I'm 37, and the first time I think I noticed age was probably about 34.
And I was like, huh.
Workouts actually take a little bit longer to come back.
Is that fucking gray hair in my beard?
Like, it's one. I mean, that's kind of cool, I guess.
You know what I mean?
And you think, huh, I'm really out of the hood.
And then when you start to roll in, okay, what does it mean about relationships?
What does it mean about your role in the world?
How are you supposed to show up?
Because like, am I going to be the fucking like leanest, most jacked, strongest, coolest, newest guy, band, fucking singer, songwriter thing?
I'm not hot shit anymore.
Okay, so what does that mean?
Am I supposed to try and recreate that old thing?
because we valorize success especially first -time success and descendancy and trajectory so much. Okay, well what does it mean what does it mean to sort of graduate?
What does it mean what does it mean to move on from that?
Well, that's why I think a lot of men older men like don't have to your point like there's no archetype there's no no mentors and it's like these people retire and then they go back to work.
Like, men don't even know how to stop being this one thing.
You've been doing it for 50 years.
Like, you know, what is next?
What is the next chapter?
And it's, there isn't one.
That's why, I think that's why, you know, episodes like the Dry Creek Dwayne.
Don't draw. Yes. Fucking first comes.
Nailed it, dude. I said triple D earlier.
Is cool because he's an old guy.
And he almost feels like he's so different than me that it feels like my grandpa or my dad talking to me about how to go about life versus peers, people that are my age, your age, our age.
And it's like, okay, what happens at 50?
What happens at 60?
What do you do with that?
And it's like, there's such an emphasis on, to your point, recreating that.
It's like TRT therapy and this and this and this and all the things and all we're doing is kicking and screaming being dragged towards death raging against entropy and doing the best we can to stave it off rather than walking with the current and going here we here we sit well having no examples to is I think is the biggest like dry creek Dwayne fucking two is is really it really appeals to me but to you I could see I could see you in Wyoming fucking wrangling a horse but to you that might not appeal you know what i mean like you might want to age and go out a different way yeah you know what i
mean like with and i'm not saying like with like with women you can you can see it in television and in media like you have the woman who's like the gardening lady and she ages that way the yoga lady like hat lady some of some of the wives in our band some of the they're they're like they're getting in their mid -40s and they're becoming yoga teachers and stuff and it's a beautiful thing to watch yeah but men like because there's archetypes like it's either dry quick drain you play golf and rot or you go back or become Elon Musk or die trying or you go back to work you do the permanent munch yeah
those are those are the three options you know and I I think what helps me is having have anything that can take me out of thinking of me is a good thing and I think having kids and having knowing that I'm going to be a grandfather one day like there my path has already been laid out and so it's And I don't know how I'm going to get there.
And I hope I'm valuable and can contribute when that time comes.
I'd love to be the grandpa that's fit enough to be able to throw the football with his grandkids.
Think about this. I know that you both have got challenges to do with, fuck, like, you know, we nailed it.
We made the world a better place.
We gave songs that sort of brought people out of themselves.
We helped them to understand bits of their life.
We created collective effervescence for like millions of people across a huge, huge, huge fucking career.
yeah but i i missed some of my kids upbringing and all the rest of it but think about what it's going to be like when your kids have got grandkids and granddad has got the sickest stories like granddad's cool yeah granddad knows the world he can tell you about delhi and he can tell you about fucking jakarta and he can tell you about what it's like in adelaide in the winter and he can tell you about what it's like to go to dublin island and have i've been the guinness file let Let me tell you about the Guinness factory.
You know, fucking dude, that is a worldly patriarch in a family.
Yeah. Is like, that's where fucking like Druids come from.
You know what I mean?
Like that anchor of why the, why you're there.
Uh, big hopeful. That's a big hopeful piece rather than being the dad who rots in the chair.
Yeah. And I mean, I think I, yeah, it's, it's always, I we're, we're, we're breaking something.
Every day we're breaking something we just don't know what we're breaking yet you know and I think that's the exciting part of life is it's not color in these lines and then beautiful picture comes out color in these lines another beautiful picture comes out everything's in its right place.
Like there there are things that I've probably done or will do or I'm still doing that are hurting someone somewhere.
My goal is to make sure that I do less of them.
and recognize them as they come and then I think by the end of it all you just look back and go we all did our best you know that's all you can do I think another way to look at that the breaking things is a an interesting an interesting way to frame it another way to frame it might be there's a price that you have to pay yeah in order to do things there's a price yeah right there's a barrier to entry to be there's a cost of doing business yes correct there's a cost of doing business for this thing you wanna be you wanna fucking i can make music that changes a portion of the world okay cool i
have to go to a portion of the world there's a fucking price that you pay for it yep and i i think that's fine and and for me personally i don't know if the price necessarily is as valuable as the outcome i don't i don't know that those correlate like if we had to start over and someone said here's a crystal ball you're gonna start now and if you do what you just did for the last 25 years again by the time you're 75 you're gonna be sitting down with a very old chris williamson and you could have the whole ride over again i would say no i'm good like i like the beauty of things being temporary
and it's like and the contentment of just going yeah we've there's there's two ways to look at it we're playing fucking the norva again we played the norva in 2003 2004 and now it's 2025 i'm still at the fucking norva yeah or holy shit the norva sold out again 20 years later norva is sick it's no i know yeah and yeah for me it's always the second one it's like 2018 or whatever these people are still coming to see us and it's but it's all the same and what i'm not interested in doing is trying to be that like sad 55 year old rocker who can't let it go and be a career musician like that doesn't
interest me i don't if if we happen to be here in 10 years talking to you and still playing shows i will gladly do it and my i'm not intentionally sabotaging anything but i think the open -handedness of just like whenever this is ready to go i've had more than my fill i've I've been beyond blessed.
I've had more memories and lifetimes that I ever thought would be provided if it all goes away.
I try to remember how blessed and fortunate we are to put, like the Norva thing, I was.
Where is Norva? It's in Virginia Beach, Virginia.
Isn't it Norfolk? Norfolk, yes.
My ex -father -in -law, I've been blessed enough to co -parent my first child with my ex -wife, and I'm still close with her family.
I was just there this weekend.
and um i live on the other side of the country my ex -father -in -law who i'm close with he's he's dying of emphysema he's in his 70s and he smoked cigarettes for like 50 some odd years and he carries around an oxygen tank um and these guys all know this but he's like he's an amazing guitar player and he played in bands all growing up that's what he did bar bands you know like gigging and he never um he never made it you know he was never in anything that blew up or sold records or was a real living um i had a conversation with him on saturday afternoon outside at a barbecue at a family member's
house and he goes i put it down i did it i stopped and i'm happy about it and i'm like head stopped playing he can't breathe he's like i put it down i don't i i finally did it because when you saw him a few months ago he was still lugging gear to venues in 70 with a a fucking with a fucking oxygen tank i mean yeah holy fuck but what was beautiful it was it i got emotional about it because he's like i did it closure he's like my time is over gracefully and you know what he said and i thought i like i literally when he started the conversation i was like oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck he's gonna be
like i never made it none of this ever amounted and he literally was like it was so fun and i'm so glad i got to do it and it fucked me up because because I was like, we're over here bitching about the Norva, or whatever.
In a theoretical moment, by the way.
I love you, Norva. We all love the Norva.
But he never played for more than 400 or 500 people, ever.
Do you find it difficult?
It seems like Tim's got a very balanced, that open -handed, impermanence sort of approach to things.
But I get the sense that you're a little bit more conflicted, not necessarily about that precisely.
precisely but generally what does this mean sense of purpose where's it coming from given that you've got someone who is kind of like a purist in no one else in the fucking recording studio but also with regards to this that's kind of a little bit like being with the the lebron james of impermanence a bit you've got this like but but you know this buddhist guy sat next to you and that's your first tattoo in one in one form uh is that fuck like maybe i should be like that maybe it'd be easier if i could let go does that cause a little uh more so when i was younger because like i told you an hour
ago this motherfucker's been bent like that since the beginning like been like this since 2003 happened to happen 2003 when 2004 when it was like i grew up in a trailer on food stamps 2004 someone we literally started making like real money like buying house money and he is over here like well you know if like whatever anyway there's been times where to answer your question more directly i've wished i was like that um and there's been times where i've gone he's a fucking idiot he doesn't know what he he doesn't know what he's got and he's squandering it with his psyche like and there's been and then
now where we're at now where we're both 42 years old and where we're at now as i look at him and i go that's a beautiful thing and i'm glad that he's able to do it i'm glad that he can hold everything with a greased hand you know and i i hold on a little tighter and i think the reasons i hold on tighter are irrelevant but i maybe they are relevant but like it it's just an acceptance that i you have if you don't it's like being like you said earlier it's like being married to four other people and if you don't accept some of their quirks you're really on the brakes you're in trouble you know know
i mean like your relation this doesn't work and it's a constant marriage is hard it's work it's a beautiful work it's one of the most beautiful works you can do in my opinion but it is labor it is a labor that you do you get up every day and as cliche as it sounds you choose to love that person and you choose to love the things about them that you don't agree with number one and that you can't see eye to eye with in any facet and that's just what it is and there's things about the greased hands thing the open hands thing that i'm like do you even care about what you're doing and then i'll you
circle back around and go i get it and and some some days i wish i i wish yeah i think i mean that that's a a rational question but to your point even earlier about you know you pop in and get all the ideas out and then i'm the ones stuck for three days like drooting it's like I think I earned the right yes to qualify that statement with the fact that I am if not the one of the hardest working people in the band oh you're the finisher for someone who quote -unquote can easily get painted as like oh he doesn't care he's squandering it why am I working so fucking hard and it's because this has meaning
yet it does not define me and And that's a difference.
You've got a really beautiful mindset when it comes to that.
It's very impressive.
As a fellow obsessive, it's difficult to find that level of equanimity, right?
To be able to deploy everything, but to have it come from a place of just, I want this to be really good, as opposed to, if I don't, this defines me and it is indicative of my self -worth.
path and if i can't make this fucking melody this track this fucking fill this whatever this part this vocal i if i can't make this a success as beautiful as whatever it might be yeah then i am dot dot dot then it means this about me then and i'm gonna be homeless and alone and under a bridge with a gluten intolerant you know what i mean like yeah all of these things are gonna fucking happen yeah um yeah i learned about this thing the other day that was that was pretty interesting um hedging your identity so the healthiest and happiest people in the world apparently have multiple different places
that they take their sense of self -worth from and uh yours might be a musician father husband friend bandmate leader uh uh confidant you know what i mean all of these different things if someone else might be a brazilian jujitsu su grappler but also they're a salesperson also they're a pool player also they're you know whatever the fuck yeah and i think i was thinking about this literally on the way in i wrote a huge message on the way in about this that the price that you need to pay to be the best in the world is to probably sacrifice absolutely everything else in order to be able to to get
there now this This is the best in the world under a very, very narrow domain, right?
It's a very narrow window, which is you will perform in your chosen pursuit to the best of your ability.
And the reason that you have to sacrifice all of these other things is that if you don't, you will be beaten by a person who's prepared to sacrifice all of those other things.
Like, make no mistake, if none of you guys had got married, none of you guys had ever decided to have kids, done all the rest of this stuff, i mean who's to say that it hasn't informed you artistically it's kind of the weird leverage thing yeah how art works that uh sometimes stuff which is suboptimal actually ends up giving you a step change in terms of insight but let's say that it's something a little bit more linear like football right or power lifting or some shit like that i always use this example but eddie hall world's strongest man 2018 19 british guy he's stood there on the winner's
podium and he's got this trophy and he's throwing it in the air and he's saying nano this is for you his grandma died like not long ago nano this is for you tears streaming down his face and uh he does this interview afterwards and he says if I hadn't won I would be dead divorced with no relationship to my daughter because he was six foot two 200 like fucking like 400 pounds 400 plus pounds he was on so many performance enhancing drugs his blood pressure was through the roof all of these different things spending all of his time training and being obsessive so his wife and his marriage fucking
falling apart wasn't seeing his daughter at all because he spent all his time in the gym I'm obsessed with overwinning this thing and you go okay that's the price to be Eddie Hall do you want to be Eddie Hall do you want to be Eddie Hall because that's the fucking price that you need to pay in order to be that right and this is where this is kind of the lesson that I keep drilling into myself it's largely like this whole body of work for me has been like a thinly veiled autobiography and like what I'm trying to drill into myself is okay what is the metric of success like what is it that you consider
to be success because Because if it's the most plays, the most money, the most followers, the most whatever on the show being known or validated or liked by the most people, that's going to pervert your direction.
And it's going to cause you to, like, you can end up, if you do that, you can end up at a place in life, not only that you don't want to be, but one that you literally didn't even mean to get to.
yeah and you can turn around and go holy fuck like i got to the top of this huge mountain i was supposed to be on that meadow over the far side yeah supposed to be down there and uh you're trying to shortcut that but and here's the question that has kind of been in the back of my mind for all this conversation i wonder how much and it speaks to your ex -father ex -father -in -law's point which is what you thought he was going to say too which is this unrequited unfulfilled level level of success i wonder how easy it is for or how much easier it is for you guys to be able to talk about you know like
the ease the open -handedness all the rest of it because you like they're only chasing safety in many ways created a sound that 20 years later is now the ascendant or partly an ascendant sound that's coming back around right that is like how how much did it shape the next fucking however many decades of rock in in lots of different ways and to be able to we've played like is there a fucking country on the planet that's not at war that you guys haven't played in probably not like you know every single place of every single show of every single tour of every single everyone anybody that's in the rock
rock industry knows the name of that it's okay so it's all well and good going you know like i just i'm open -handed with it man and like it's easy but how the real rubber meets the road when you go you never played to more than 400 people in your entire career and you were never recognized and you never got a record label deal yeah and I think that that again this is an unteachable lesson being said by people who have got to some form of success within their industry to be able to tell people further down hey man you can you can chase it but I'm telling you your problems are still going to be
your problems when you get to the top and they're going to say fuck you watch me dance through this minefield yeah it didn't work for all of you watch me do it i'll be different yeah yeah i think that's true i mean that's all that's all life is is us looking at celebrities overdosing and all these people and rock stars never being good dads or good moms or good partners and cheating and i mean even dave grohl that came out fuck yeah i know like like what a hero fallen from the top and literally And that's kind of like, that's kind of broke people.
That's my thing though, is like, why are we making these people our heroes?
It's, this is not new.
Like, and I don't know, like, it's just a weird thing to be like, I look up to musicians that inspire me musically, you know, Run the Jewels is one of my favorite bands or groups.
And like, I listened to a lot of hip hop and then a lot of like weird stuff that is, you know, down here.
direct bullshit yeah well there's a band like howdy h -o -v -v -d -y you've probably never heard them i think they're from here they're in national now i love them they're great um porches shit like that and like they're not my heroes they inspire me but like to put someone in especially for musicians to have someone that you idolize that is just doing what you're doing at a 10x scale and not recognizing that it's just 10 times more fucked up the bigger it gets hey to get that yeah it's just like you don't want to be that guy and if you could be that guy you'd be miserable and i think every i think
the universe if there is a god or an energy or a spirit it's trying to tell all of us all of the time Anytime, go grab a cigar with your friend and don't break nothing and stop trying to be Elon Musk.
There's nothing logically in my brain or heart, which is more important, or my spirit, whatever you call that, that says the opposite.
There's just nothing.
And it kind of just ends there.
I mean, three and a half hours later, you can end it on like this poetic, like blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
but like if you can synthesize all of it down like that's what it is i don't want to be in nashville writing more songs for more people i don't want that you know i don't want to be more famous than i am i love going to target with my kids and just being a guy nobody knows you know like it's not about climbing the ladder next next next next next and i'm not saying he is either i'm just saying i'm just naturally wired to just be like man the simple the peaceful you know we needs to take fishing poles out like maybe we just get out of the concrete jungle and just go to any lake and just fish pack
some beers let's get out of here like the nature the mountains the cabin like everything that we are doing even collectively i might be maybe trying to forcefully do that and some people are like i guess we'll go to the mountains but man like when you're there it's like different than being in la it's the beauty of enough right oh beauty of enough stuff contentment that should be a whole other podcast even i you know i was listening to a podcast the other day i think we listened the same one with bono and bono's polarizing for a lot of people you know like i don't know much about him for music
people he's polarizing because are you are you serious i don't know much i mean i know he's like i know his music oh okay i don't know much about yeah yeah god oh yeah yeah i've never read an interview with polarizing for a lot of people because a lot of people hate modern youtube but something that was really in in he's player your old stuff just like yeah he's been involved in a lot of causes you know um but with enough being enough like something that really got me that he that he said was he and he seems to have this huge ego with the glasses and he's fucking mano and he says our band like
we started this conversation i thought it was so cool he says our band is a democracy and he's like that's one of my biggest pride things that i have about what we do you know what i mean and for me like the fishing the the the cabin the the contentment like like if you put something on under a gravestone for me it will be that we did our own shit our own way democratically even when it was impossible even when it seemed impossible for us to do it in a democratic way and even sometimes at our demise like if we would have made chasing safety part two would would i be richer probably but i'm glad
that we would you be happier that's that's exactly it and bon i think bono in the vibe i got is i think he's happy because those other three guys in his band and him agree and they fight to do it like we do but they can say yeah this song should be be this way or whatever this ultimately you're gonna know right at the end of the day maybe there's a certain level very low level of self -reflection where people are able to kind of continue to masquerade as a thing while being a different thing in private yeah and and continue to do things ostensibly out front for one cause whilst secretly believing
something different or wanting something different privately.
Uh, but ultimately I think you're going to know, you're going to know whether or not you fooled yourself.
You're going to know whether or not you lied about this thing.
And that's cool. Like you can look back on a string of miserable successes or inauthentic successes, right.
That were crafted in a manner that kind of fugazied people into believing that it was you.
Yeah. And you know, again, You unpack that a lot though, right?
Because you have like imposter syndrome.
I hear that come up a lot.
Like just, are you wise?
Are you this driven?
Are you fit because you know people?
Where's it coming from?
Yeah. But I think at scale, over time, you will be found out.
well you know navar's got this wonderful line he says uh you don't need karma to deliver spiritual justice all that karma is is people repeating their patterns virtues and flaws until they finally get what they deserve if you roll the dice enough times eventually you'll get the same the thing the thing that is coming for you will come for you yeah and sure some people some people can dance through the minefield and not kick it right yeah but there are people in your industry there are people in my industry there are people in my old industry yeah i know i'm like hey man like i get it you might be
making it work but you're a piece of shit yeah or you're um self deceptive or you're uh obfuscatory or you're you're um unfair or whatever right you're mean you're mean you're a mean person and sure maybe you're hot now maybe you'll be hot forever but But like, unless you have a fucking half inch deep level of self -reflection, at some point it's going to come back around.
It's going to come back around in your fucking nervous system.
It's going to come back around in an existential crisis.
Or you're going to roll the dice one too many times and Snake Eyes is going to come up and your wife's going to catch you fucking cheating.
Or your bandmates are going to realize that you've actually been doing this thing all along.
long you've been like you've been fucking skimming transaction fees off the top of every bit of merch that we've done for the last fucking however like whatever it is that you do yep you'll repeat your patterns and i think the goal is it's what uh duane says he's like um i like me i'd buy me a beer yep you're like you want to be a person that you can fucking buy a beer triple d baby yeah boys this has been fucking unbelievable we've done three hours hell yeah it was an honor to do it it man yeah thank you thank you for real appreciate it appreciate it very much well let's go and eat some steak
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